Samui Samui at Rawr: Life in the Lion City

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Samui Samui

By jeni | November 26, 2008

An incredible blue lagoon

Well my peoples. I hear you want to hear more about Thailand. Sorry for the delay. Me thinks its time for us to move on to Koh Samui, known simply by the locals as Samui since koh means island in Thailand.

After being in Chiang Mai for four days, culminating with the elephants, we were getting a little tired. Luckily, it was time to head to the beach. Koh Samui is a short flight from Chiang Mai, I think it took about an hour.

Koh Samui is the third largest island in Thailand, and a major tourist hub because of the beautiful beaches and amazing weather. It isn’t as popular yet as Phuket, Thailand’s biggest island, but I gather it’s getting close. As I’ve mentioned before, we were there during the low season for tourism, so we didn’t have to experience the massive hordes of people. That was nice. In fact it got a little lonely from time to time, especially when we went to go eat dinner in virtually empty restaurants every night.

I have to admit, we did spend some time just lounging about the pool/beach. But we also rented motorbikes and drove around the island, stopped to admire the view on the beaches, eat ice cream mixed with rice (what?) and enjoy the trucks traveling around with loudspeakers blaring advertisements for muay thai fighting every night in wannabe Howard Cosell voices. We saw some dude on the street with a monkey. And another dude with a hawk. He asked where we were from and couldn’t believe John was not a German. Just another nationality John gets to add to his list (in addition to North African, Mexican, Arabic, Greek and Italian).

We went on a boat trip and kayaked around Mu Ko Ang Thong National Marine Park. John tipped over our kayak and then blamed it on me. We got massages and enjoyed our own private steam room/whirlpool. We got too much sun. We tried to hide our ugly elephant rashes and Amy tried to stop sneezing and we finally went to the pharmacy and got some medicine. We listened to a really annoying guy talk and talk and talk on our boat trip and gave him a mean nickname. We watched fisherman searching for crabs on the pitch black ocean floor during low tide. We laughed at John and Dave’s pathetic attempts at handstands and cartwheels. We judged because we didn’t have the guts to try one ourselves. We had some pretty rad breakfasts.

We marveled at the airport’s island feel. We almost cried when we had to come home. We frankly didn’t get to see enough ladyboys.

We had so much fun. Some pictures: