Thailand, Koh Samui: Big Buddha's Island

After spending time off the southwest coast of Thailand, we decided to venture to a couple of islands situated off the east coast, the first being Koh Samui. Koh Samui has a special place in Kyle's heart as it is the only island in Thailand he managed to visit back in 2000, as he was trapped in a big monsoon which caused torrential downpours each day out of the nine days he was there. Suffice it to say, this trip to Koh Samui was exactly what both Kyle and Dan wanted - a warm, sunny and chilled-out place to visit.

Our choice of beach to stay at on Koh Samui was made before we visited the island of Phuket, and after spending a few days in the Patong Beach area of Phuket, we were happy with our Samui choice of Lamai Beach. The main beach on Koh Samui is Chaweng Beach and, in some respects (but certainly not to such an extreme), it is similar to Patong Beach with its busy nightlife and similar "in your face" feel there. Lamai Beach is known to be a more laid back and quiet stretch of beach, and we are happy to confirm that this is indeed the case. In fact, the section of Lamai beach we stayed on was extremely quiet, as it was at least 1km from the main section of town. We stayed at a resort (with a swimming pool!) called Samui Beach Resort, which we booked on Hostelworld's website, and the price for a bungalow near the pool and beach was just over £6 per person per night. A bargain, and we didn't have to worry about finding some other resort's swimming pool to sneak into!

There is actually a mummy in a glass case, who died about 30 years ago in a meditation pose, sitting in a prayer position

For those of you following our travels during our year-long trip, you may wonder how we got to Koh Samui from the Phang Nga Bay area and island of Phuket, or you may have just forgotten from reading our last couple of journal entries. Actually, we think we may need to refresh our memories, as we can't remember if we told you how we got to Koh Samui at all! What happened was this - we were picked at the Crown Hostel in Patong Beach by the driver of a small van which could carry 10 passengers; there were 12 in our van somehow but luckily two people were dropped off in Phuket Town. The driver then drove us for over 5 hours to a town called Surat Thani, where we transferred onto a large bus to travel another hour to the pier to catch a ferry to Koh Samui. We had somewhat of a layover in Surat Thani and the ferry to Koh Samui took 1-1/2 hours, so the day ended up being a long one.

We finally made it to the island in the end, hopped on a tuk-tuk (local taxi) and were driven to Lamai Beach. Of course, we didn't know where in Lamai our resort was located, so the tuk-tuk driver dropped us off in the centre of the main section of the small town and we ended up walking about 3km back in the direction the tuk-tuk had come, with our large backpacks and everything else we were travelling with at the time. The walk was unbearably hot but along the way, we spotted a couple of working monkeys (these are really animals trained to collect coconuts) being loaded onto a truck and we also stopped to play with some adorable puppies at a pet shop. The visit with the puppies was cut short because we started getting attacked by mosquitos and we also realised our backpacks were not getting any lighter. After arriving at the resort, the first thing we did after checking in and dropping our backpacks in our bungalow was hit the pool, and it was super refreshing after a long day's travelling and the trek to the resort.

Throughout our time on Koh Samui, we ate really good food. Just down the street from our resort was a little restaurant run by a very friendly Thai couple (although the man drinks rather excessively and smelled of whisky every time we saw him). They had a large TV and DVD player and were watching some Thai soap opera when we ate there the first time. Kyle asked the owners if it would be okay for us to bring a DVD to the restaurant the following evening to watch a film, and they agreed wholeheartedly. The place was a typical island restaurant, connected to a guesthouse and with open-air seating, and it was a quiet place with few customers. The owners agreed and the next night we ended up watching a DVD with them and one other patron, and we also enjoyed another good meal there. All of the meals we ate at Samui Beach Resort were tasty and well-priced, and again we have been spoiled with delicious Thai food. We are writing this journal entry with about one week left on our Thai itinerary and we are starting to get a bit nervous about food that we will experience in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, possibly China, too. Who knows what sort of creatures we will be eating there - dog, anyone?

Another island, another tour around the island on two wheels. We hired a scooter from a Danish guy who works at the electricity power station on Koh Samui for two months out of the year, and he does the same in Bermuda for two months out of the year. That is all he does apart from running a couple of motorbike rental shops. What a life...

The first stop on our trip around Koh Samui was to see the infamous Grandmother and Grandfather rocks. These two large naturally occurring formations can be viewed in our photo album and closely resemble the male and female genitalia. Leave it to the Thais to make up some legend to go along with it, but "apparently" a man and woman in love committed suicide and afterwards, these rocks formed out of the sea, representing the two lovers. We think this is a load of bollocks (that's "crap" to Americans reading this) created to go along with something that is funny to photograph. After a few stops visiting some temples on the island, we finally reached a temple containing Koh Samui's "mummified monk". There is actually a mummy in a glass case, who died about 30 years ago in a meditation pose, sitting in a prayer position. The Thais have built a small buddha statue resembling the monk and have placed it in front of the glass case. It was a strange but interesting sight to see on the island.

One of the major highlights of our tour around the island was a stop at the elephant trekking adventure park at the Namuang waterfall. When we arrived on Koh Samui and hopped onto a tuk-tuk towards Lamai Beach, we saw about five elephants walking along the side of the road. They were the large Asian elephant species and we wanted to get close to them again. What we didn't expect to see when we stopped there was a couple of gibbons and a friendly short-tailed macaque. The trekking park had a couple of young female gibbons there, one in a cage and the other tied to a long chain next to a tree. We ended up playing for a couple of hours with the gibbon chained next to the tree, as he was extremely friendly and quite playful. At first, we were nervous about getting too close for it to bite us, but after a short while, we figured out that its little teeth could do no harm to us, and that it would not try to harm us as it was only playfully biting at us like a little puppy does.

