Island Living

Koh Lanta is such a perfect Island for us. It was recommended by a couple of people for a good island to go to if we want a bit of life but not be surrounded by too many drunken backpackers. And spot on they were too. We were probably about the average age, we were staying on Long Beach and it had a nice back packer vibe, the kind where you start having the same conversations with everyone about where you’ve been, where you are going etc. It’s nice actually, you have only a few conversations about what you do, I feel like at home when you meet people one of the first questions we ask is ‘what do you do?’ It’s how we pop people in their boxes, creatives, sales, people jobs etc, but when you are travelling what we do at home/left behind is irrelevant, it’s about what we’ve experienced already or what we are excited about experiencing next. You even see the difference between the conversations you have with ‘travellers’ and tourists/holiday makers in the where are you going vs what do you do question.
I guess with the travellers asking about what we’ve seen and where we are heading helps us to categorise people too, those hitting the smaller/quieter islands I think are perceived as searching for more, searching harder and often it’s the older people going to those places, while the younger travellers are heading to the party islands and much more mainstream destinations....and at the same time while we are heading to the slightly harder to get to places, we still get small frowns when we say we haven’t got time to get up to the North to explore Chiang Mai ( a very popular trekking destination where everyone tells us is wonderful).
We mostly just hung out the first afternoon, getting a feel for the beach and island. We ate at a restaurant on the beach and it was delicious, surrounded by nice people and under a canopy of stars like we haven’t seen for ages!

On our return to the ‘rustic’ bungalow we were greeted by a cockroach and a fast moving slug in the bathroom. Needless to say I waited til the morning to use the bathroom again that night. The weather wasn’t great the next day so rather than the planned day of lying on the beach we hired a moped. Awesome! Ed loved it! We bombed around the island scouting out the other beaches and found Khlong Nin which was a couple of beaches down. After asking in a gazillion hotels we found one with availability for new years eve as we had decided we didn’t fancy waking up to Cockroaches in 2011.
Driving around, it poured with rain on us and i’m not convinced Ed could see completely clearly while driving but we had a fab day, heading over to the East side of the island to suss out the Old Town and had a spot of lunch. A very wet grey day but fun nonetheless. That night we decided to try somewhere more local for dinner so headed to ‘Mr Greens’ on the ‘main road’ rather than the beach front. It was our first venture back into proper street food since Rattie in Bangkok.
I finally got to try my Panang curry, a hot red curry that is dry unlike the creamy coconut milk laden red and green curries we can get at home. It was delicious but ridiculously hot! I managed about half and that was to be polite. Ed had a yummy green curry.
On our return to our room we were tonight greeted by the biggest spider i have ever seen. Big, meaty, hairy bugger it was! A friendly gecko had taken up home in the roof earlier that day-but we liked him (Prickles) as he ate flies, but the spider had even scared off Prickles. It was at this point we decided to pop down to the pre booked hotel first thing the next morning to see if they would have us a day early! Rustic I can cope with, the toilet, the cold water no problem but the bugs and spiders i’m afraid really get to me. A very sleepless night was had with the spider and we dashed to the hotel in the morning to see if we could come early, we could and I was super happy.
Back to the bungalow for brekkie and checkout and then on to new hotel two beaches down. Still a very simple bungalow but this time, solid concrete walls-much better. Plus I didn’t mention that the last place the water really smelt! So even when you washed you didn’t feel clean. The first bungalow had a brilliant chilled out feel, really wonderful staff and food but it became apparent that perhaps Ed and I are more flash-packers than back-packers, not sure we’ll last six months though, flash packing is way more expensive!

View from our old bungalow

View from our new bungalow (almost!)