Thursday, January 2, 2014

Koh Samui

For a long weekend and New Year celebration, Riley and I took a trip to Koh Samui. Neither of us had been here before, but being the beach fanatics we are… we needed to check it out. It was not exactly what either of us had expected, but all in all it was a good trip and it was nice to get away for a few days.

To get to the island it literally took us a truck, bus, songtaew, ferry, songtaew, and a taxi. Though we used many modes of transportation, it actually wasn’t too difficult to get to Koh Samui itself. Now getting to our hostel was quite the opposite. Nobody had heard of our hostel, although nobody would admit that. More than once we would ask the driver if they knew our place, “yes, yes… 300 baht”. Well 30 minutes later we would just get kicked out of the songtaew or cab. After Riley and I had gotten mad, frustrated and pulled my rolling suitcase down a dirt road, some girls about our age pulled up in a car. They literally told us to get in, and we did haha after two hours or searching you get pretty desperate. They had a toddler singing along in the front seat, so we figured we couldn’t go wrong. Literally two minutes later they pulled up to our hostel, I have never been so happy to meet strangers in my life!

Doing my best bargaining by trying the clothes on haha.
Traveling via the bumper of a songtaew






















We were exhausted upon arrival and so ready for bed… and it was like 5:30. Which ended up being a theme for this trip… if you are 24, you are like a grandma. We didn’t actually go to bed at 5:30 ever thankfully, but we weren’t exactly night owls. Although where we were staying seemed to be Koh Samui party-central, we weren’t really into it. We decided to save our party pants for New Years Eve and spend the other nights, shopping/bargaining, eating, doing face and hair masks, and watching Britney Spears documentaries on youtube.



New Years on the other end of the spectrum was insane. We really didn’t have any idea of what to expect, but if I had expectations this exceeded all of them. The beach was packed with thousands of people, lanterns and fireworks going off everywhere. When I say everywhere, I mean it. Like I don’t know how everyone woke up with all his or her limbs. You could literally buy fireworks on the beach and just let them off where ever and whenever you wanted. The scariest part, somehow it just works out haha. But music was playing, everyone was dancing and we had an epic countdown to the New Year! So far I have been to Koh Phangnan, Koh Tao, and Koh Samui… next onto Koh Phi Phi!