Day 66 to 75 - Thailand

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On New Year’s Day, we headed back to Thailand. The Lao-Thai border was chaotic - people pushing and shoving to get onto buses. Trying to get on a bus with all our gear was, as Matt put it, “character building.”

Once across the border we headed back to Bangkok on the overnight train and caught a connecting flight to Phuket. After killing a few hours in Bangkok, we finally arrived in Phuket. Some friends told us about Lom Lae on Koh Yao Noi, a small island about 40 mins off the coast of Phuket. Lom Lae/Koh Yao Noi had not been taken over by tourists and was very peaceful and relaxing. We ended up spending 7 nights there. The main source of income for the island, other than tourism, was fishing and rubber farming. We spent our first night having cocktails on the beach and eating too much. The next day we booked a snorkeling trip around Ko Hong and visited other karsts and beaches in the area. The snorkeling wasn’t great due to the weather, but we did meet a lovely English couple, Nick and Sandy. They had won 2 nights' stay at a resort in Phuket which they weren’t going to use and gave to us (we felt like we’d won the lottery!). The next day we hired a scooter and drove around the island in search for Temple Beach which was the nicest beach on the island - golden fine sand, good swimming and not too many people. We hired a scooter and spent the next few days finding hidden beaches, laying out and exploring the island. Matt wanted to go diving while in Thailand but it never worked out.





From Koh Yao Noi we headed back to Phuket, with hotel vouchers in hand, to the Secret Cliff. We did not like the chaos of Phuket so we decided to stay at our hotel and spend the rest of our time in Thailand by the pool.





On our way to New Zealand, we had one last destination in Asia - one night in Singapore catching up with Dave and Marie. They had recently moved to Singapore and Dave was very excited to show us their new apartment which had a bomb shelter! All apartments are required to have a bomb shelter but these days it's used for the maid’s quarters - in Dave and Marie’s case a storage room for all their stuff. They were great hosts. We stayed up late chatting and got 3 hours of sleep before catching our flight to New Zealand.

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