Oh boy, I have a new item on my list of Things I´m Not Doing Ever Again.
I spent some time in and around Phuket the last few days, and yesterday it was a particularly boring day on Nai Yang beach, but since the hotel was pretty close to the airport I walked to the beach end of the runway to snap some pictures and videos of the incoming and outgoing planes.
I got there and I saw an LTU plane reading for take off, I lined up straight behind it, around 150 meters from it; I could smell the kerosene of the engines and a warm wind blowing. I stood ready, camera in hand waiting for the plane to accelerate away.
I heard the engines spooling up, started recording and then all hell broke loose.
Holy Mother of Thrust that thing nearly blew me away, see, my mistake was to line up behind a big fat Boeing 777 sporting two bloody big engines rated at something like 50 tons of thrust each.
The wind was mighty, the air was hot, but the real deal was the sand blasting; I felt like I was being stripped to the bones, I turned away from the plane and endured the most throughly scrubbing of my life. Under normal circumstances that would be bad, but I had just spent two days roasting under the Sun so the burning sensation was tremendous.
Standing there for what I think was only 15 or 20 seconds I could see the blast pushing away the water line 50 meters away from me, it was that strong.
I ended up fine, red as a stop light but unharmed otherwise, but I had a hard time getting the sand out of every crack and crevice of my anathomy afterwards.