sybarites

As soon as I read that we would be visiting a part of Thailand that was near where they filmed The Man with The Golden Gun, I made sure that we went out of our way to see it.  Imagine!  Scaramanga’s island!

Lucky for us, there is a plethora of tours on Phuket to choose from and they all boast a visit to ‘James Bond Island’.  I don’t know what the real name of the island is because everyone just refers to it by its nickname.  As a luxury, we chose one of the more expensive tours because it offered the opportunity to do some kayaking around other pretty islands in the near vicinity.   I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the kayaking was the best part.   Or rather, the second best part because Marc’s pose as a Bond girl is my favourite.

At several stops during our day tour, our small group would all hop off the big boat and onto little, inflatable kayaks that were each paddled by a crew member.  We skimmed around tall islands rising out of deep, turquoise water, and ducked through a bat cave into a contained, salt-water pool in the middle of high, sheer cliffs.

We saw wild macaques swimming to retrieve the pieces of banana that the some tourists tossed to them; we saw mud-skipper fish, the kind that can “walk” on land for short distances; we paddled through and around several picturesque islands and then were treated to a great lunch on board the boat.

Plus, I got to stand on the strip of sand where James Bond’s plane was blown up by the solex-powered ray gun!

We forgot to write about the Taj Mahal!

An icon representative of a nation, spectacular to behold and arguably one of the seven wonders of the modern world, and we forgot to mention it.

However, in our defense, the city in which the Taj is located can almost make one forget the beauty of the monument. I’m not going to go off on a rant here but as far as tolerance of pollution and and poverty goes, Agra broke the proverbial straw on our camel’s back.

The good news is that now that we’ve seen it, we don’t have to go back!

P.S.  A little known fact about the inside of the Taj Mahal:  it smells like feet.