The Land Of Smiles.....

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After leaving the Uk back in April, we had finally made it into Thailand.....the land of smiles where everyone smiles, it seems that the Thai people are never unhappy and whenever you see them they will give you the bigest smile! They are just the happyest people i have ever met. After our days journey from The Langkawi Islands, we eventually found our hostel......after being droped off at the wrong one (it was dark and not very well lit where we were staying on Lanta and were no signs outside the place we had just been droped off at so we didn't actually find out we were at the wrong place until an English guy told us where we were......just our luck!) But it turned out we were only a 5 minute walk away just a bit further down the dark track so it wasn't too bad in the end.

We ended up staying at a place called The Chill Out House.......The place is run by a very freindly American family (a mother, her daughter and the daughters Thai boyfriend) and the whole place was in the style of a tree house, really cool, you actually feal like you are living outside (so much so that in the night when it rained i woke up and being half asleap actually went and checked that our bags were still dry) it's really worth going to stay there, just for the outdoor bamboo showers which were pretty amazing! The only thing though with us backpacking in what is mostly the low season through out SE Asia, nearly every place we go to the owners are doing work to the place.....on the upside we end up paying really cheap prices to stay for the night (I think the Chill Out House is fairly cheap in the high season also) and the work that was going on didn't bother us too much to be honest anyway so it turned out to be a good place to stay.

Jade had also been to Koh Lanta when last backpacking a couple of years back, so the first day was spent just looking around the nearby beach area to see if we could find where they had stayed before and to see if anything was recognisable......which it wasn't because again it's low season and so literally everything along the beach (hostels, bars and restaurants) are all wrapped up in tarpoline......This is how the Thais let people know they are closed up......and the whole place was deserted apart from a few stray dogs. There were a few restaurants and tour offices and shops which were still open towards the peir, about 20 minutes away by tuk tuk so it wasn't as bad as it sounds!

After a few days of not doing very much, we decided to book a day trip through the owners of our hostel which came highly recomended, The Four Islands Tour........i know from other blogs we've written, the Island tours didn't turn out to be much good but this one was probably the best trip we will do in Se Asia and was a day which will stay with us for some time to come! We were picked up by a really nice Thai guy at around 08:00 am the next morning and taken to a peir on the other side of Lanta after picking up a few others on the way over, and soon set out on an old traditional longtail boat, and for around the next hour we slowly made our way to a small island called Ko Mook.....well known for it's Emerald Caves, which if you're lucky to get there when the sea isn't too rough you can swim through to a small beach surrounded by cliffs on all sides (which is supposedly where back in the day, pirates would come here and hide their treasure on the beach)......we were lucky as we got to do this and it was probably the highlight of the trip. As you first swim into the cave the light shining through makes the water turn a bright emerald green colour (hense the name of the cave).......we found out later that we had chosen the best time to go there, as it's in the low season theres not many people around and so when we had finally swam through the cave we arrived at the beach and were literally the only ones there! hich just made the experience so much better......apparently in the high season there can be easily around 10 boats of people there, maybe more, all making there way to the beach, even as we left and swam back through to our boat another three boats all with tourists on turned up so we were quite lucky.

Once we left Ko Mook we stoped another 2 times for snorkelling, which was amazing, the water was so clear and there were just hundreds of fish everywhere, we even managed to see a baby shark so that was cool. We were then all taken to another small island where we had some of the best Thai food we've had yet, then taken back to Koh Lanta later on where we were both just exhausted!

After 3 nights of staying in our treehouse style hostel we decided we would move on and go and stay a bit further up the island in a resort which we had found with really cheap rates (Golden Bay Cottages) as it was the down season and they were doing some work on the resort which didn't bother us atall..... again right on the beach and with the freindliest staff....and a swimming pool which was only really being used by us it seemed! Here we decided to get some much needed laundry done and we also hired out mopeds, for only £4 a day and they were in really good condition so got another good bargain there! This turned out to be not as bad as you may think as the roads were empty and we were virtually the only ones using it at times, and this was also my first time on a moped so it was good practice for me as most of the roads wherever else we have been have always been crazey with traffic with drivers seeming to just aim for anything and everything in their way and seem to just hope they don't hit anything...plus i didn't trust geting on the back with Jade too much! haha (i did the first day and for the first 10 minutes it was an experience!).......we then decided to go and explore the rest of the island, which suprisingly too us the whole of the day (it was actually biger than i thought it was) and with stoping off at places aswel we managed to have a pretty good day. We spent a bit of time in the national park at one end of the island which had a nice beach and plenty of monkeys running around! We didn't stay here long however as there was still plenty of the island to see including The Old Town, which wasn't too bad, just a few little restaurants and shops, just a really quite version of where we were staying really.

Koh Lanta has been a really good start to our travels through Thailand, and Jade has said that she still loves the island as much as the first time and this has been her favourite island so far. But as always our fairly short stay was almost over and from here we were moving on to Koh Phi Phi.

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Photos

The Four Islands Tour
Our Lontail boat

Jade with her nice bright pink bike and matching helmet