Tag: Beach in Southern Thailand

A beachy life

The past few weeks on Lanta have been pretty similar to the first, although we had a crazy storm which saw the beach have waves for the first time ever according to the locals.  We have spent a lot of time with Ben and Fafa, our French friends, and Ben’s wife Bo and Fafa’s girlfriend Ying.

We have also spent lots of time on the beach, riding around and visiting many different beaches.  We have now been on all the roads in the entire island so have a pretty good lay of the land.  Our favourite beaches remain the ones from 2 beaches north of where we live, our main beach across the road, and the many pristine deserted beaches of the south.

We have seen a huge number of elephants lately too.  On the beach, on the side of the road, walking down the street, swimming, it has been great.  They seem to be everywhere on this island and it has become really normal to see them around the place.  We also have an Eagle that visits our house almost daily and have had tree frogs and huge praying mantis’s visit us as well.

Because the rainy season is coming we have also had a lot of insanely beautiful sunsets which has been really awesome.  By the end of this week, we will be able to officially say we have spent 2 months on a Thai beach, which was actually something we said we wanted to do before we came on this trip, so mission accomplished!  With all the people we have met and things we’ve done here, we really feel like we were meant to come here and it was a good thing that we didn’t make it into Cambodia just yet.  Plenty of time for that!  Our photos are here.

Life on Lanta

Firstly, we just want to say thanks to all the people who have contacted us out of concern or impatience because we haven’t updated the site for so long.  It’s nice to know that some people actually read this!  :-) Basically we have just been being lazy, or having fun, or spending time at the beach, rather than on the internet.

The past month we have been living in a little house on Koh Lanta, in south western Thailand.  It has been heavenly!  We have a huge room, all the mod cons such as a fridge, kettle, (Yay!!  Cups of tea and coffee in our own room, without having to go out!  The only other place we can do that is Luang Namtha.) cable TV, (with 3 movie channels!  OMG, it’s been 10 months since we’ve watched TV!), air con and a huge balcony overlooking heaps of trees including palm trees.  There are lots of birds and squirrels always in the trees so it’s quite entertaining to sit on the balcony for hours.  We are also a few minutes walk to the beach, (about 30 seconds on our motorbike) and our French friends Ben and Fafa live just across the road and we have spent a lot of time with them.

A typical day pretty much consists of:  get up and go for a run on the beach and then a swim, come home, Dre take scooter to fruit and food stall – Thai’s laugh at Dre for eating like a local, have the nicest mango and pineapple in the world for breakfast (seriously!) plus other fruits, sit on the balcony/read for a while, go to the gym at the resort across the road, go for a swim at the resort, laze by the pool at the resort, have lunch, visit Ben and Fafa for some out of this world homemade icecream/sorbet/talking/chilling, watch sunset and swim again, have a lazy evening at one of our favourite restaurants, watch a movie.  So, very domesticated!

We have visited the annual Lanta festival, been to many deserted beaches, and went to the most fun party of our lives (even better than Shapeshifter!!) hosted by DJ Fafa, we danced for about 8 hours and then showed our age the next day by pretty much not being able to do anything other than eat, sleep and swim.

We are starting to appreciate why many regions in south-east Asia so many people celebrate the coming of the rainy season, April is meant to be the hottest month and the past week has been SO hot.  High 30’s every day and then the  past few days this has been broken by rain for an hour or so in the late afternoon which is such a welcome relief.  It has made for some amazing sunsets and is awesome because it cools everything down for the evening and night.  Tomorrow we are off to Malaysia again because our 1 month visa is up already!  Our photos are here.

Koh Lanta

View our location map on Koh Lanta

We have spent the past week on the beach in Koh Lanta.   Now that we have arrived at our destination we had to burn our Sukwan strings given to us by Paet, Thong and their friends.  After the first couple of days we found we much prefer the quiet, non-touristy south of the island, so moved here into another beach bungalow on this part of the island.  We have been really lucky to spend time on deserted beaches, go for moonlit swims, and spend lots of time in our hammock.

We both learned to make Som Tum, (green papaya salad) at a local stall that we had been at for a couple of days in a row.  Now that we can speak basic Lao, it easily converts into Thai, and it has gotten us a long way on this island!  Burriam, the lady who runs the stall was so excited that we could speak some Thai that she invited us to learn to make our own papaya salads – she turned out to be an awesome teacher and we have both now made a few salads with her during our daily visits.  The proper ingredients are not particularly easy to find outside Asia though, so won’t be that easy to replicate perfectly, still a really fun experience though!

Motorbiking around the island was another highlight, the eastern coast is very pretty and undeveloped and the national park is stunning too.  The pristine beaches are really beautiful and peaceful so this has been an awesome place to spend the week. Our photos are here.