Thursday, May 22, 2008

Hatyai Day One

This is the continuation on our journey to Hatyai, Southern Thailand.



We got hard time to locate the hotel Novotel Centara Hatyai. We couldn't get any map at the border as it had been sold out. Anyway, we stopped a few places and asked the locals on the location of the hotel. Thai people are very friendly and helpful, unfortunately, after approaching 3 people, none can speak English nor Malay . I was so happy when we were near a school caused to me, sure the student can at least understand some English. True to my thinking. There were students were sitting outside the school and I took this opportunity to ask them on the Novotel Centara exact location. Being the real Thai, the students even offer to show us the way. They led us on their bike to the location. Upon reaching the hotel, they stopped and approached our car to confirm that they had brought us to the correct hotel. Hmmm, this is what I called genuine help. If only, my fellow citizen can be as helpful as the Thai. I took a 20baht from my pocket and passed it to the student as a thank you gesture. They refused to take the money. Another Thai good character. If this happened in Indonesia, the people will in fact request for some percent for their effort. I couldn't blame them for that though.


Novotel Centara is one of the good hotel in Hatyai. The service is tip top since the moment we entered the car park. The security guy at the car park entrance, stopped and checked our car. Then he asked if we are going to stay there. We showed him our reservation. He nodded and directed us to go to B2. The moment we turn our car to B1, another security guy was waiting there. With his whistle, he signalled for us to follow him. He was on his two feet running in front of us, just to show us a parking lot that he had reserved for us upon receiving a walkies talkie message from the 1st security guy. Wow! how would you feel?. We were very pleased. We are not VIP but were treated like one. This lead to our happiness to take out some baht to pass to the running security guy. To our surprise, when we started to unload our luggage from the car bonnet, a bellboy was an already stood behind with his trolley. Another Wow! We were showed the lift to go to the lobby.



Anyway, there is a slight misunderstanding due to communication problem at the reception area. Nevertheless it was rectified by the supervisor and we got our room key in under 20 minutes upon arrival. Novotel Centara in Hatyai hotel room is very clean. We can smell the freshness when we entered the room. The room is spacious too.



We had arranged to meet up again at the lobby at 6pm Thailand time. Since we checked in at about 3 pm, we had time to rest a bit. We did our prayers and started to meddle with the TV channel. Thai had so many TV channel. But none of the channel that we tune to had English as the medium. Luckily, there are cables like discovery channel and the hotel have Malaysia channel too. Fuhhh! no need to have headaches trying to understand the Thai language then.

Hatyai have a few Muslim restaurant. There are Hamid Restaurant, which is only a 3 minutes walk from Novotel. Salmah Restaurant, which a bit further from Hamid and Rocky Restaurant.









Among the three restaurant that we patronised, Hamid Restaurant had the most varieties of food. For our first meal in Hatyai, we went to Salmahs'. We had a fish, squid, kailan, tom yam and white rice. For 6 persons, it only cost us about S$65. That was quite a bargain for us as at our place it will cost us more. Unfortunately, I forgot to snap the food that we ate at Salmah's as we were hungry and just ducked into the food when it was served.

At nite, you can see a lots of pushcart stall around the Novotel Centara area. This pushcart stalls sell local delicacy like fresh durian with glutinous rice, grilled sotong and also selling knick knack items like key chains, coin pouches and so on. They normally started their trade at about 7 pm.

After our dinner, we walked around to see what are being offered. Opposite our hotel, there is a shopping complex which have some world known brand like Adidas, McDonald, Pizza Hut and Swensens. We decided to have an ice cream at Swensens. We ordered the Earthquake thinking that will be enough for the 6 of us for desserts. What I like is that we can choose our own flavour and no restriction for the topping either. The best part is that it is so much cheaper than back home. We vows to come again for more the next day.

Since it is still early to go back to the hotel, we roamed the area again. We were quite surprised as more pushcart stalls were present now even though the time was almost 11.30 pm. What more, there are more locals patronizing the stall as the nite goes on. We decided to call it a day and headed back to Novotel. In our room, I told Noy that I was contented to spend my birthday that day with good dinner and dessert even though I only had a prata as a first meal on my birthday for breakfast earlier on in Perak.

We had planned to go to Songkla the next day and I will blog that in my next posting, insyallah soonest possible.

Here is Novotel Centara Hatyai Address:

3 Sanehanusorn Road Hat Yai Songkhla 90110 Tel : +66(0) 7435 2222Fax : +66(0) 7435 2223