Koh Phangan for the day

Koh Phangan for the day

Lamai Beach, Thailand, Asia

We got up this morning and had an early breakfast at the resort before being picked up by the taxi company. We bought our ferry ticket for Koh Phangan from reception last night and it included a taxi pickup from our hotel. They picked us up at 8:30am and we were at the pier by 9:10am. This would have been perfect, except our ferry wasn’t leaving until 10:30am! I have no idea why they picked us up so early for that ferry, but we had to sit around at the pier for over an hour just waiting. There was an English couple travelling (Ryan and Laura) to the island today as well, so we had some people to chat to anyway.

The ferry took about 45 minutes to get to Koh Phangan and we were dropped off at Haad Rin pier at the south side of the island. We walked around the town for a bit trying to find a place that was open for a small bite to eat before heading off on our scooters. Nothing was open. Either that, or they just didn’t want to serve us food. We finally found a place and they were the rudest servers I’ve ever come across. You could tell they really just wanted us to leave, but we weren’t going anywhere! Luckily, the food was not bad, but we made a swift exit after we finished. There was no point in sticking around there.

We walked up the street and rented scooters from Joe’s Scooters. It was only 150 baht ($5) for the day, and it was by far the best way to get around the island. We headed north to Haad Chaloklum and stopped by a place for a drink on the beach. We didn’t see anyone on the beach or in the water, so we headed west for a few minutes until we found Malibu Bungalows. We drove into this resort and walked onto their beach and just plunked ourselves down. It was a much finer powdery sand than what’s on Koh Samui, and the water looked even clearer.

We hung out there for a couple of hours and just took in the scenery. We headed south after that and tried to find a waterfall, but unfortunately it’s all dried up. We are really not having good luck with waterfalls on this trip! We kept going south until we found a viewpoint between the two piers, and we had an early dinner there. It really was a beautiful view looking over the water to Koh Samui. After dinner we brought our scooters back to Joe’s and walked into town to get our ferry back to the big island.

The ferry ride was nice and we got to see the sun set from the boat. When we got back to Koh Samui we found our taxi driver that was supposed to give us a ride back to the hotel. He picked up three other groups as well, and he had no idea where any of our hotels were. He got “near” to the other three groups places and they all got out and walked, and then he didn’t have a clue where Lynne and I were staying. I tried showing him a map a few times and kept telling him it was at Lamai Beach, but he kept acting very strangely. At one point he stopped the jeepney, got out, put his jacket on, and told me to drive to my hotel. I refused. No way was I going to be driving a truck through this mental island traffic.

Then he jumped in the back of the jeepney and said he wanted to take a nap because he was so tired. His English was terrible, but he managed to say that he was exhausted because he’s been working since Monday. Lynne asked me what day it is, “It’s Wednesday.” I’m not impressed with his work habits. He stopped and asked four people where to go, including some foreigners who were leaving Tesco. I finally mentioned that we were next to Rumana Hotel (which he should have seen on the map when I showed him about 30 minutes before. He then started cursing at me in Thai on our way to our hotel because apparently I should have told him we were near Rumana earlier. I was really annoyed with the guy, but at least we got there eventually. The 35 minute drive from this morning took us over an hour tonight.

Finally we got back here though and went straight to the bar for a much deserved jug of beer. We ran into Addy, Dan and Francisca again, but we didn’t stick around for long. We’re both pretty tired from today so we watched a couple of episodes of Modern Family and now we’re going to get some sleep. Tomorrow will be a nice rest day here though, with nothing to do.

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