The Islands of Thailand: Koh Samui, Koh Tao, and Koh Phangan (sort of)

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My ride to Koh Samui, as always, was eventful. I got picked up from my hostel in Koh Lanta at 7:20 in a van. I was squished into half of the middle seat because the other half plus the seat next to me was being taken up by everyone's luggage. And another person was in the seat next to me. It was so uncomfortable. I thought it would only be like that until we got to the bus. Nope. That was the bus. Thankfully, about 3 hours into the trip, the girl next to me got off, so I had all that room to myself. Only 3 solid hours of discomfort. Not bad. The van dropped us off at the Suratthani pier and gave us ferry tickets. I bought some snacks and got on the boat. The ferry ride to Koh Samui was uneventful, but the water was beautiful. Cloudy and light blue like Lake Balaton in Hungary. The ferry landed, we got off, and I had arranged for a van on the other side rather than deal with a cab and meter. Back in Suratthani, I had given them my hostel address, and they had just given me a ticket and said, "show it to the driver." My ticket was collected, and I was pointed to a van, which I had to myself.

The driver drove for a while, saying "backpackers hostel?" while I replied, "let's go backpackers hostel" with emphasis on the "let's go." His reply was always, "yes, backpackers hostel." So...he brought me to the backpackers hostel and was REALLY put out when I told him it was the wrong one. I showed him the address in my email in Thai, brought it up on a map, and enlisted the help of the extremely pregnant woman working at backpackers hostel. While the driver was trying to figure it all out, he was getting more and more exasperated, saying he had other people to pick up and blah blah blah. I was like, "listen. I paid for this. Please just take me to my hostel." Eventually, I used my map skills to direct us there, and we rejoiced at finding it together.

I got settled in my hostel on the top floor where there was a balcony but no AC. Oof. I met a Kiwi guy who was traveling with his friends but was poorer than him so he was at a hostel while they were all at a fancy hotel. We met one of them and went swimming for a bit. The water was cloudy, but it was still beautiful and warm. Then we went out to dinner with all of them at a really cheap market with pad thai for 60 baht.

The next morning, Simon (the Kiwi in my hostel) and I got breakfast. Expensive coffee and cheap fruit. We went back to the hostel where I rented a motorbike. We met up with the other four Kiwis and rode to the Big Buddha. Josh didn't want to ride a motorbike, so he and Simon were going to get a cab or tuktuk. The rest of us arrived at the Big Buddha where we waited for 45 minutes before they showed up because they walked the 5k there. The Buddha was beautiful and so was the view. Simon and Stanley climbed up to the top and got some GoPro footage. Afterwards we motorbiked over to Chaweng beach, which is the backpacker area. Rather than wait for Simon and Josh this time, we just went to the Green Bird restaurant and got really amazing curries for lunch. We sauntered over to the beach, which didn't exist. The tide was so high because the full moon had just happened that it went right up to the storefronts (reminiscent of Hoi An). We found a table sort of on sand at a huge beach bar and set up shop. Boyce and I went in the water, but the current was crazy strong, so I didn't want to stay in too long. We finally heard from Simon and Josh that they had arrived, so we met them at their restaurant and the 3 boys I had been motorbiking with went back to the hotel because their rentals were almost up.

Simon, Josh, and I went back to the beach. By this time, the tide was much farther out, and people were starting to set up chairs on the sand that now existed. We lay out on some chairs while loads of people came around and tried to sell us all kinds of things. Jewelry, sports equipment, tattoos, cigarettes, speakers, etc. An incredibly drunk man of unknown ethnicity (small and brown) sat down next to us. He was our entertainment for the next few hours. He seemed to know everyone who worked in the bar, and they seemed to be falsely nice to him, so I think he had some amount of money. He asked about 12 people for a mojito but didn't get one. He got the guy selling speakers to come over and try to sell him a speaker. He talked to the guy for a solid 10 minutes trying out different speakers and bargaining before not buying a speaker at all. Then two girls went to sit down in the seats in front of him, you know, to relax on the beach. He immediately started hitting on them and asking them all kinds of questions, so they moved a few chairs down. At some point during this time, he had acquired a Chang beer (still no mojito) and was drinking it and throwing up in the sand. Once he finished that, he finally got a mojito. Probably a bad idea. The sun was setting, and I didn't want to drive home in the dark, so we all left, and Simon and Josh started the walk home.

