PHUKET 

The Joy of narrating an adult holiday to children

The only people who did not raise their eyebrows when I told them I was going on a boy’s weekend trip to Phuket somewhere at the end of August were my 7- and 9-year-old daughters. Six of us in our early forties, all friends from the same school, made an impromptu plan to travel to Phuket to relive our lost youth – which doesn’t necessarily involve indulging only in the nefarious activities you’re thinking of. We wanted to spend some time without domestic and professional responsibilities; the last time we were on a beach holiday together was to Goa, over two decades ago. “Why didn’t you guys go earlier?” my daughters asked. “Because we were all busy working and making babies like the both of you and raising them to be wonderful children,” I reasoned unreasonably. 

“Tell us what you did there,” they asked after we had returned from 3 days of enriching experiences. “What happens in Phuket, stays in Phuket!” I replied, teasing them, but who can resist the urging “Tell ya, dadda!” of a 7-year-old. “Well, we got onto an early morning Indigo flight, which will soon change its name to Bhaago once India becomes Bharat!” I joked, but they didn’t understand. We were there within 4 hours, I told them, and a man called Jimmy picked us up in a minivan and took us to the villa we had rented, a beautiful six-bedroom white palatial mansion atop a hill, with a swimming pool overlooking the turquoise water of Patong Beach. 

Among several housekeeping instructions printed on a laminated notice board was one that caught our eye in particular: “Your three resident maids will take care of all your daily needs, in discretion.” In Thailand, this could mean a lot of things, so we checked with our lawyer friends in India if it should have been ‘with’ discretion and not ‘in’ discretion, but they refused to opine on cross-border transactions. Like good boys, we decided to steer clear from testing it out and left for lunch instead, where we feasted on local seafood at a roadside cafe and topped it up with their prized mango sticky rice. 

Marijuana is legal in Phuket. Every second shop that adorns the streets emanates that musty odour that typifies the drug. Even though we refrained from trying it, we got our education in it. Marijuana cookies had three categories – Good Boy, Naughty Boy, and Bad Boy – with increasingly accelerated concentrations of the dose in each square inch. We walked the famous Bangla Street with an eclectic array of nightclubs and bars brimming with scantily clad women doing their thing, all looking relatively unhappy. It is somehow the brutal reality of life that those who bring the most joy to others are most often internally fractured and lost. We got some Thai acrobatics performed on us in a traditional Thai massage parlour that had the words “No sex” inscribed in bold and an earnest request not to ask for a happy ending in fine italics below. We returned home well rested.

The next morning, we got onto a giant catamaran that took us an hour into the verdant sea for scuba diving. Along with breakfast aboard, we were given instructions on how to breathe underwater and what to do in case we ran out of oxygen. We put on body-hugging suits used by thousands before us, got cylinders strapped onto us, put on our foot flippers, and 1-2-3 dived into the water to get intimate with the fish. We swam 20 metres below the surface of the water and I was mesmerized by what the sea world had to offer. Corals of varying hues, even though bleached by the harsh rays of the sun, were magnificent to be at a breath’s distance from. Fish and turtle that we’ve only seen on television suddenly came alive, and the million bubbles emanating from fellow divers’ snorkels looked like we were swimming in a sea of diamonds. We made three such dives interspersed by an hour each, the scorching sun turning us a shade darker each time we surfaced. 

After 10 hours at sea, we returned to our villa in a neon pink auto rickshaw, from where we saw the golden sun set on the white sands of Phuket. On the television, we tuned into India landing Chandrayaan 3 on the moon. We lounged for the rest of the evening at our private pool, sharing stories from school and why those seemed to be the best days of our lives. “If you could live the life of anyone else in the world encompassing every single thing they’ve been through, who would you choose?” one of us asked the others. Everyone said they would rather not be anyone else. I chose Roger Federer. 

“What’s your answer?” I asked my daughters. “Taylor Swift,” came the reply without batting an eyelid. “I am told that that the scientific community has organised Swiftposium 2024, a 4-day conference to be held in Melbourne in February 2024, to understand the phenomena that is Taylor Swift,” I gave them some insight. 

The next day, I continued telling my daughters, we rented a speed boat to go island hopping. In shorts and singlets, we took pictures at the edge of the boat from where we jumped into the ocean with no one in sight for miles. We floated away all our worries as we stared at the vast expanse of a clear blue sky peppered with white candy floss. We went into obscure islands with malachite caves that were a few thousand years old and kayaked singing retro Bollywood songs. I collected some fossils and shells to take back home. We made a pit stop at James Bond Island, made famous in the epic movie The Man with the Golden Gun – a metaphor for what every man my age wishes for.

“Are you truly happy?” one of us asked the others on a secluded island in the middle of nowhere. Of course, the conversation then moved to what ifs and past loves, with all of us quickly reminding ourselves that, in the words of Cheryl Strayed, all those sister ships we were imagining had sailed away, and all we could do was salute them from afar. “Don’t forget we have a speed boat with us; we can catch up anytime,” one said joyfully. 

As we sailed back, we saw the sky mesmerise us with its colours, dancing under a setting sun. We made a pitstop to the Big Buddha on ATVs and meditated our sins away. We drove back to our residence, stopping for Nutella crepes on the way. Confucius said, “Wherever you go, go with all your heart.” That’s what we did on this trip, I told my daughters.

“When you grow up, I hope you travel the world,” I told them. “I hope you travel with friends who make the experiences worth reliving a million times over. I hope you make the kind of friends I did when I was your age and I wish you hang out with them until they’re my age and beyond. I hope one day, when I’m old and rickety, you’ll tell me endearing stories of your travels,” I professed, as I unleashed all the goodies I had gotten them. “We’ll take you with us, dadda, don’t worry,” they said, as they disappeared to play.