Thursday 16th May, 11:33am, Phuket, by Mamie

We've been in Phuket, a hub of trashy tourism and revolting ping pong shows, but we've had a really brilliant time here. Our first night led us to some street performers breakdancing. Putting that aside for now, we then began roaming Bangla; the road of nightclubs, bars and the part of Thailand which Amy and I really hate; the culture for Thai girls to be strippers and performers and literally sell themselves for cheap, all for the shitty tourists who encouraged this business. Anyway thats a whole chapter to itself and not something I'm going to go into. Instead, we made some friends and went clubbing at 'Seduction' which became our go-to every night following. It was here that I recognised the dancers, and perhaps a little alcohol fuelled (sorry parents!), said hello and told them about how I used to breakdance. Of course, standard, the next day we end up in a breakdancing lesson with Rain and Mikey. As embarrassing as that was, we remained friends.

That night we watched their dance show in Seduction like groupies from the side and later were shown a cool local club. The third day was one of our favourites on this trip. They took us wake boarding and we got to properly meet the entire crew. These are their nicknames by the way, their real names are much more difficult: King, Mikey and Hsk (brothers), Rain, Porn, Extra and Twister. To put it simply, they're just really really cool. They're also through to the next round of Thailand's version of Britain's Got Talent. They're all really close and it's so cute it's almost as if it's from a movie. That night at the club there was some fierce competition. A weird (maybe French?) man attempted to impress us with some weird body rippling and locking stuff while some other men were also trying some odd moves. Our boys looked on for a while but eventually it got too much and they decided to shut them up. One second Amy and I are laughing at the ridiculousness of the situation and the next minute we're cheering on Rain who's spinning in the middle of the dance floor with some really impressive breakdancing. Boom. We felt like groupies at first but that night, went home feeling proud of 'our boys'.

What's kind of interesting is that we can parallel the group to the Nepali boys; Sagar, Santosh, Prashant and Smiley. The Rapidrunners team is a large group of boys who have worked together for years and formed a strong bond. While we only met a couple of them, we still felt the impression of that bond and now we can compare it to that of the Thai boys. It's been really fun here, and though they invited us to watch them in the big competition in Bangkok, unfortunately we have to stay down South. We're going to miss them but good luck for their competition and maybe we'll come back to Thailand one day.

As for the wake boarding, Amy struggled to stand up while I managed that part but got really pissed off at the corner of the cable ski. Fuck you corner. It was definitely something I'd like to try again but my body is now whacked after both that and the breakdancing. I might go find Amy now and beg for yet another massage...

Today we planned to get up at 7:30 on only a couple hours of sleep. Of course, it's now 11:30 and we're still lying in bed. We're now heading to the Ko Phi Phi island today for more beautiful beaches and sun. Wooo!