Advertisement
Published: April 14th 2014
Edit Blog Post
So from Bangkok we took a night bus down to Ranong. I think Carly will say it was the best bus journey we've done - that's because she slept pretty much the whole way. We left about 9:30pm and due to arrive around 6:00am, well Carly was asleep by 10 and only woke when we arrived in Ranong and I had to wake her up! She missed the several stops we had along the way including a visit from the Army to check ID. From the station in Ranong we hopped on a tuk tuk to the pier and waited for the first ferry to Koh Phayam.
Now we didn't really know that much about this island until we started looking which island to visit first. We read that it was Thailand's last remaining island paradise due to very few buildings and its few visitors. Sounded exactly what we wanted to experience and as we got on the ferry across it was true that there weren't many visitors at all maybe only about 20 or so foreigners and the rest locals. The island has no cars at all and the only tracks across the island are like pavements wide enough
for a motorcycle taxis, this would be our transport down to the beach! So one taxi each for me and Carly, the drivers took our rucksacks and put them in front of their faces and me and carly behind our drivers. Now I had a driver who couldn't even start her bike properly and jolted forwards several times and now she had a rucksack in front of her face too, I don't know how we made it too the beach safely but we're still alive.
We checked into Smile Bungalows who had bamboo bungalows right on the beach for £10 a night we couldn't complain about that with the view we were given and this really was paradise! The beach we stepped out into was maybe a mile and a half long with nice soft sand and turquoise waters and only about 5 people along it. With this paradise however came some drawbacks, the bamboo bungalows are partly open air and so you get a lot of nature visiting you and welcoming you to the island! Our visitors were a nice big red lizard and a rather large toad, plus numerous other small little insects. The island doesn't have its own power source so they rely on solar power or private generators, only two places on the island have 24hr electricity, we were not in one of them! We only had power between 6pm and 10pm and on our 2nd night that cut out around 9pm which led to most of the beach being plunged into darkness. With our little torches we made our way back to our hut got into our mosquito net covered bed and decided to leave the next morning. As much as it was paradise during the day we think we needed to get back to civilisation!
After the ferry back to the mainland we took a bus down to Phuket, one if Thailand's most famous islands, so big that its not even considered an island anymore and just part of the mainland. Phuket is extremely popular with tourists from around the world and so it was a lot busier and prices reflected this. On arrival at the bus station there was a taxi rank that had outrageous prices to different parts of the island. After doing our research though we knew there were local small public buses that ran to different parts of the island and were much cheaper.
We checked into our hostel which was fine and the room was pretty decent apart from a funky smell. We then headed out for food to realise that the prices were greatly increased in most places, we did however find a nice little reggae cafe that served a good jamaican jerk chicken burger with a little help from Levi Roots. The next day we went to check out the beach, this was horrible. The beach on Koh Phayam was a deserted paradise with not a single sun lounger. The beach on Phuket we visited was the total opposite! Every bit of sand was covered by sun loungers and people and the sand wasn't that nice either! We also made a visit to Phuket Town which turned out to be just as disappointing - a torrential downpour didn't help there though!
Just from visiting these two islands we could see the contrast of what people see when they visit the Thai islands and their search for paradise - I think we found it on Koh Phayam but Phuket was no where near. Anyway plenty more islands to visit so on to Koh Lanta next.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.151s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 6; qc: 45; dbt: 0.0913s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb