Welcome to the Thailand – The Land of a Thousand Smiles

So we finally made it to Thailand and the Land of the Smiles and are about half way through our trip now, so you may be wanting to know how the heck are you getting on, so I’m going to give you a long overdue update now.

Firstly, the holiday stuff. So we started off with 5 days in Bangkok, which was big, polluted and extremely noisy, however, it was great to be in Thailand at last and we had a lot of fun in the big metropolis. After a few days though enough was enough so we headed for the islands.

Well, actually it wasn’t really the islands as we went to Krabi, which is on the mainland. Krabi Town itself is a nice enough little place for a night’s stop over, but then we headed over to the Railay Peninsula, which is the location most synonymous with Thailand with the Limestone cliffs jutting out of the sea and the white sandy beaches.

We decided to stay on Tonsai beach, which is the quieter hippy / stoners side of town, which can only be accessed by boat or by a 30 minute walk through the jungle. Now, not a lot of people will say this but my overriding feeling was of disappointment with our stay here. Because it was the low season and the weather was pretty poor to be honest, the whole place felt depressing. Everywhere was empty, there was a lot of rubbish and generally it didn’t really feel like the tropical paradise we’d hoped for.

Of course when the sun was shining it was still pretty beautiful, however, it just felt like something was missing, and for me it definitely didn’t live up to the tag of one of the best beaches in the world.

After a few days we decided to move onto Kohlanta and stayed in a wonderful Resort (Relax Bay) kind of place on the south side of Phra Ae beach. We had an amazing room for one night before being kicked out into the cheap seats as a French family moved in, but nonetheless, it was great to chill out for a few days in relative luxury. Disappointingly the beach was a bit dirty with litter again, and low season really does give a bit of a downer vibe on everything.

Highlights will have been going to the animal welfare centre where we nearly adopted a dog, and an amazing sunset:

As the weather had been so temperamental, we thought there was no point staying south any longer and I had been itching to get to Chiang Mai and check out the Digital Nomad scene, so we got an earlier than expected flight up North to the Land of the Lanna people….