Thailand...moving on from Chaing Mai to Koh Lanta!

I don't want to forget to add the pictures from Finny's meet up in the Chiang Mai airport to set up delivery of her hair clips...this is Finny and Lukey with the son of the woman who makes the clips.

And this is Finny with the woman herself! It was a memorable moment, as Finny brokered her first entrepreneurial venture...in a place I would never have expected!

I want to make a quick note here of the comfort of flying in Thailand. All our domestic flights in Thailand were on Bangkok Airways. The flights were affordable (a nice plus), but more importantly, they harkened back to a different era of flying. The comforts offered throughout the process reminded me of what I remembered flying was like as a kid. A passenger's comfort was actually considered and catered to...there is even a lounge available to ALL travellers. The lounge had tons of unlimited snacks, drinks, newspapers and magazines, free wifi. It was great.

We woke up early to catch our boat to Koh Lanta. I don't know quite what I was expecting...maybe something more like a ferry? This experience was sort of opposite to flying Bangkok Airways. The boats sort of reminded me of the pictures you'd see on the news of a ferry sinking and everyone on board perishing. These are hard working boats, very low on extras. Also, it was really choppy. Not everyone likes choppy boats. There was a heavy odour of sick in the tiny enclosed cabin down below. Yuck.

Luckily, it was a boat to paradise, so our discomfort was quickly forgotten.

I had been booking all our accommodation on the fly as we travelled. Trip Advisor was my best friend. I used an Asian hotel booking site and had been having pretty good luck. Our good hotel booking fortune held up in Koh Lanta as the Lanta Sands I had booked from afar turned out to be quite a bit nicer than we were expecting. It wasn't the cheapest option on the island, but it was a considerable step up from all the hotels and resorts around us. It's on a gorgeous sandy beach and the grounds of the hotel were lushly landscaped and gorgeous. There were three pools and a lovely beachside restaurant for our breakfast buffet.

As luck would have it, while looking on Instagram while in Bangkok, I noticed that a friend of Eric's and mine from high school, Cristina Herman, was posting pictures from Chiang Mai! I got in touch and we discovered she was about a week ahead of our exact schedule! We arranged to meet up on Koh Lanta. By that time, they were about to head back to Bangkok to fly home, but we managed to have dinner together two nights before they left. Hooray for social media!

Here's a shot of the kids enjoying the benevolence of distracted adults at our favourite (and much frequented!) restaurant on the beach, the Thai Cat.

We went to the Thai Cat almost every night of the ten nights we were on Koh Lanta. We just couldn't get away. We didn't have banana splits every night, though.

It was great fun to see friends so far from home.

There were little hermit crabs all along the beach to play with...

And the Herman family had rented scooters...which some of our group was intrigued by as well (not this girl, particularly). Everyone had a try in the Thai Cat parking lot. Which was sand. So a little challenging. Note Lukey's bare feet...eeek!

And in a rare quiet moment, we even got a picture of us adults all together.

A couple of great evenings with friends was a lovely start to our Koh Lanta stay. By the end of our trip, we had our ordering at the Thai Cat down pat. It was a gorgeous breaded chicken with a lemon sauce on the side, accompanied by Massaman curry. By the time we left, we had upped the number of each of these that we ordered as the kids caught on to how tasty this combo was...

Dinners were great, but breakfasts were pretty great, too. Our first couple of nights at the Lanta Sands didn't have breakfast included. No problem. Just a couple of steps down the beach, we found the Funky Fish.

Breakfast is DIRT cheap in Thailand. Even when you are right on the beach in the middle of a total tourist district.

I am including this picture because it makes me laugh...every morning, I brought out my camera. Our cabins at the Lanta Sands were super air conditioned and overnight, the camera got cold. Then in the mornings, I brought it outside and it was HOT. The lens fogged over for about an hour as the temperatures sorted themselves out in the camera. It makes for quite an effect...

This breakfast of an omelette, toast and coffee would be under $3...probably closer to $2.

And as an added bonus, the kids could get up from the table and run straight into the sea for a swim...! Gives new meaning to "wash your hands"...

And we could supervise from our breakfast table. Oh, yeah!

Another pleasure we discovered on Koh Lanta was massage. For $10, you get an hour of Thai massage on the beach. Eric was almost giddy! As my dad would say, you couldn't afford NOT to take advantage of that!

It didn't take long before we all looked permanently like this:

Our days on Koh Lanta took on a routine. Breakfast, beach, afternoon popsicles (about 25 cents...always these delicious watermelon ones...but each person got to splurge once on a Magnum, which was about a dollar. Except Dad. He always got a Magnum!), swimming, shower, walk to the Thai Cat for dinner. Home to sleep. Repeat!

This was the view from our afternoon loungers:

For a couple of dollars, you could have a full platter of the most divine pineapple (they are totally different in Thailand...smaller, sweeter and far less acidic) and watermelon.

That's the kind of routine I can get behind!!

