Adventures with Jack and Julia

Day 1:

It’s been a while since we had to take a flight, so we were excited to make use of our AMEX and get some free lounge access (check at the end of this post for further details)! Even though the lounge was about 50 square feet, we made sure to eat our fill and load up on coffee before takeoff. After a quick one hour flight, we found ourselves in Surat Thani which is located south of Bangkok and we spent the night next to the airport bus station before a long travel day to the island.

Our shuttle to the ferry took a couple of hours, and then we took a 3 hour ferry to the island of Koh Phangan! We passed the time eating oreos, drinking Singha sodas, and playing cards. We switched a couple of weeks ago from King’s Corner to Rummy – real thrilling stuff! We’re still on the hunt for a travel Cribbage board that we can bring with us, however.

Day 1:

Koh Phangan is famously home to a “taxi mafia”, who dictate the prices of rides all over the island and are very aggressive against anyone who tries to undercut them. Consequently, there aren’t any Grabs there either so we were happy when our chosen hotel was positioned near the middle of the island. As soon as we arrived at our hotel and paid the egregious taxi fee, we immediately put on our bathing suits. Our resort was located right on the ocean, with our bungalow steps from the sandy private complete with hammocks, loungers and cabanas. That expensive taxi ride was immediately put in the past and we spent the remainder of the afternoon lounging in a cabana, swimming and enjoying some guacamole by the water. To finish off the day, we walked up to the main stretch of road for dinner and found a delicious local spot called Mama’s before heading to bed.

Day 2:

We were pretty tired from the big travel day yesterday so we spent the morning booking flights and trip planning. Since we already found ourselves in paradise walking right out our doorstep, we decided to have another day enjoying our beautiful resort relaxing in a cabana for a few hours. The gyms on Koh Phangan are very expensive and cost more than they do back in Vancouver for a drop-in, so Julia did a quick hiit workout on the beach while Jack decided to take a rest day and “hiit” a quick beer in the lounger. We got some supplies from the grocery store and made our own guacamole on the beach, read and swam until dinner. A nice relaxing day settling in to island life!

Day 3:

Today, we spent more time at our beach before going for a walk to explore our area a bit more. On our walk, we picked up some delicious fruit shakes (Julia passion fruit and Jack mango). On our walk, we ran into a restaurant with some talking parrots who gave us a lovely “sawadee kha” which means hello in Thai. We had a good chuckle having a chat with the birds then went for a delicious dinner with one of the sweetest owners before calling it a night.

Day 4:

Having done everything we could do in our immediate zone, it was time to hop on a scooter and explore more of the island. We had a lot of plans to travel around the island to various different destinations on this trip but found Koh Phangan to be a lot more expensive than we were expecting. Instead, we made our way down to Haad Rin beach where the monthly Full Moon Party takes place. We had actually planned our trip to line up with this, but the Thailand’s Queen Mother passed away recently and while the country is in mourning a lot of events have been put on hold this month. Because of this, we were able to experience Haad Rin beach a lot differently than people normally do with hardly anyone there, crystal clear waters, and beautiful soft white sand. We took some pictures and had a quick dunk before heading off on foot to see the nearby Leena beach. When we got there, the tide was in and it wasn’t nearly as nice as Haad Rin so we headed back there, found a restaurant on the waterfront to have some food and enjoyed the loungers for the afternoon.

After scooting back to our hotel and getting cleaned up, we watched the sunset from the beach, had dinner at Mama’s again, and then had an early night before heading to Koh Lanta the next morning.

While we don’t feel entirely qualified to give our full opinions on the island, we still feel like we got a good idea of what you can expect. There are a lot of tourists, which makes it very busy and everything is priced to match. Even shared taxis or Songthaew are super expensive, and when compared to some other places we’ve been and will go, it’s hard to say it’s worth it if you’re looking for a relaxing beach vacation. If you’re looking to party, there are so many cool events both up in the jungle and on the beach that go all night and we heard nothing but great things about. There are also a lot of other places on the island that we didn’t get to, and other than our hotel we didn’t love the area we were in, so our view is certainly somewhat narrow with regard to what the island has to offer. We’d love to check out Koh Samui some time as it’s right next to it, but we were certainly glad to have been on Koh Phangan this time as we looked over to them in a massive rain cloud the whole week, however.

In the end, it’s hard to complain when you’re in paradise and the above are small nitpicks. For anyone not on such a tight budget as we are on this trip, you can absolutely have a great time on any of the islands and we are still glad to have visited here. As you’ll find out soon, there’s a lot more to the Thai islands than full moon parties. Thailand is home to 1,430 islands, and everywhere you go has a unique feel to it. Stay tuned as we head to arguably our favourite island, Koh Lanta!

If you also love the idea of unlimited lounge access at over 1,550 airport lounges across 140 countries, for you and a friend, please click here to get additional welcome points on an Amex Platinum card. It also helps us out too!

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