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Published: August 9th 2013
We were thankful that our tummies had calmed down from the roller coasters by the time we were checking in for our flight to Bangkok. We are slightly surprised that Hong Kong airport doesn’t have the self-check in machines other airports have, but Air Asia have actually invested in staff numbers here, so there is several check in desks available for all flight destinations open!
The flight went very smoothly, arrival into Don Mueang still reminds us of the first time we went to Thailand, except without the scrum of taxi mafia waiting at the arrival doors! It’s a little disappointing that Don Mueang has been the Air Asia hub for 9 months now and there doesn’t seem to have been any real improvement to what is offered at the airport. For example, despite asking in several of the shops (including in the 7-11 airside) there is nowhere to buy sim cards or phone credit! There is very little food choice landside, airside is slightly better with a Subway, McDonalds, Burger King and Dunkin Donuts…not exactly health food, we know! It really seems like Don Mueang is just a temporary measure for Air Asia, maybe it is?
We had
decided to fly to Surat Thani with Nok Air (literally, bird air and the planes are painted with bright colours with a beak on the nose!). The funniest thing was that the staff around the check-in desks were all wearing brightly coloured t-shirts with the word ‘BABE’ printed on, yes, even the men, which was a little weird! After (what now seems like) our obligatory sleepless airport stop over we boarded the oldest plane we have seen in a long time and we were only a little bit worried…why only a little bit? There were 3 Buddhist monks in the row in front of us, we were immediately reassured - with that amount of good karma on board nothing would go wrong 😉
The flight was actually excellent, the cabin crew were lovely – so smiley and cute in their yellow uniforms and we even got a little goodie bag of cake and a cup of water. Once upon a time, when presented with a neon green and pink cake with some kind of filling, we wouldn’t have eaten it…now, well, we eat anything!
We had pre-booked our ferry and bus tickets (after what had happened in March!)
This is how busy it was on the ferry change over
and it was only half the people who were there at the port!which was 6 hours in total and included a bus and two ferries…the second ferry was as hot as hell as the air con was broken.
Following the yellow brick road and day tripping Very happy to be off the hot ferry and finally standing on Koh Tao, we swooshed past the taxi mafia offering overpriced rides and opted to walk instead. The walk was actually quite pleasant and only took 30 minutes (we don’t travel with heavy check in bags, so it was easy!) and it gave us a chance to see both the village of Mae Haad (where we arrived) and Sairee (where we were headed).
Our first impressions of Koh Tao were good, there seemed like A LOT of restaurants and plenty to keep us busy for our 10 night stay here. Being the slightly crazy people we are, one morning we did a run on the beach (at 6:30am) the divers waiting for their boats gave us weird looks, not sure why as they were up to dive! Later in the day we then decided that as Koh Tao is a relatively small island it is therefore very walkable and proceeded
Brum, brum
this was the craze on Koh Tao instead of mopeds. on a ‘walk’ to some other beaches further south. Well the nice ‘walk’ turned out to be a 12km hike up and down jungle paths…combine that with the 3km run we had done in the morning and the fact Donna was having a bit of tummy trouble, well let’s just say memories of the Inca Trail surfaced 😉. We powered on and saw some fabulous beaches and in the end we were glad we hiked it!
Another day we managed a 4km run on the beach…again with weird stares from the divers – is it really so unusual to get up early to exercise? At this point we’d like to mention we didn’t hire snorkels and masks, all places wanted 150 baht (just over £3) for the hire, even though it would only have been for a couple of hours! Funny how a snorkel and mask was 150 baht for a couple of hours but a dive, with all equipment and meal included is 850 baht (£17), it just struck us as a little weird!
One day we took a boat to the nearby island of Koh Nang Yuan, this is actually 3 little islands joined together by
Goodie bag
the cake was actually delicious! a sand bar and is meant to have great diving, snorkelling and a viewpoint to look down on the beach. The boat is 200 baht per person return and there is meant to be an entry fee to the island (it is a privately owned resort and it likes to make money from people!) of 100 baht per person. However, as we have discovered in Asia, if you stroll along nonchalantly and look like you belong you get out of paying the fee! 😊
We actually think it’s about time Koh Nang Yuan starts to limit the number of people allowed on the islands…wow, to say it was crowded was an understatement. There were 5 day trip boats from Koh Samui/Koh Phangan (which hold around 40 people each) when we arrived, along with the people who had hopped on a boat from Koh Tao. The place was packed and from an environmental point of view, that number of people on a daily basis is not good for sand erosion on the sand bank linking the 3 islands! We immediately noted that the divers had almost monopolised the best swimming water for their Open Water courses and we counted at
least 60 divers in the water…Koh Tao is a bit of a dive factory in that respect. Tao does have a good reputation for diving but we wouldn’t be very happy as a diver here as most boats we saw leaving for dives were completely packed with 60-80 people per boat. Not exactly an ‘intimate’ diving experience!
