During Royal Wedding Month 2011 (April in case you don’t remember) another Catherine, Catherine Deshayes, got married and honeymooned in Thailand. Here’s her account of life as a new bride …
I had just one criteria for my April honeymoon – sun, and lots of it.
After slogging through a London winter frozen with fear about a potential wedding day washout, Ol’ Blighty did us proud on our early April big day. The sun shone, it was hot. Or so we thought. Then we got to Thailand.
Feeling in need of some R&R after the endless to-do lists which accompany the sheer madness that was planning a wedding and buying a house at the same time, we headed first to Centara Villas, set into the hillside above Karon beach in Phuket. Picture the honeymoon catalogue shoots – the four-poster bed, the swan-shaped towels, the beach views, the lush palms – and you’ll come close. I was the ultimate smug married and I didn’t care who knew it – this was the Budweiser of holidays and we’re normally value-brand lager type travellers.
The beach (white sand, tick, clear waters, tick) was an easy ten-minute stroll along a palm-shaded walkway, but unable to face such strenuous exertion in humidity that was spiralling out of control, we spent the first day comatose by the waterfall pool. The cicadas kicked off their nightly sonata at 6pm – heralding the start of happy hour at the Cocktail Bar and countless Lemon Grass Mojitos followed by locally-caught barbecued seabass, and er, less locally-caught New Zealand mussels at the Cliff restaurant.
The following morning we dodged the water pistols and flour-throwing celebrations of Songkran, the Thai New Year festival, and made for the small town of Karon. A delicious Pad Thai and an hour-long Thai massage set us back a laughable £4, after which we promptly undid all the good work and got pummelled by the waves down at the beach. Life was good. My skin was no longer the colour of my wedding dress. We were relaxed, chilled out in true Thai style. Then we hit Patong.
Picture if you will a psychadelic Soho-on-sea bursting with hawkers selling knock-off handbags, ping-pong bars (I’ll leave that to your imagination) and cocktails in buckets. I was keen on the former, my new husband was probably keen on the second – but to his credit didn’t follow through – but we both agreed on the latter, best sipped on the beach watching Chinese lanterns carrying wishes skywards as the sun set in a blaze of red.
Patong behind us, we took a day-long boat trip out to Phi Phi Island and Maya Bay – best known as the setting for the Leo DiCaprio film ‘The Beach.’ We snorkelled, we swam in crystal waters, we sunbathed alongside honeymooners from Oz who tied the knot on the same day we did. Sadly, the American travel bore we shared a cab with on arrival at Phuket Airport was right – Maya Bay was ‘like, so commercialised.’ It may have retained its looks, but it had ditched its personality – going from the lost paradise that Leo made sandcastles on to a crowded tourist trap. The price of fame.
We waved goodbye to Phuket and hit Bangkok, both slightly apprehensive of a crowded, stinking hot city after the cool oasis of our villa. It was crowded, it was stinking hot, but it was blooming brilliant. We haggled at the night-markets in Saladang, we ate chilli-heavy noodle soups, curries and sunny mangoes for £2 a day on the side of the road, we worked our way around food markets and tried everything we didn’t recognise, we realised the alien-looking Dragon fruit’s perfection didn’t stretch to its taste and that deep-fried locusts and white ants eggs are exactly as you would imagine them to be – utterly vile.
We took a ferry boat down the Chao Phraya river to the Wat Pho (Temple of the Reclining Buddha) in Phra Nakhon district and explored the Grand Palace, which has played home to the Kings of Thailand since the 18th century. We followed the hoards of backpackers over to the famous Khaosan Road and saw why author Susan Orlean called it “The Place to Disappear.” We wanted to disappear from its Guinness-swilling-kebab-wielding-I love-Bangkok-T-shirt-wearing stag parties and fish-foot massages* fast. Forget leaving on a jet-plane, those tuk-tuks can move. (*OK so we got a fish foot massage – tickly types will be in hell but it’s worth a try for £2). We headed for the relative calm of Lumpini Park – Bangkok’s answer to the Big Apple’s Central Park – and watched relations of the Komodo dragon rise from the lakes in true loch-ness style.
At sunset on our last night in Thailand, we sipped Singa beers with friends who have made Bangkok their home, at Vertigo & Moon Bar, 61 floors above the city streets in Sathorn. Over a goodbye mai thai, I realised that Bangkok’s verve summed up everything I hope our marriage will be – a riot of colour and possibility.
(Images: MarkLeo, Eustaquio Santimano)