I arrived back at the hostel just as it got dark. I met a Dutch guy who had arrived that day and brought him with me to get dinner at the market with the Kiwis. After dinner, they went back to their hotel, so the Dutch guy (too many people—I forget his name. I suck) and I went to the beach by our hostel. We got a couple of Changs at the 7/11 and sat on the beach to watch a fire show. Really good. Very professionally done. I got back to the hostel at around 1am and slept soundly.

The next morning, I packed up some fruit, rented the motorbike again (about $8 per day), and set off to drive around the whole island (slowly, I promise). I stopped a few times to take pictures of the crazy blue water and shop around. I finally found a place with a waterfall. I hiked up the trail for a bit but found a place with a lot of rocks on the river to climb around. I found a good one, stuck my legs in the river, and wrote in my journal for a long time. It reminded me a lot of the place I went for my vision quest in Patagonia all those years ago. I finally made it up to the waterfall, which was beautiful. I swam for a bit and then hiked down and motorbiked around the rest of the island. I arrived back at the hostel and decided to explore my own area. I walked around the Fisherman's Village market for a while and finally bought an elephant shirt for 100 baht. It's white with a really colorful elephant, and I love it. I took myself out to dinner and then went back to the hostel, read my book for a long time, and went to bed.

I woke up early the next morning and sat in a dark hostel with all my belongings while I waited for someone to bring me to the pier. I was on the first boat to Koh Tao to meet up with Rachel, Jordan, Brett (all from college), and Carly (Brett's coworker in Korea). My boat was scheduled to arrive in Koh Tao at 10, so I had told Rachel to meet me at the pier over there. At 10, we were right in the middle of Koh Tao and Koh Phangan, and I had no way to contact Rachel. I arrived at about 10:45, found internet, and eventually found Rachel in a running hug that involved a lot of screaming and having to quickly move out of the way of vans.

We met Jordan and Brett at a cafe where they were already drinking Chang, and we all had breakfast. Since they were on vacation, a lot of conversations went like this: “What time is it?” “Chang-30.”

We walked to the hostel, which was right on the beach. A few days before, I had emailed the hostel asking if I could be in a room with everyone else. They emailed me back saying it wasn't possible, but they were overbooked for the first night, so I had been upgraded to a private room. SCORE. When checking into the hostel, I booked a fifth night because I was in love with Koh Tao from the beginning and Brett and Carly were staying 5 nights. We threw all our stuff in my private room, put on bathing suits, and went downstairs to drink Changs and swim in the gorgeous water. That was most of our day. Sylvan met up with us, we all got dinner together, and then we drank more Changs while watching the fire show in front of our hostel. While the fire show in Koh Samui was amazing and professional, this one was more...four guys messing around with fire sticks who sometimes caught it and sometimes didn't.

The next morning, Brett and I got up at the same time and went to Cafe Culture with Sylvan and a girl we had met named Az. We ordered our food and then waited while everyone else in the restaurant got food. It took about 20 minutes to get our coffees. We were grumpy. In the meantime, the girls next to us who had arrived after us had gotten their food, eaten it, and left. Except they only ate half their dishes. So we just took the rest because hanger and shameless. Half an eggs benedict and half a banana nutella pancake. Eventually our food arrived, and it was delicious.

