Alas our adventures in Chiang Mai had to come to an end. Due to a rescheduling of our flight times, this meant getting up bright and early on Wednesday morning. Actually as an extra surprise for my mum who was flying out even earlier than us, we got up even earlier so we could meet her in the lobby and get a photo.
A little while later we were off to the airport ourselves to catch a plane down to Bangkok. The rescheduling of our flight meant we then had almost a 4 hour wait at Bangkok airport. This was sub-optimal but we dealt with it. Bangkok airlines had a transit lounge we could go sit in with little nibbles and internet terminals. After a long wait we finally boarded our plane to Koh Samui.
Arriving in Koh Samui was a bit of a shock. We were greeted with the most high tech airport I’ve ever seen (and aaah by high tech I aaah mean … an openair terminal where it seems everything is done manually). After we received our bags, (which was be no means a guaranteed thing) we probably had our first unpleasant experience in Thailand in trying to get a Taxi. The drivers were very rude and pushy, but after 1 aborted taxi ride, we managed to get ourselves a ride over to Chaweng Beach where we had booked accomodation at the Baan Chaweng Resort. We got shown to our room and then shook off the bad feelings with a swim in the ocean. This was our first time swimming in the ocean since we left NZ so it was pretty special really. On top of that the ocean was beautifully warm which helped us to ignore the hundreds of children and chip packets floating around us. The swim really picked us up after a long day of travelling and waiting - but mostly waiting. After towling off and changing we headed off down the beach in search of dinner. There were heaps of beachside restaurants with pretty much every resort (and there are a large amount of those) displaying their menus for passerby’s. Just about everything was seafood, but it didn’t take us too long to find some vegetarian offerings. We stopped at the Beachcomber for our wining and dining (actually it was cocktails and dining) and were well impressed with our meals, although Jasmins cold Green Apple soup with chilli and Lemon sorbet was a little weird. Eating dinner and sipping cocktails by the beach with a lovely sea breeze is a great way to spend any night! And Jasmin also enjoyed the company of one of the locals (see below). It had been a long day so we wandered back to our resort and crashed out.
Thursday was Jo and Chris’s wedding day. This wasn’t until around 4pm so we had most of the day to relax and do what ever we liked really. So after breakfasting we decided we still had a little bit of shopping to do and thus we hit the mean streets of Chaweng Beach (actually there is only really one street and it’s not at all mean). We dived in and out of shops while simultaneously trying to avoid the rain that all of a sudden turned up. By the time we had finished our shopping and made it back to our room, it was getting late in the afternoon. We had just enough time to go take another swim though before changing and heading up the beach to find Jo and Chris and the rest of their Wedding crew. It really wasn’t too hard to find actually, given that about 200 tourists had gathered around for a good gawk. The ceremony got underway very soon after we got there and went off without a hitch. There were lots of happy people and lots of tears (aren’t weddings supposed to be happy?). We didn’t really know anyone there other than Jo and Chris but everyone was really friendly so we found ourselves having a great time. Tables were brought down on to the beach and a huge buffet dinner was setup. We were sat a table with a few other kiwis, aussies, and brits, and had a pretty good yarn. All in all the wedding and dinner were great fun!
Friday was our 1 true day of having nothing to do. So we did indeed do pretty much nothing. This was made much easier by the fact that it rained for a large part of the day. We started off the day as usual by breakfasting and swimming, and then we retired to our room for reading and napping. After a while we thought lunch would be a good idea so we dressed up and headed out again, only to be reminded that today was Songkran (Thai New Year), aka Water Fight day. Anyone and everyone becomes fair game for a good hosing with water pistols, buckets, and any kind of water distribution system. Oh and a good pasting with some sort of white stuff that feels suspiciously like Tiger Balm (deep heat or whatever you want to call it). So our lunch plans didn’t exactly go according to plan, but it was amusing (although the fact that our brand new camera got soaked and now dosn’t work was a little less amusing). So after grabbing some ice cream, we headed back to our room for more napping and reading (and trying to dry clothes as our clothing stocks were running lean). We chose to venture down the beach for dinner as the beach proved to be a safe haven for those trying to stay dry. We were going to head back to the Beachcomber for dinner as we knew there was vegetarian food there, but it turned out they were only doing buffet that night. So we kept on searching and came across the best restarurant of them all called ‘Eat Sense’. It had beautiful decor and had great atmosphere. Food was great, drinks were great, and service was great. Nothing I could fault there. We even finished our dinner and asked for our bill just in time to avoid the rain which decided to show up again. We went to catch up with Jo and Chris down at their resort. They were enjoying some Thai dancing performance and dinner. We agreed that we would meet up for a drink afterwards and headed back to our resort where we had a quick dip in the pool. When we got back to our room, Jo had txt’d us saying that they had asked the managment and they said it would be fine to come join them. So we did! We relaxed while enjoying the dancing and some very interesting music, and Jasmin got to have a little catch-up with Jo. We said our goodbyes and retired for the evening as we had a very early start the next morning.
We had a 5am pick up to take us to the Airport (for yet another rescheduled flight). So bleary eyed, we stumbled our way our way around the Koh Samui airport (it really is more like a parking lot with a few pagodas) before hopping on a plane back to Bangkok. We got in some duty free shopping before finding some couches in the Thai airways lounge to plop ourselves down on. We then had to waste almost another 4 hours waiting for our London bound flight. Surely enough, we safely made it on to our plane and waived goodbye to Thailand.
We hope though that it won’t be the last time we see Thailand. The people are great, the food is great, the shopping is great. I want to see some more remote places in Thailand though. We need to escape some of the crowds next time and take more time to relax. 1 week really was just a whirlwind tour and only touched on what Thailand has to offer. Until next time.
Recent Comments