The gibbon, who we will refer to as Gibby for the rest of this journal entry, used each of us as a human climbing frame ("jungle gym" to the Americans reading this). Gibby would jump, from a metal bar he normally used for swinging, onto our arms and then would climb all over us before jumping off us and onto the neighbouring tree. He seemed to get completely into this and would repeat this journey over and over. We, of course, thought it was absolutely fun and kept egging him on by holding our arms out and getting his attention so he would go through the cycle again. The cutest thing Gibby would do when he wanted a break was grab onto one of our legs and just hug it for a minute or so before starting to play again.

In Malaysia, when we visited Kuala Selangor on a day trip from Kuala Lumpur, we stated that silver-leaf monkeys were our favourite monkeys, winning over the mischievous macaques and rare proboscis monkeys. Even though gibbons are actually apes, since they have no tails, we are still classing gibbons as favourites over silver-leafs, based on the fun factor and adorable qualities Gibby exhibited when we played with her all afternoon. Gibby, while playing, would get completely over-excited like a young child and at times would flip around on the ground and on our arms, and even at times would completely crash onto the hard ground. None of the crashes phased her, though, the little young ape's spirits were not dulled and she kept coming back for more fun.

Near Gibby, the short-tailed macaque on display was trying to grab our attention by doing backward flips. This was extremely cute and the monkey looked a lot like Kiko from Langkawi (see Langkawi, Malaysia travel journal if you want the back history on that mischievous creature), so we nicknamed him Kiko 2. The problem with macaques is that they can get quite aggressive, and at first Kiko 2 did not want to have anything to with Kyle, except check all of his pockets and see what treats were on offer. After playing for such a time in the sweltering heat we bought some watermelon to feed the gibbons and macaque. They absolutely loved it and were eating the fruit like it was going out of fashion. Both Gibby and the gibbon in the cage wanted us to feed them watermelon; they titled their little heads backwards and opened their small mouths so we could put pieces of watermelon inside. Kiko 2, being more used to scavenging for his treats, took the watermelon from us and fed himself.

Full of watermelon, Kiko 2 was much more receptive to Kyle's aim of winning him over and spending time next to him without getting bitten. In fact, he was so receptive that he reached out gently towards Kyle at one point, and climbed onto Kyle shoulders, sitting calmly behind Kyle's head for a few seconds. It was only a few seconds, and just after that Kiko 2 started violently shaking behind Kyle's head. It was Dan who was able to let Kyle know what was really going on, that Kiko 2 had decided to do to the back of Kyle's head what young dogs like to do to people's legs. You can visualise this, there are no photos for your enjoyment!

We took many photos and videos of the gibbons, macaque and elephants that were walking around the trekking park so be sure to check these out in our photo album. We didn't actually make it to the waterfall we intended to visit as we spent too much time playing with Gibby and Kiko 2. We left the park, and had to hurry around the south and west parts of the island in order to get to the nice beaches in the north before the sun set, and also to get across to the northeast tip of the island to visit Big Buddha. Big Buddha is not some large, fat Thai man but rather an extremely large statue of Buddha which is visible for many kilometres around it. Jao Mae Kuan Im, a many-armed Buddha statue very near to Big Buddha, was our last sight to see on our tour of the island. Were both Buddha statues real, and if they were to get into an argument, it would be a heck of a fight as Jao Mae Kuan Im was pretty big, too.

After we had seen all of the sights on the island we wanted to see, except for Chaweng Beach as we had decided to visit Chaweng in the morning when there would be daylight, we ventured into the middle of the island to visit a new shopping mall which has been recently built on the island. There is a huge Tesco there, and people from the UK reading this journal will know how comforting it was to see the large blue letters in the distance as we approached. The set-up of the Tesco was more like a Wal-mart Supercentre store in the US, as they sold pretty much everything imaginable, including groceries, household goods, clothing, etc. We took advantage of the "low prices" and bought some t-shirts for 79 Baht (£1 or $1.80) each, so we could ditch some of our less pleasant smelling or ratty looking tops.

There is a new Major Cineplex movie theatre at the shopping mall and we decided to see what was playing in the small but immaculate new attraction to Koh Samui. Of the three screens there, one film was a Chinese film and the other two screens showed the same Thai film. We had already had enough that day of the grating Thai language, so we opted to listen to (and to watch) Gong Li and Chow Yun Fat speaking Chinese for a couple of hours in the movie called "Curse of the Golden Flower". The good news is that all of the options we were faced with included English subtitles and we were able to enjoy the film we chose without being completely lost. Dan actually thinks it may be the best Chinese film that he has ever seen and Kyle is leaning on agreeing, but he still rates "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" quite highly. See the film yourselves and let us know what you think.

We used the travel agency / internet cafe next to our resort for backing up photos and working on our travel journal, and it was there that we learned about a company which does same-day trips from the island Koh Tao to Bangkok, thus avoiding the uncomfortable overnight bus journey which most travellers endure. We decided we would go for this option when we were leaving the next island in our itinerary, Koh Tao, so we could enjoy two full days there before heading to the Thailand's bustling capital, Bangkok. As you will read in our next journal entry, it was an excellent two days.