A friend of mine is sending me some stories and photos from Phuket which as you may know was the first part of the Thailand "sandbox" tourism scheme where they open for people that are vaccinated and let them come to the paradise island.
It really is a wonderful island but at the moment there are a ton of restrictions that are upsetting a bunch of people including the fact that it is difficult for the people who do manage to vacation there to actually do anything and most shops and all bars are closed. Coming to an island and not being able to get a drink isn't really what a lot of people consider a vacation in Phuket to be all about but who knows.
I am sure there is plenty of bending of the rules that is allowed depending on what sort of hotel you are staying in and honestly, if you are traveling to Thailand now and paying the premium for the flight, you are probably paying quite a lot
The beaches, even with the just a few thousand people that are allowed in for tourism are for the most part completely deserted but still, if you want a beer at these places they probably wont sell it to you.
I guess if you have been around long enough you can kind o appreciate the fact that normally these beaches would be annoyingly packed with people and touts so let's try to put a silver lining on this cloud.
If you get up in the hills to restaurants that have a long pathway where they can see the police coming from a long ways away and get all the booze off the table before they make it up the stairs then you can get a beer if you want. It's still really bizarre to me that alcohol seems to be the first thing that the Thai government wants to ban whenever there is a problem in the country.
If you can't make it up to these hilly restaurants and honestly, not very many of them are open anyway due to the near complete elimination of tourism, then you can always drink a beer in a "covert Covid cup."
Virtually every restaurant will serve foreigner locals beer provided they drink it out of a paper cup, a coffee cup, or in this bizarre situation, a cup that is actually manufactured by the largest brewery in Thailand. They are almost certainly manufacturing these non-see-through cups specifically for this purpose and I love it!
At my local bar we drink beers out of coffee cups or sometimes just straight out of the bottle, but I live in a suburb of Chiang Mai where we kind of have an understanding with the police and people can kind of just do what they want. Because Phuket is kind of on the global radar right now they need to pretend to be enforcing the law a bit more I guess.
It could be worse I suppose. We could all be in a country where it will soon be getting cold and screw that noise.