When we got back to the hostel, everyone else had woken up. We went out with them while they ate, and then it took us until 11 to get ourselves together. At 11 we were dressed and sunscreened. We rented kayaks, put our stuff in a dry bag, and set off with Rachel and Jordan, Sylvan and Brett, and Carly and me. Carly was wearing a life jacket because she proclaimed she can't swim (she can). We tried to find a beach to swim on, but it was high tide, so...no beach. Brett and Sylvan in the fastest kayak potentially found some rocks, but they weren't going to work. Then Carly and I found some potential rocks and kayaked towards them while everyone else kept going towards the small islands just off of Koh Tao. We saw a huge boulder COVERED with crabs and started yelling about crab island...and then beached ourselves on a rock. Then the kayak tipped and Carly fell out. I tried to get off the rock, but I was laughing too hard and there was a lot of screaming and no one came to our rescue. Eventually, Carly got back in the kayak, and we backed out of the cove (crab free). We tried to go towards everyone, but we beached ourselves on another rock where there was a weird current that was throwing us around and splashing us. More screaming and laughing. Then we backed WAY up and eventually got to everyone else. They weren't as enthused as we were.

We kayaked across the highway of taxi boats, scuba boats, and speedboats to the small islands. We dragged our kayaks up onto a rock and then were approached by a guy who was taking the landing tax of 100 baht each. We paid and decided to go for a hike. Sylvan was the only one with shoes. The rest of us were just in our bathing suits. The walk was across a wooden walkway in the sun with lots of room for splinters and rotting wood. We made it off that and up a lot of stone steps. I have calluses—Brett and Jordan don't. We got up to the top and scrambled up some boulders for a beautiful view. The islands we were on are connected by a sandbar. The sand is white and the water is turquoise and there's a reef that's perfect for snorkeling. After taking a lot of pictures, we climbed back down and went swimming off the sandbar. There was a mean current that we were constantly fighting, but there were also lots of rainbow fish. And us fighting the current meant we often floated into the stream of people walking across the sandbar and would either have to swim back or just stand up and walk back. When we got tired of swimming (and it was Chang 30), we kayaked back to Koh Tao with no incidents.

We docked our kayaks and got curries for lunch on the beach. While we were waiting for our food, Carly and I went swimming more in the smoothest whitest sand EVER. It was amazing. The food arrived, we ate, we swam more. Then we got the kayaks and returned them to the rental place. I said goodbye to Sylvan who had to go to his hostel, and the rest of us went back to our hostel to change and shower. I was in a dorm this time. I went to their dorm to hang out and got yelled at because we're not supposed to visit each other. I followed that rule never. We rested and read and talked for a while. Carly's friend Jason came back from scuba training, and we all walked into town to shop for New Year's clothes. Basically cheap neon clothes that wouldn't get ruined. We went into a million shops. We needed something fun for Carly, loud for Brett, Full Moon for Jason, and big for Jordan. We got all of those things except for Jordan's. At the last store I found a neon yellow shirt with a colorful seahorse that I hadn't seen anywhere else. I loved it. I bought it. We ate dinner that night at a place called Fizz on the beach. We had burgers, fries, and Chang. We went to bed early because the next night was New Year's Eve, and it was gonna be huge.

On the last day of 2015 we woke up and ate breakfast down in our hostel's cafe area. We had eggs with toast and coffee. We spent the day taking it easy. We played with Brett's snorkel gear, and I taught Carly how to swim with flippers and snorkel. Jordan wrote, Rachel read, Brett, Jason, Carly, and I played frisbee in the water. We got some lunch and then it was time to get ready. We put on our new clothes, and I put some money and my license in the back of my phone case, which I put in my bra. I was taking no chances with theft.

Our boat was at 3:30 pm. Our boat back to Koh Tao was at 8:30 am. We had nowhere to sleep. We got on the boat and sat outside on the back deck. The boat backed the entire way out of the harbor and verrrrryyyyyy slowwwwlllyyyyyy turned around. While it did this, we watched a wall of rain come over Koh Tao and hide the island from view. As the boat finished turning (we were all hoping it would outrun the rain) we saw a FUNNEL CLOUD start to form over the island. I have never seen a funnel cloud form or be formed. I was not expecting southern Thailand to be the first place. We watched it attempt to touch down but fail because Koh Tao is a hill, so it dissipated. It was wicked cool, though. The boat failed at outrunning the rain, so we all ended up down in the cabin.

We arrived on Koh Phangan, met up with Megan and Tori (coworkers of Brett and Carly) and found a bar near the pier to eat at. We had some lunch and got in the back of a pickup truck with some Koreans to go to the full moon beach. We waited around for a while while the driver tried to find more people to pack into our truck, which was already completely full with me and Jason basically hanging out the back. She got 3 Canadians to hang onto the back ledge, and we set off for the beach. When we arrived, it was getting dark. We knew we were in the right place by the plethora of black-light body paint and buckets. Brett bought some body paint and a paintbrush and we took stock of the prices further away from the beach before checking out the scene on the beach. We got to the beach and established the buddy system (Carly and me) and a 3am meeting point (really bright sign). Rachel painted my arms with body paint, so now I really stuck out as that white girl wearing neon and body paint.

We drank some Changs and walked down the beach to explore more. The first thing we saw was fire limbo, which is exactly what it sounds like. Drunk idiots trying to limbo under a stick on fire. We got bored and went to watch the fire jumping, which was way more terrifying/horrible/exciting. We stood on a platform for a good view and watched as two men on platforms swung around a giant thick rope that was on fire. Then drunk idiots (only men, mind you) would go and jump in it like a jumprope. And sometimes they would do really well. But it always ended in the same way. One too many people would join in the jumping and screw it up for everyone else and then they would get hit with the fire rope and scramble away to avoid the burns. Sounds awesome, right? I think the best word for it is...cringy.

Carly and I shared a bucket of Thai whisky, Red Bull (prescription strength), and coke. They sell the buckets for more if you get it with fancier alcohol, but it's all just the same alcohol they put in fancier bottles. Research. It matters.

The rest of the night was full of dancing and buckets and a fireworks show at midnight. We had a fantastic time. At one point Carly stepped on my flip flop and broke it, but Brett found a rogue flip flop on the beach about 5 seconds later, so I just wore that one for the rest of the night. As it got later, I took a couple of naps against Rachel's legs because I'm old now and can't pull those all-nighters like I could when I was just a young lass.

We got a truck back in the morning to the ferry. This time there weren't even benches in the pickup truck. Just 8 of us in the back squished with all our legs. Our boat was late and picked us up at 9 instead of 8:30. Everyone was exhausted and cranky and slept the instant we got on the boat. We trudged back to the hostel, and I took a 3-hour nap. When I got up, some of us went back to Cafe Culture (despite the poor service the first time) to get eggs benedict. They were everything I had dreamed they would be, and the service was slightly better. Then Brett, Carly, Megan, Tori, and I got Thai massages for an hour to the sound of the waves on the beach right next to us. Then (grossness disclaimer) I started having digestive issues, which continued for the rest of the night. Granted, I can't even be mad because this is the first time I've had digestive issues on this whole trip. I went to bed early because of the stomach problems and the whole lack of sleep thing.

In the morning, Jordan and Rachel were gone—back to Korea. Booo. I was still not feeling great, so I just had bananas, toast, and peanut butter for breakfast. Brett, Carly, and I went to the scuba place we had booked the day before so that I could do a day of diving while they snorkeled. The boat ride was really short—only to those islands we had kayaked to just a few days before. I dove with an instructor and two other divers for the first dive. The reef was beautiful, and I saw a lot of big triggerfish and blue-striped angelfish. Then we found Nemo! There is a clownfish family that lives in an anemone away from the reef, so humans put a ring of rocks around it so that swimmers wouldn't disturb them. There was a big clownfish and a bunch of little ones.

For the second dive, I was with another instructor, and it was just us. We saw more huge triggerfish, a big pufferfish, a jellyfish, and two blue-spotted stingrays. We got back on the boat and went back to land in time for lunch (more toast and bananas). The rest of the day was spent relaxing. I did a lot of napping and walking around. I was able to have an apple and some gatorade, and that went over pretty well. For dinner I had toast and bananas (my favorite). I went to bed early.



When I woke up the next morning, Brett and Carly had gone to Koh Samui. I spent the day eating normal food (and was all better!) and reading my book on the beach. I went for a walk briefly and then got a taxi to the pier where I boarded the ferry to begin my long journey back to Bangkok. Tanned and happy, it was time to head north.

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[D MJ Binkley]

Beautiful
Peaceful Seas