from phuket, with love.

In case the title of this post isn't immediately obvious, I'm making a stupid joke about the number of 'special' massage parlours littering the streets of Patong Beach, the main hub for hedonism in Phuket. Seriously though, one place was called 'Willy Massage'. What do they expect?
We stayed at Patong Beach because my lovely fam was there at the same time as us, so we had some hangs with them. We did a lot of swimming in Phuket. Because unless you want to shop, drink or engage in dubious activities, there wasn't much else to do.

My lovely cousins and the sunset on Patong Beach.

This was in Patong area though. There were lots of places to explore around the islands.

After we had spent some time with my family, swimming at the beach (which was lovely) and sneaking into their enormous resort we went on a bit of a day trip on a speedboat.

The beach from The Beach.

We visited the beach from the movie The Beach and Will pretended he was Leonardo Dicaprio. We swam in 'Blue Lagoon', an actual lagoon, and I pretended I was in Peter Pan. We fed some monkeys and also saw some baby monkeys. We went snorkelling and saw a lot of beautiful, colourful fish and I brushed past some coral and my foot is still itchy. And our last stop was the 'island of buying things', except we didn't...we sat on the rock and amused ourselves by wondering about all of the clinically obese (mostly) Australian tourists that were everywhere.

My new best friends.

Then we nearly missed our flight off the island, and only made it in time to check in because our taxi driver very admirably sped and weaved through obstacles the entire way.

And I bought love heart sunglasses. So that's a win for me.

cairo.

So we had a bit of wait in Cairo airport and decided we should spend our time seeing some pyramids. Because when in Rome...

We got our visas, cheap and easy, the man was helpful, all was looking good. Til we left the airport and the aim of the game changed from being helpful to the newbies to wanting to relieve us of alllll the money. Just all of it.

But apart from a good solid 4 hours of us being continually ripped off, we did get to see the pyramids. We even rode horses. And I even saw scavengy looking desert dogs feasting on the carcass of a dead horse lying in the sand.....Who says you need to go on safari?

mosques and tourists.

We had organised several places to sleep for our stay in Istanbul, but in the end it worked out better for us to find cheap accommodation in the heart of the old town. Which is why we arrived in the busiest and most touristy city I`ve yet been to in Turkey, carrying our massive backpacks, with no place to stay. But amazingly, we were hardly hassled at all and we found a relatively cheap hostel with a cafe within about 10 minutes. Because we are awesome.

Really the only reason to stay in the old town is its proximity to all of the sights one might like to visit, and that is what we were there for, since we only had 3 days.

We saw the Aya Sofya, a church that turned into a mosque that is now, in the interests of secularism, a museum. We saw the underground cistern that used to supply water to the magnificent palace, among other places. And, we saw that magnificent palace, Topkapi Palace, home to many Sultans over the years.

the Basilica Cistern.

one section of the enormous Aya Sofya.

Topkapi Palace...now just imagine the hordes of tourists are peacocks and well dressed royalty.

As well as being very touristy, I wanted to go shopping, so we spent about a day on that mission, which worked out quite well. We also met Sibel`s sister and stayed at her house, which is so far out from the centre of Istanbul that it is an hour from Bulgaria.

Apart from that we ate some seafood, played with some kittens and, on our last morning, had a quick look around both the Grand Bazaar and the Spice Market. But we quickly escaped before the little alleyways became packed with tourists.

Then, goodbye Istanbul for another year, we were on our way to Bangkok, via Cairo.