Once most of the day trippers had left we hiked (yes, again!) up to the viewpoint, which involved very steep stairs, impromptu rock climbing in our flip flops and monster mosquitoes the size of baby birds! The view from the top was worth it though, but we did worry about some of the people we saw when we were on our way down…heart attacks waiting to happen, along with some very hung over and queasy youngsters attempting the hike up!
Sairee beach itself was very nice, although due to the full moon, the water was quite far out during the day and really high at night. By the end of our stay the tides had normalised a bit, so we got to see the beach in it’s full glory! We liked the fact there wasn’t any high rise buildings, everything was
low rise. Sairee village was bigger than we expected and as mentioned, had so many restaurants with a huge variety of cuisines. The nicest thing was the little path (nicknamed the ‘yellow brick road’) which ran right through the village, linking it to Oz (only joking, Mae Haad), which made walking relatively easy…apart from the idiots on the motorbikes trying to weave in and out of people walking. Why bikes on this path aren’t banned, there is a perfectly good road as well which bikes could use!
Food, cocktails and being little piggies Ahhhh, food! As most people know, we love our food…the only problem is, we only have little tummies and can’t fit a lot in. On this visit to Koh Tao, we actually wished we had a bigger appetite; there were so many restaurants and food we wanted to try but couldn’t manage it 😞
One thing we do have now is cast iron stomachs…Peru/Bolivia and India have seen to that! We have never, ever, in over 10 years of travelling to Thailand had food poisoning…until here. A name and shame for Krua Thai restaurant. The food was mediocre to begin with, neither
of us ate that much of it but a few hours later, Neil was really, really sick. Donna wasn’t too bad, but she didn’t have meat with her meal. It completely wiped out the next day and night – very annoying!
Anyhoo, otherwise the food in Sairee was FANTABULOUS! It was some of the best Thai food we have ever had and it was some of the cheapest as well. On average a dish was only 80 baht or £1.66 (versus 110-120 baht - £2.29-2.50 in other resorts/islands we have been to), the prices were more like 5 years ago and we can only put that down to the fact there was a lot of competition here and a lot of backpackers who were being frugal with how they spent their 'hard earned cash'.. 😉 lol
The best restaurants we found were Fizz which was on the beach with funny bean bag chairs, nice low lighting and a good atmosphere, which also did a good mojito cocktail (which Donna has managed to get Neil into!). Fizz did the best massaman, green and penang curries we have had anywhere. The price was a little more than other places at
95 baht (£1.97) but the portions were huge and there was even brown rice on the menu – quite a rare thing in Asia! Our other favourite was Tik’s restaurant – the staff were a little cuckoo, but they did fantastic banana shakes, fried rice and pad krapow (spicy chilli and basil dish!). One other thing to note about the Thai restaurants in Sairee, we never once had to ask for our food spicy, it came spicy as standard.
There were several restaurants we tried which were just ok, but managed to be completely packed out every night and have rave reviews on TripAdvisor. We just came to the conclusion that some people just don’t know what good food is 😊. We tried an Italian (Farango) while we were there, which was average – the best thing being the caprese bruschetta starter and also tried a little coffee shop called Zest which served excellent sandwiches and coffee shakes (this was the day after the food poisoning incident, so tender tummies!).
Booze in Sairee was cheap, well for Thailand it was! There was an abundance of happy hours, buckets on special and plenty of bars. One night we managed
View from Fizz beach bar
see the funny bean bag chairs? to get completely drunk by 9pm…pretty shameful 😉. We only had 3 cocktails each (two mojitos at Fizz and a mojito at another bar), they were so bloody strong they had us staggering along the yellow brick road, dodging and weaving around people, bikes and ladyboys (yep, they are here too with a cabaret to boot!). On average, most places were charging 100 baht for cocktails (about £2).
There was also plenty of street food available – pad thai, corn on the cob, kebab skewers, pancakes. Oh the pancakes were great, definitely the best ever banana and nutella roti was made by Mr Ali or his wife!
Bumps, bruises and a people without places to stay
If we had £1 for every time we saw someone with either a bandage on some part of their body from a motorbike accident, saw someone almost have an accident on a motorbike or saw someone fall over drunk in the street and almost get run over by a motorbike…well, we would have a lot of money by now.
Koh Tao has a reputation of being a dangerous island for driving motorbikes and we shudder every time
we see people on bikes whizzing around as if they are invulnerable to damage. This is due to the incident with Donna’s Dad a couple of years ago (
Emergency Landing...Dislocation...Fracture...not a good way to start a holiday), people just don’t realise how bad coming off a bike can be and that their insurance probably doesn’t cover them.
