Holidays of our Holidays...Koh Chang

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It's Christmas time and our holidays of our holidays started on the 23rd of December after a one-night stop in Bangkok. Here we are again - Bangkok!?! There are some experience with this big town, we remembered.
This time we felt much better. We could relax by having an 1 hour food massage, manicure & pedicure for Steffi, haircut for Thomas (...we wanted to look nice for xmas), we also did some shopping on the night market in Silom.

On the 23rd our bus to Koh Chang started, one more time, very early in the morning. We got some breakfast and then joined directly the bus to our holiday island. The bus took about 6 hours to reach the east coast of Thailand. Then we took a ferry to Koh Chang and taxi to our beautiful hotel/ resort - THE DEWA.

When we arrived at the reception (We think that the staff was just asking themselves: What are you two guys want to do here?, because we were not looking like the other guests) we got a nice welcome drink. However, the best thing was the upgrade to the villas instead of the superior room. So we moved into the very nice villa which cost more than 300 Euros around christmas time and had BBQ at the beach. We would say: "uns geht es richtig schlecht" (that phrase is for our German readers).
We could also rent movies from the hotel's libary and there were many books to rent or keep. Good! We planned to read a lot during our holidays in our vacation 😊

Next day we spent at the beach sunbathing & reading.

Guess what: The next day we spent at the beach again. However, this time, we rent a motorbike and drove around the island to a fishermen village, where we looked up some diving schools and found a nice small and quite beach in the south.

This beach was our beach for the next day again. As this beach was close to the fishermen village, we went there in the afternoon and signed up for the open water diving course, which started on the 29th.

So we had the next day to fill in, being tired just laying on the beach (could you imagine!?!) we hired a kayak and went to the small islands near THE DEWA beach. Well, it took us 3 hours but we went to a nationalpark island with a beautiful lonely beach.

2 days before New Year ’s Eve we started the OPEN WATER Diving Course. The first day started with a classroom lesson, consisting of a video lesson and a quick test at the end of each chapter. We managed to pass 😊. Next day we were eager to learn real diving. To do so we went to a lonely beach on another island south of Koh Chang. We started to learn how to use the diving equipment on the boat and then in the water. After our first experience we were ready to dive in deeper water. We went to two other sites and dived a couple minutes. It was an amazing trip under water. We saw a lot of fishes, reefs and other divers. 😉
On New Year ’s Eve we had two more dives and our final exam, which we passed of course. 😊

The New Year’s Eve party in our resort was once again really beautiful. We got a welcome present and nice drinks and snacks at the beginning and a big buffet at the beach. We ate a lot of food and had some long drinks. Then we got to know that we won a bottle of white wine in the new year’s eve lottery. After several show acts and tombola the fireworks started.

Our final day in our resort was a relaxing day. So we enjoyed the beach, got a massage and prepared our stuff for the next day (ticket to seam reap) as our days were over in Thailand.

At 7:30am on the 2nd of January we got pick-up of the minivan to start our trip to Siem Reap, Cambodia. Around noon we reached the bordertown Aranyaprathet, where we had lunch and after that we needed 3 hours to emigrate out of Thailand and immigrate to Cambodia, as there were many other tourist having the same idea to border cross exactly on the 2nd of January.

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