The joy of doing nothing - Koh Chang and Bangkok

Our flight from Luang Prabang to Bangkok was delayed by almost a full day. But in fairness to the Bangkok Airways staff, they couldn’t’ have been more accommodating, and me and Mark quite enjoyed the free food and hotel room for the night. Mark even got to watch a Man Utd match on the telly in our room!

With all the spare time we had in the fancy Bangkok Airways lounge, we went online to find out the weather in southern Thailand really was utterly shit. Koh Samui was a metre under water, and during the week the airport actually had to close. So we decided to head to Koh Chang, which is a gorgeous little island on the east coast of Thailand, near the Cambodian border. For some reason, this island is not hyped up as much as it should be, but all the better for us. It’s a truly gorgeous island, fairly big, and the whole island is a national park. There is one huge resort town which the Thais want to turn into the next Magaluf! We opted for the backpacker beach called Lonely Beach. Here we found lovely but overpriced huts right on the beach. As it was our last week we decided to go with the luxury of air-con, hot water showers and a cleaner, costing us the same per night as about four nights in Laos!!

Lonely Beach is about 1km long, lovely soft white sand, calm shallow blue water, lots of backpackers, posers, a bitch (dog) and her three puppies and one guy in speedos! We arrived Monday morning, and by Tuesday Ruth and Denis arrived (Ruth from my masters class who I worked with in Sydney) and we all settled in for a serious week concentrating on doing absolutely nothing!! Normally I would probably scoff at a week of doing completely nothing and get bored after about two hours, but this is exactly what we needed after the three months of constant travel and we relished it! Our days consisted of getting up, having breakfast in the lovely beachside restaurant in our resort Nature Beach, sunbathing, thinking about lunch, eating lunch, sunbathing, thinking about dinner, maybe having a swim, a walk or a massage, then eating dinner, then drinking while watching a fireshow, and then doing exactly the same thing the next day!! Bliss!

Lonely Beach village was about a ten minute walk away, so occasionally we exerted ourselves enough to walk up there for a look around. The food in Nature Beach was soo good we’d spend our days decided what to have the next day, and only three times could tempt ourselves away to eat somewhere else….which turned out to be Dave’s Dive Advenures, who ended up robbing me, the dirty bastard!

To stop us for feeling completely lazy, we did go snorkeling one day. Booked through Dave’s Dive Adventures, the day wasn’t as exciting as we’d been led to believe. We only stopped at two sites, which were really for the divers on the boat, one was crap, but the other was quite good, and the day was still nice and relaxing, and we got to see loads of cool fishies, and check out the fishing village of Bang Boa.

While there was lots of drink consumed (mostly Chang beer and buckets of Samsong) every night, Saturday night was definitely the highlight/lowlight of our drinking!! Our resort has beach parties about three times a week with the Saturday night one being the biggest. The staff here have won awards for being the best firedancers in Thailand and amazed us with their skill every night. Actually the staff in general amazed us, having no day off in the week we were there, serving us our breakfast at 9am and throwing daggers of fire around at 10pm! Saturday night was also ladies night so me and Ruth got well oiled up on free samsong and cokes before the buckets started. We took part in every possible drinking game, by this stage we knew the staff fairly well so were having a great laugh with them…unfortunately we didn’t manage to win anything, although I did come second in the balloon stamping game. Anyway, the night got quite rowdy, but great fun and there were definitely sore heads the next morning!!!

Monday morning we said our goodbyes and left Ruth and Denis on the island, and headed off for the madness of Bangkok. Having listened to everyone we decided there was no point even attempting to tacked any sightseeing in a day and a half, and we wanted to have a chilled last few days….which to Mark meant getting absolutely ratarsed and staying up all night drinking with a Scottish guy Paul we’d befriended on the way up. The state me and Kim, his girlfriend found the two of them in at 7.30am the next morning was not a pretty one to put it mildly!!

The four of us stayed in nice hotel just off the infamous Koh San Road. From the way everyone speaks about Bangkok and the Koh San, I had expected a lot worse than I saw. We expected Bangkok to be complete squalor and the Koh San to be grotty, loud and tacky…OK it is loud and maybe a bit tacky, but Bangkok as a city seems very westernized and clean, and definitely a step up from most of the southeast Asian cities we’ve been in. Maybe its cos its our last city, and for most people its their first.

Tuesday, me and Kim shopped on the Koh San for the day, while the lads slept off their hangovers, and in the evening me and Mark went and checked out the electronics market in Panthip Plaza. Mark was like a child in a sweet shop, its six stories of pure electronics!! We got most of the bits we needed and I’m sure have managed to exceed our weight limit for the plane home!

Tuesday night we met up with Julie, the Australian teacher teaching in Thailand that we hung out with in Laos. She showed us a great place to eat frequented by ex-pats living in Bangkok.

Today (Wednesday) we fly out at 3.20pm. We’ve been having a nice chilled morning, sorting out stuff online and doing our last minute shopping (for which we have absolutely no room in our bags for!).

And so it is the end of our three/six month adventure! Tomorrow I will be back home in Kilkenny in the cold. The whole experience for us has been really amazing…if anyone dares ask which place was the best I will go mad…how can any one place be the best when you’ve been to so many and when everywhere is great and amazing for a different reason each time. While we might have rushed a bit, we have seen more than we ever expected, met some really great people along the way, challenged ourselves physically and mentally, not killed each other, understood new cultures, and got a little bit of a tan along the way. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this and haven’t been too bored keeping up our adventures.