Our last day had a bright and early start followed by frantic last minute packing in order to catch our island-hopper plane from Koh Samui to Phuket. Mysha and I were ecstatic not to be spending hours on a bus (6 to be exact)! The outdoor mini-airport at Koh Samui had tropical plants everywhere, warm & friendly staff, courtesy food & beverages, and a general chill island atmosphere. It was the perfect send-off.
We arrived at Phuket International at 8:45am and were greeted by our amazing friend Kelly, who also helped cover classes at Elements Academy while we were away. Kelly had hired a private van (thank you to Harris’ sister) to pick us up and escort us to our familiar digs in Rawai. We dropped off our luggage at the Sinbi Apartments and went straight to breakfast with Kelly and her fiance Em. We feasted on veggies, eggs and rice, were treated like royalty, and paid a grand total of $12 for 4 people!
Next we headed over to Sinbi Muay Thai to say hello to our friends, buy some gear and pick up our scooter for the day. We had some final shopping to do so we scooted over to the pearl district where we discovered shopping with a local gets you a much better price – thanks Em! We parted ways with Kelly and Em at this point and returned to the Sinbi Apartments for a rest, tan time, and swim. We had the whole afternoon to relax before my 30-minute private with Em back at Sinbi’s. While I sweated in the ring, Mysha caught up with all the trainers, Gob and Sarah. When we said goodbye, Sing gave Mysha and I parting gifts and we promised to be back with our members for a training trip next year. Here is our video from a previous training trip.
Our flight home was scheduled for 2:30am so we picked up some plane snacks at the 7-11, repacked our suitcases and had a stressful encounter in our room with a very large cockroach. Mysha and I might be forces to reckon with at times but you all would have laughed to see us leap to our beds to avoid this nasty, antennae-twitching insect as it scuttled around our room. We happily fled the room to wait for Harris, our taxi driver, to pick us up and take us to Phuket International Airport. When he (finally) arrived, his mad driving skills got us to the airport in perfect time. The airport was absolute chaos, the busiest and noisiest I have ever seen it. Duty free was a complete zoo but we managed to get 2 bottles of our favorite Thai jasmine lotion. Finally we boarded our plane and were off…HOMEWARD BOUND!