Week two of our paradise getaway from Georgian winter. It’s been snowing in the mountains of Svaneti and elsewhere, the skiers are getting ready, and here I am in swimming trunks and silk shirt, trying not to get too burnt by the sun.
We have had some chances to explore the island of Phuket a bit now, on foot and by taxi, and are getting used to it the tiniest bit. The Big Buddha, about 45m tall and covered in fine white stone, gazes down at us. Tigers, from newborn to full-grown (only about 300 of them remain in Thailand) allow us to stroke them in their sanctuary; unbelievably large as the adults are, apparently Siberian tigers are about twice this big. We emerge unscathed and awed.
I discover my two favorite linguistic jokes. Bang Nun Tea, sorry, is one. The other is a bad translation, for the island’s largest nationality of visitors by far: satay chicken rendered in Russian as chicken of Satan. (It’s not that hot… though other curried dishes can be). We continue to go through exotic fruits and vegetables at my adventurous wife’s urging: snake fruit, rambutan, more we still can’t identify.
My wife posts videos of our sorties and gets over 16,000 views of one on Facebook, is helped by Anna to set herself up on Tik Tok.
One evening, coming home after dark, one of our friends calls out, “Snake!” near the condo door. My wife, a true herpetophobe, screams and backs away, though she hasn’t even seen it. The other man of the group and I stamp it away, over a meter long and black. We resolve to check carefully before every exit and entrance, to avoid and more unpleasant encounters. Although I have no fear of snakes at all, from my Zimbabwean childhood no doubt, Lali is at the opposite end of that spectrum.
We hire a traditional wooden fishing boat for half a day, and I get three strikes which I don’t manage to land, but all big enough to bend the rod far. Frustrating but a good start. I’m reassured that I haven’t lost the ability to cast with the rod and reel, last practiced, what, 40 years ago in Canada? I was never much of a fisherman, but at least this time I try hard and almost succeed.
Although desert dunes are far away, I still manage to find delightful sand-chaos in the flow of small rivers into the sea, and in the play between wavelets and shore. (No big waves here, ever, but that’s fine, I’m no surfer.) The other two ladies are getting closer to swimming freely, bolder, winning over fear.
We dip into the old city of Phuket enough to know that we want more, so are going back there today. I still am set on having a silk suit made, but am compromising by getting the material here and using a tailor in Tbilisi, because return trips for final fitting and pickup here are too far.
We discover a universe of pinky-thumbnail-sized crabs on the beach. Each of these makes a hole for itself in the sand by throwing out little balls of compacted material… in PATTERNS which cover half the shore, and are repeated after every tide, some sort of miraculous gratuitous display of design.
It’s a beautiful place, though I know we’re just touching its surface. What it must be like in the season of endless rains is hard to imagine; we chose carefully to avoid that time. Mosquitoes would certainly be an issue.
I can see, though, why many expats would consider Phuket as a place to retire. It’s cheap and tropical and delicious and relatively safe. Our dip in is only a start, but convincing.
Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer and photographer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 2000 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/
He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri: www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti2
Blog by Tony Hanmer