We arrived just before a Full Moon Party on the neighbouring Koh Phangan , we expected Koh Tao to be busy, but not THAT busy! We were very glad we had booked accommodation ahead as almost continually during our stay we saw so many people looking fruitlessly for rooms, we were getting stopped in the street multiple times a day asking if we knew anywhere which had spare rooms. Nearly every place we saw had a ‘FULL’ sign up and people were arriving in the morning and having to leave the same evening as there just wasn’t any accommodation available – crazy! There was a little lull around 4 nights into our stay but then it just busied up again, so much so that our first choice Lomprayah ferry off the island was completely booked not just for the day we wanted but two days either side!
Nearly every
voice we heard was British or Irish; there were a couple of French and Germans…no Russians in sight (maybe that’s why it’s still quite cheap?). On our first couple of nights it seemed like the whole Full Moon Party had descended on Koh Tao – there were a lot of 18-25 year olds whose main mission seemed to be to get as drunk as possible as fast as possible (although us responsible adults weren’t much better that night when we were legless!). It was actually quite a culture shock to us witnessing what we remember happening in UK city centres on a weekend right here in Thailand. We supposed due to University holidays, this is why it was so busy. We know though when we were at Uni we still had our limits for drinking…these people we saw just seemed to have no limits at all. One encounter baffled and amused us in equal measure; we were looking at a restaurant menu which had specials listed by the day and a girl stood next to us completely confused, turned to us and asked what day it was. When we replied ‘Friday’, she looked shocked and mumbled something about ‘losing a
day somewhere’! Oh dear, how much had she had to drink?
As you have read on our other blogs, we have sometimes reached breaking point with rude people…surprisingly in Koh Tao the tables were turned! Yes, we have become the people we complain about. We are so used to people being rude to us, letting doors slam in our face, shoving and pushing us, queue jumping that we discovered that we have become quite rude! It literally took us by surprise, that even when rolling drunk these British and Irish kids were unbelievably and unfailingly polite. They held doors open, asked if you were queuing in the (out of the door) queue at 7-11, they apologised when they bumped into you and asked if someone was using a spare seat before taking it. Well, us two little lost Brits had to adjust our attitude pretty sharpish and remember the good manners our parents had instilled in us when we were younger! Living in Asia has meant we have had to harden ourselves to certain things and it’s a dog-eat-dog scenario sometimes, but we are glad that this trip to Koh Tao reminded us that not everyone in the world
is rude and we can let one person through a door without 17 others shoving their way past you too!
The weirdness of ‘kids’ nowadays Disclaimer – wild generalisations here, based on a lot of the people we encountered during our time on Koh Tao. We know not all people of this age group are like this, we actually know quite a few who are the complete opposite!
We had such a laugh people watching, it was amazing to observe the younger generation and we overheard plenty of inane conversations. One of the best, a Canadian girl and British guy get in the sea – she says ‘oh, it’s so not cold’ (you mean it’s warm?) and he replied, ‘yes, and it’s very salty’ (really, seawater is salty?!). More hilarious was a girl in 7-11, declaring loudly that her body is a temple, she never snacks and doesn’t drink soft drinks EVER! She then gets to the counter, asked for a bottle of Hong Thong whiskey (only one step up from Sangsom, the worst whiskey ever), plonks a bottle of pop down along with a cake and asks for a packet of fags from the
Sairee street
...the drain in the middle overflowed when it rained and it wasn't just water, ewww! guy behind the counter. Oh the irony!
During our people watching, one thing that did strike us was the fact that a lot of people don’t speak very clearly at all. We learnt pretty rapidly that when talking to people who don’t have English as a first language, it’s very important to E-N-U-N-C-I-A-T-E. We found that British people we encountered tend to mumble a lot, and speak in a kind of whine, it was so bad that sometimes we couldn’t even understand what they were saying. Some Scandinavians and Germans we have met can speak better English than British people! Add to this the number of times we heard, ’30 baht, oh that’s only 30p innit’ (actually, it’s 48 baht to £1, which makes 30 baht 62p!) which led us to wonder what the British education system is teaching people in the UK?! Certainly not basic maths and English.
We are a
little older than the people we were observing (we aren’t letting on how much older we are though!) and it was very strange to watch them interact with each other. From our perspective, for these ‘kids’, everything was such a chore and a bother. It was
like they were on a tick-box holiday; they had no interest at all in learning about Thailand, interacting with Thais or eating Thai food. The places serving British/Italian/Mexican food were packed out, the food wasn’t as good as ‘home’ and they were only really interested in getting drunk (which honestly, you can do at home for cheaper!). We were discussing this and we came to the conclusion if we had been given the opportunity to travel to Thailand at that age during a University holiday, we definitely wouldn’t have wasted it getting drunk, lying in bed until 2pm every day and huffing, puffing and complaining like we didn’t want to be there!
