Patong and James Bond Island

I get one day and one night off. Saturday night and Sunday are when things must happen. I went to Patong Saturday night and on a tour Sunday.

Patong is a sin city kinda place. My friends described it as having a party vibe like Cancun, happening 24/7. It's designed for partying single men, but anyone can enjoy the commonplace absurdities. Much of what happens there would be morally reprehensible in Western societies because there is a high degree of freedom for the sex industry. We went to a show, a bar, and a club.

I did two training sessions Saturday after waking up at 630am, so it's unreasonable for me to stay up past 10pm without drugs. Fortunately, Thailand is where Red Bull originated. There seem to be two big brands: Red Bull and M150. I've heard rumours that some types of these energy drinks contain amphetamines or some uppers other than caffiene. The fact is that as someone who rarely consumes caffiene, I drank half a can of Red Bull and could still feel the effects 12hrs later. It was the most energetic I've felt in the last two weeks.


My day trip on Sunday consisted of:

Monkey caves

Elephant caves

James Bond Island

Ko Panyi

The Monkey Caves had wild monkeys that you could feed in front of a vast, open cave.


The Elephant Caves are a system of narrower caves that go 2 or 3 kilometers under a mountain-hill. The tour consisted of kayaking, sitting on bamboo rafts, and wading through knee-deep water. The cave has many naturally occuring rock formations that look vaguely like elephants and people, including one that looks very much like an elephant. These formations are considered 'lucky' in a holy sense, so the whole site is a holy place.

James Bond Island is the site of shooting some of The Man with the Golden Gun. It's the tour's main attraction because it's something foreigners can identify with and say they visited. That being said, there are interesting-looking islands everywhere on the longboat ride. James Bond Island is the most interesting one.

Ko Panyi was my favourite stop. On the way back from James Bond Island, we visited the floating Muslim village. Most of it seemed to be built on wood and concrete columns, but it was probably floating at some point. 3000 people live there. There are a network of alleyways 2-3m wide between all the houses and children bike along them. I was most impressed at how normally people seemed to live despite existing attached to some island. There was an ATM (presumably the result of the video below), I saw kids in their houses playing on tablets, young adults were wearing presumably fashionable, modern-looking clothes.

It seemed incredibly safe and tourist-friendly because no one minded me wandering while children and toddlers ran around playing in the empty and busy alleys without parent supervision. I even walked into a school and a soccer pitch which I didn't realize was featured in this video that I had seen a couple years ago:


There were only 3 monkeys...