Pete & Rach's Big Trip: Koh Phangan: 19-30 Dec 2013

Happy Christmas!

Rach says:

We landed in Koh Samui to very grey weather and incredibly high taxi fares...800 Baht (£16) for a 20 minute drive!! Our Lamai "beach hotel" then turned out to be up a mountain, so we got out of the taxi in Lamai town and sat down for some Pad Thai and a beer to consider our options. It was at this point that we met our drinking comrades for the evening ahead: the Norwegian bar owner (also called Peter), his Thai wife (Mimi) and a slightly crazy American
Vietnam veteran (Tom) who also sorted us out with a cheap room. The next morning, we jumped on the ferry to Koh Phangan to begin our Christmas and New Year beach break.

Thong Nai Pan Yai beach

We were incredibly lucky to get the last available room at Baan Panburi, where we stayed the last time we visited Thailand in 2010, seeing as we didn't book until 3 weeks before. It was nearly a massive @!*# up, as the only other options coming up on the internet were in the region of £1,000 a week!

Since our last visit, Baan Panburi has moved from Thong Nai Pan Noi to TNP Yai to make way for luxury hotel developments and posh cafe bars, and the road across the island has been almost fully paved - with just the odd remaining wild and muddy mountain section. I was sad to see that the old beach shack vibe is being lost, but happy to find that Gan's food at the Bamboo restaurant was as good as ever, the multi-talented Jip has upscaled from shopkeeper, hairdresser and masseuse to cocktail bar and restaurant owner, and that our favourite tree-house bar, Rasta Baby, is still going strong!

At Gan's Bamboo Restaurant

Thong Nai Pan Yai remains the more chilled-out and budget-friendly option and has the best beach with shallow waters and a dramatic mountainous backdrop. It also has some great hippy-ish bars set amongst the jungle, with lots of cushions for lazing about. The owner of the Dolphin Bar looked like a pirate and kept giving us samples from his pork barbeque. The beach is just as beautiful at night, the lanterns hanging from the trees reflecting pretty colours in the wet sand. The only downer was the weather...it was cloudy, windy and a bit chilly - I had goosebumps on the beach.

Party time at Rasta Baby :-)

On 23rd December (my bro's 30th birthday - I like to think we were celebrating from afar) we got utterly trashed at our all-time favourite bar, Rasta Baby, where the owners get as hammered as the customers and every night feels like a party amongst friends. We met a couple from South Africa, Ilan & Tiffany, and Ilan stayed out with us 'til about 4 or 5 in the morning, despite having to catch a ferry at 8am the next day - bleurgh! I remember laughing so hard at Pete drunkenly crawling up the road on the way home and staggering from side to side like he was bouncing off walls. Luckily for him I was too drunk to get the video on my camera to work :-)

Pete says:

I vaguely remember us staggering along the dark and windy road, over the hill towards our village. At some point we heard a lot of barking and saw a distant pack of dark shapes running directly at us. We panicked and ran off into the trees, where I realised we were standing in our flip flops, in the dark, among the snakes and spiders, so we decided to take our chances back on the road. A girl came walking along who seemed to find us quite hilarious and told us that the dogs were nothing to worry about, but we decided the best way to avoid being savaged was to head back to Rasta Baby and try to get a taxi. The bar owner ended up giving us a lift back in his truck - even though he was heavily drunk - and we finally made it back to our room. The next day was marked by a brutal hangover that made us decide not to drink for a few days. Our Christmas Eve plans became a lot more sober and we hadn't really recovered even on Christmas Day.

Christmas morning swim

On Christmas morning we went for a swim in the sea and a walk up the beach. We had Christmas Dinner in the Flip Flop Pharmacy bar, where the British/Australian owners cooked a very good turkey dinner and we had a great day, drinking and eating by the sea. In the evening, we called home to wish our families a Merry Christmas. Because we had not seen all the usual adverts on TV in the months leading up to it, and with no-one around us celebrating, Christmas Day didn't really feel like a significant event. More like some sort of private celebration that no-one else was in on.

It's Christmaaaaass!!!!

On Boxing Day we made a snap decision to move to Haad Salad, in the hope that the other side of the island would be sheltered from the wind. It wasn't a great deal better but did have a few hours of sun a day! Haad Salad is probably a more picturesque and more typically paradise beach than Yai. There were plenty of nice places to eat and drink, but they were busier and there was something I liked more about Yai in general.

We were very nearly homeless on New Year's Eve when we realised we had nothing booked for a few dates and not one place on the beach had a spare room of any kind. We asked at each hotel every day and ended up with just New Year's Eve missing. One lady offered to let us put our bags in her kitchen and stay in her bar for the night and eventually a nice woman called Gig offered us a hut at her new place at the very far end of the beach. This was all confirmed very last minute so to avoid uncertainty we had already arranged a ferry to Samui for the 30th and off we went to the Samui Beach Resort.

Views of Haad Salad

Other memories of Koh Phangan:

Writing our journal notes and planning our India trip in the Reggae Bar.
The delicious chicken & pineapple stirfry at Salad Hut.
The Dogs and Logs World Championships!
Being asked to remove our shoes because there was a picture of the king on the wall.
Hilly and windy roads that made us think of the old Amstrad 'Rollercoaster' game.
All the bandaged up tourists on crutches after having motorbike accidents. They are so common, that the resulting scars are nicknamed the "Koh Phangan tattoo".