The Koh's - South Thailand

Good Afternoon :)

Been a bit slack with the blog recently so I'm going to try write everything under one blog for Koh Samui, Koh Phangan and Koh Tao... WARNING it's going to be long!

Koh Samui

After flying into Bangkok on the 19th February we stayed the night on Khao San as Max was there so we spent the day & night with him catching up again.
We travelled the following night to Koh Samui, night bus and then a ferry in the morning from Suratthani.
Got to our guest house who didn't have a room for us even though we pre-booked so trapesed up and down the road and finally found a place with a room available!
The manager was a Thai lady called Lek and she was so funny, Lee & I chatted with her quite a bit and turns out she was a lady boy. (We'd been trying to work it out while we were there but couldn't decide) but she told us the day we left, bottom surgery done too! It was quite good to have my questions answered as there was a few things I wanted to know.
So we stayed in Koh Samui 3 nights and stayed in Chaweng Beach. The beach was ok there and first day Lee & I sunbathed and had a swim in the sea while Lora chilled in the room as she got badly burnt on the ferry on the way to the island. We met John and Mike two guys travelling together, John's Welsh and Mike is from Essex and a couple of English girls too while on the beach, had a couple drinks with them at a posh bar place which had a pool and chilled for the afternoon and arranged to meet up again as was a big pool party going on a couple of days later.
That night we went to a lady boy cabaret show then found a gay street and had a few Changs in this tiny bar, there was a 12 year old kid selling Hawain reefs and I took them off him and managed to sell 4 to some of gays in the bar (bunch of queens lol) . Lora wasn't feeling up for it so she stayed in and Lee & I ended up partying until the early hours of the morning. There was a really good club called Green Mango which was playing trance music and kind of felt if we were in a disused warehouse.
Didn't do an awful lot there really, the weather wasn't great and rained quite a bit, I skipped the following night out - I hear it ended up with Lee sleeping on the floor in McDonalds, the photos are pretty funny! I watched the film Remember Me which ended in me crying my eyes out annd started watching Lost from the beginning! (My stab at not giving in to peer pressure!)

Following day we went to the pool party in the afternoon but I still wasn't feeling up for a heavy one, met up with John ad Mike and chilled with them. I didn't get in on the pool party action at Ark Bar, we chilled at the side pool where it was a bit more relaxed. Night 3 we just chilled out and had a wonder around the town and packed up our stuff as we were going to Koh Phangan for the FULL MOON!.

Koh Phangan

We arrived on Monday 25th Feb at Koh Phangan which is where the beautiful friendship started between us, Holly & Blaine and Stefan and the rest of the Bang Namken crew.
We stayed in some nice beach bungalows 10 minutes from Haad Rin in a place called Ban Tai with a secluded beach and hammocks all over place, it was lovely! We arrived and instantly Lee stubbed his toe on a rock on the path up to the reception, blood gushing everywhere he'd taken a whole chunk of skin off his big toe! He had to go get cash too so he hobbled into the village to get some money and took Lora with him. I was rather bored so I started talking to a couple who were checking in which happened to be Holly & Blaine. That night we sat round a big table in the restaurant and accrued quite a few people, Kennedy, Liz and Gary who were travelling together, Stefan (Big G) & Annika and of course Holly & Blaine, Lora, Lee and myself. The full moon gang had formed!

One of the girls told us about a pool party she heard about which was meant to be good so after a few drinking games we went in a tuk tuk to Haad Rin and bumped into Mike & John from Samui! That was so much fun, Stefan had a waterproof camera with him so took some good pictures and we were all smashed!
Everyone the next day wasn't feeling great so we chilled out at the beach (the bungalows were right on the beach and it was so quiet) Tuesday night we decided to try out the Jungle Rave but it was a buddhist holiday and they weren't serving alcohol until midnight and was quite a bit of money for entrance fee so we left there and headed for Haad Rin beach for the pre full moon party. We also bumped into Mike & John again so they came with us too :) such a great night, everyone was jumping through the burning skipping rope (Menatlists!) and we were all raving hard and in case you are all wondering, nobody took a trip up mushroom mountain.


I chilled out Full Moon day, but can't say the same for the boys (Stefan, Blaine and Lee) who did an all nighter the night before, had 3 hours kip and started drinking on the beach in the morning.
Lee was so drunk by the evening that we all had our money on him bailing before we went! We all congregated in the communal area and got all dressed up in neon outfits and painted each other with neon paint.

