Jenn and I spent a month in Asia. A week in Cambodia, two in Thailand and a week in Singapore. This post is about the time we spent in Thailand.
We landed in Bangkok and stayed at the Chatrium hotel riverside. It was a pretty nice place. We were on the 19th floor and could see out over the river and the city. I got a haircut at the closest barber shop to the hotel and they wanted a selfie with me. The best thing we did in Bangkok was the Michelin guide street food tour. We had some amazing dishes and went into the kitchen (or the alley, in the first case) to see them being prepared. I highly recommend doing something like this if you get the chance.
We went to Wat Pho to see one of the largest reclining Buddha sculptures in Thailand. There were also a number of temples and a lot of other Buddhas.
Our next destination was Haad Tien Beach resort in Koh Tao, where we had a fantastic suite overlooking the ocean with a private pool. The rest of the resort was so-so. I had wanted snorkeling right off the beach at our snorkel destinations and the snorkeling off the beach at Haad Tien was poor. We had low visibility and extreme reef damage. You could tell there used to be a lot of coral, but not now. We did see a giant sea turtle though. The staff at the resort told us there wasn’t any snorkeling at the nearby Shark Island so we didn’t visit it right away. We joined a large boat snorkel tour that motivated us to find a private operator. With the private boat we saw better sites (including Shark Island, which was pretty good). Overall, I was a little disappointed with the snorkeling in Thailand- I think my expectations were much too high. The internet would have you believe it’s a great place to see Whale Sharks. However, asking locally turned up no operators that offered a trip with any expectation of finding one.
We moved on to Khao Lak where we stayed at the JW Marriott. This was our nicest hotel of the trip. There was a pool right outside our room (the longest in Southeast Asia!) that we could use to swim all over the resort, and they had a coconut boat that offered icy coconuts to drink. They even had fire dancers perform one evening on the beach. We visited Phang Nga Bay by long tail boat and kayaked through small sea caves and saw James Bond Island (The Man with the Golden Gun). On the way back we stopped at a floating village and we also hand fed monkeys.
We caught a snorkel trip to the Similan Islands. Sadly, this was a long boat ride for a couple of short snorkel stops. The islands were beautiful and we had decent snorkel experience, but it was a long day of travel for what was really only a short time in the water.
Once back in Phuket, we visited the Elephant sanctuary. We enjoyed this but had hoped for more interaction with the elephants, or even to have been in closer proximity. I think we drew the short straw on the tour that morning, as our group had many very young children which slowed our group a great deal. Other groups on the tour were in the park’s grounds while we stayed mostly on the skywalk, avoiding the elephants.
On our last day, on the way to the airport we did a bit of a city tour in Phuket. We visited a viewpoint (that we’d been to the night before) and the Big Buddha.
Thailand was great, but I felt two weeks was a little long even spending so many days snorkeling. Maybe if we’d had better luck in the water I would have wanted to stay longer. In hindsight, we could have stayed a couple more days in Siem Reap and a few less in Thailand. This was also my first time staying at a mega resort like the one in Khao Lak. They had everything, and it seemed like you could just arrive one day and plan a week of activities out of their planning book. That could have been low stress and very convenient. They also had the most comfortable bed of the whole trip. I really enjoyed our stay here.