Conversations were very self-absorbed; it’s as if the art of having a two-way conversation has completely died. The majority of conversations we overheard (and we weren’t being nosy here, people talk so loud it’s impossible not to hear them) actually didn’t need two people in the conversation. One person would be talking about themselves and the other person would respond talking about themselves and not addressing what the first person said in any way at all. It was puzzling to us overhearing this kind of conversation and
made us wonder if social media/texting is to blame? It also worried us that the people we were watching were the future of the UK…makes us a little apprehensive to be honest 😉
On our taxi ride to the ferry when we were leaving, we were sharing with 3 of these youngsters…two were on their way back to Koh Phangan for the half-moon party, having just come from the full moon party. The other, a girl was on her way back to the UK after having ‘a nightmare 5 days where EVERYTHING had gone completely WRONG’ (drama queen alert!). They were discussing how ‘insane’ it was that the sun was coming up while the moon was still in the sky while they were at the Full Moon Party (erm, normal occurrence people!) and that someone they knew had been arrested for cannabis possession. It’s all fine and well going to the Full Moon Party, but we really cannot believe that people are STILL stupid enough to do drugs in SE Asia. Apparently, this kid (19 years old) is in prison on Koh Phangan. He was told to pay £1000 bail and he could leave prison until his court case,
Does this lead to Oz?
follow the yellow brick road which he did and the Thai police kept his passport so he can’t leave the country, he is terrified to tell his parents. Way to go, even if he is let off with a slap on the wrist, chances are he will never be allowed back into Thailand…was it worth it we wonder?
This leads us onto a puzzling new craze…the so called ‘legal high’ of balloons. Yes, you read it right. BALLOONS! Not just any old balloon but ones filled with nitrous oxide (aka laughing gas) - here is
an interesting UK media article on the balloon craze. Bars on Koh Tao were selling balloons for people to get high on. We wondered what was going on when we saw a guy carefully cradling a yellow balloon and then sucking from it in a bar we were drinking in and then later on we saw people walking around with balloons. This lead to many questions on our part:
-Do they offer nitrous oxide in balloon animal shapes? That would be fun sucking nitrous oxide from a balloon dog’s bum!
-Is the new chat up line – ‘hello, can I buy you a balloon?’ or ‘wanna share a balloon with
me?’
-Do you get a hangover from too many balloons?
-Does this mean the old guy from the film ‘UP’ was actually a balloon dealer? Now that’s a bit of a disturbing thought.
-Can you bring your own balloon and do they charge you the equivalent to corkage (erm, fillage, suckage?)?
-Do different colour balloons have different effects or flavours?
Thoughts on development and numbers Koh Tao is a lovely island, however (as we have found with other places) it seems to be on the cusp of over-development. As we said earlier in the blog, there wasn’t enough rooms for the people arriving and people were having to turn around and leave the same day as arriving. We aren’t quite sure why Koh Tao is so popular, it’s nice but so are other Thai islands we have been to…perhaps it’s just a passing fad with people like we have experienced with other places over the years? There is a lot more building work happening, which in our opinion, Sairee really doesn’t need; it’s already at over capacity with the development there is! We hope that the island doesn’t develop more
and what we experienced with the numbers of people on the island were not normal, otherwise it really will strain Koh Tao to breaking point.
When it came time to leave, we were shocked that Lomprayah was fully booked for 4 days (actually even the travel agent was shocked as well at how busy Sairee was!), so we had to opt for Songserm ferry and bus instead. Let’s just say it was a farce from start to finish, with ferry swaps, overcrowding and a rasta-reggae striped non-air con bus meeting us at the ferry pier in Surat Thani. After a hellish all day journey, we were then dumped at an out of town ‘bus station’ and us (along with 5 others) had to fight to get our ride to Surat Thani town from the arrogant and dickhead Songserm staff. Never again – we have decided always to book well in advance (usually not needed!) and always use Lomprayah with whom none of these shady shenanigans happen!
Our next stop is Bangkok, with lots of luxury, some new experiences and observations of a changing metropolis.
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D MJ Binkley
Dave and Merry Jo Binkley
Beaches of Thailand
Sorry to hear about your illness. Hope you are feeling better now. Sadly, I get food poisoning all too often and understand how you were feeling. The mojitos will surely chase away all bacteria...just keep drinking them. Looks like a great place to explore. Chuckled about your observations....you are getting older! Have fun and stay safe.