So Lee made it out and we went back to the same place we were at the night before. We thought it was better the night before as wasn't as busy, there were 25,000 people on the beach it was insane. Just look at the photo to see how minging the air there was! Lee lasted one and a half hours and couldn't handle it anymore, he was really drunk and there was no room to move, everyone pushing past each other and was so hot and sweaty, so I accompnied him back to the bungalows. We had more fun on the walk home than we did at the actual full moon party. Definitely wouldn't do another one at Haad Rin beach, its definitely over rated!
 The rest of the guys ended up raving until the sun came up and at 8am when I got up the guys were just coming home.. Lora didn't get back until about 10! lol... good times for some, but i'm not really a hard core drinker - I actually didn't drink much that night at all, partly because I was keeping an eye out for Lee and I just felt like i'd overdone it recently.
Our last night we went out for dinner with the guys and had a quiet night, hardly anyone touched any alcohol and Lee stole my book "Memoirs of a Geisha" which I was in the middle of reading and that was him indoors for the night! Thoroughly recommend the book by the way if anyone's looking for a good book and not read it! Has to be one of the best i've read so far.
Koh Phangan was such a laugh, met some really brilliant people and will remember the fun times chilling at Bang Namken for ever :) Thanks to everyone who made it great!! xxxx

Koh Tao

We travelled o Koh Tao on the 1st March and headed for Crystal Dive School to do our PADI open water course. Emilie who we met in Chiang Mai and a couple of the other girls had done their dive master course there and had talked a lot about it so we just went with them and Emilie was still there working, so was good to see her again :) We managed to get 5 nights accommodation and the course for 9000 Baht, which is £180. For that we did the theory and took an exam and did 4 dives.
The first day was just theory and then the second we got kitted up and went to the swimming pool. Lee and Lora were quite nervous about it but seemed fine in the pool. That night Stefan (Big G) arrived in Koh Tao to spend a few days with us and crashed in our room.
The following day we had our first dive at Mango Bay, 12m in the sea and had to take our PADI exam first thing in the morning. I woke up Lee and he decided that he didn't want to do it as didn't like the feeling in the pool so after trying to persuade him to go and getting our lovely instructor to go and see him, Lora and I left him and we went off on the boat for our dives!
The following day we went to two different dive sites and it was amazing. Such a great experience, we got to see so many tropical fish and even spotted a turtle! Lee really missed out but just wasn't his thing. We were lucky enough to have our last day diving filmed so we have a brilliant memory of our dives and paid for a copy of the video which is awesome! I've taken some screen shots from it, hence the amazing pictures you see.

We had one day left before we were due to leave and Stefan was leaving for the national park so we rented scooters on the 4th day and rode to to Shark Bay to see the stunning beach we heard about. Such a shame that the weather was slightly overcast as the photos would be so much better. We
nearly got caught in a thunder storm so whizzed back to our accommodation before we got soaking wet!

The last day we had every intention of going to the twin rocks as the view is amazing and would have got some great photos but unfortunately the heavens opened all through the night and day, so we couldn't do anything with the bikes. There was one point I was teaching Lora to ride a scooter and just as we started the rain hit hard.. needless to say we got soaking wet! Anyway, so we chilled out, I knicked all her films off her laptop and gave her some IT lessons lol.

This was the end of the Koh Tao, and Lee & I said goodbye to Lora for the time being. I wanted to start thinking about heading off for Australia as the more money I go with the better unfortunately  (plus I've kind of had enough and want a change of scenery) so I decided to head for Malaysia to get a flight from Kuala Lumpur. I asked the travel agent how to get there, and they said we have to go via Krabi.
I really wanted to go to Phi Phi and Holly & Blaine were going there too, and also Stefan was heading in that direction, so I said to Lee how about we go there for a few days and then head to Malaysia, so that's what we did :) Lora stayed to  do her advanced diving course and spend some time with Emilie, so we bid her farewell and Lee and I took the night ferry over to Suratthani, and got a bus in the morning to Krabi where we first stopped at Railay at Holly's recommendation.

See you in Aus Lora, been fun travelling with you and we'll meet again soon :D

I'll write about that in another post soon... it's enough for one evening, I think i've deserved a Singha!

Hope everyone's well at home :)

Lots of love

Hannah xxxxx