Our afternoons were spent mostly at this pool.

We developed a series of complicated games.

Quiet, we were NOT. We spent HOURS every day floating around in there.

And when the sun started to head down towards the water and our tummies started to rumble, time to head off to see our friends at the Thai Cat. The waiters all knew us by the end. Gomai was our favourite. We learned that he actually slept on the beach every night. Most of the waiters were seasonal workers who came to Koh Lanta from around Chiang Mai.

There weren't a lot of waves to speak of, which suited Lukey just fine. After a few rough encounters with body surfing and especially skim boarding in Florida, our boy is a little shy of the big water...this suited him just fine.

Here's a couple of shots of the girls having fun:

The second half of our stay at the Lanta Sands included breakfast. This is what that looked like:

It was ridiculous.

As an aside...we only had four breakfast vouchers and six people, so every morning two people had to have breakfast elsewhere. The girls were happy to head to the Funky Fish for eggs and toast. So there were a few mornings where we pushed a couple hundred bhat into their hands and sent them on their way. We laughed, because the kids wouldn't head even a couple of blocks from our house on their own for breakfast, but none of us batted an eye at sending them away up the beach to eat alone in a foreign country at a cafe run by two grumpy transvestites. It was hilarious. Also, a true testament to how safe and comfortable we felt in Thailand. Pretty remarkable.

On one of our last days on the island, we sprung for massages for the kids. For $30, all three got over an hour of Thai massage. The ladies giving the massages were tickled to have kids as clients.

It was funny to hear them giggle as they went through the various Thai postures. As another aside, I LOVED Thai massage. It was a really different experience than any other massage I have had. It was terrific.

The sign in the foreground of this picture is for laundry. We did take advantage of that close to the end of our stay. Super cheap, but they tied a piece of green wool onto everything in our loads. I am STILL finding those green wool threads on our clothes...!

While the kids were in their happy place getting massages, I popped next door (haha...there ARE no doors!) for an iced coffee. It was awesome. Note the sign in the cafe saying there was no wifi...talk to each other or call your mother. Ha!

Now that's happiness!

And when the kids were done, they walked about three steps over to me, all refreshed and relaxed with the cold waters they got at the end of their massages.

In short (not really that short, looking at this eternal blog post!), we were happy.

More Thailand...Chang Mai to Krabi (Railay Beach)

After three magical nights at the Rainforest Boutique hotel and Chang Mai, it was time to move on...

In fact, we were lucky to get out of Chang Mai in the end. Our flight from Chang Mai was long-delays and very nearly cancelled because of the poor air quality in the region. The flights to Bangkok before ours were cancelled and passengers were sent away. For a while, we weren't optimistic about our chances.

Luckily, we had a bit of business to conduct in the airport. Finny had to make payment for the big order of hair clips she ordered (1000 clips to resell at home) and provide the address for our hotel in Bangkok for them to be shipped to...our budding entrepreneur.

Then we were able to kill some more time in the lounge of Bangkok Airways. Even the economy passengers of this incredibly cheap domestic flight could enter the lounge for free food, drink, wifi and newspapers. It was pretty impressive. 

We finally departed Chang Mai, changed flights in Bangkok and then landed in Krabi in the south of Thailand. It was a late arrival after all those delays, so we were very late checking into our guest house in Krabi town. Not our best accommodation score of the trip...luckily it was a short night and we booked another place for our second night in Krabi. 

We set out in the morning to explore a little bit. Of course, when in Krabi you have to hit Railay Beach and Phra Nang. Rated one of the most spectacular beaches in the world, we couldn't say no to that...

We caught a long tail boat (actually, Eric ended up yelling at one already underway and he pulled over and we waded in...) with a German couple. We didn't know how far it was by boat, so negotiating was challenging. 

It turns out, it's actually pretty far. Twenty minutes at least.

A bit choppy in the open water bits, the long tail captains do a brisk trade transporting tourists back and forth.

It was exciting to finally be on the coast and catching our first glimpses of the Thailand we had in our heads from our research at home.

It was so beautiful flying along the water with those iconic cliffs all along the shore.

The beauty of Phra Nang didn't disappoint, although I have to say, Railay wasn't as nice as I thought it would be. Part of the issue with the place is the lack of care taken with dealing with the impact tourism has on the area.

In an isolated spot with no road access, there has been no consideration of where garbage and other waste material disappears to...in fact, disappear it does NOT. There is an absolutely alarming amount of trash everywhere in this naturally spectacular location. Something which makes it a little harder for me to enjoy it.

The levels of garbage were better on the Phra Nang side, which went a long way towards my preference for that area.

The walk from the east beach along the mountain base was gorgeous. There were monkeys and caves, long vines hanging down and lovely jungly-type nosies as we walked.

It was amazing.

And it doesn't hurt that the end of the path looks like this:

The water was so hot that it was totally unrefreshing.

It was a boiling hot day, so with no swim to cool us off, we resorted to cold beer, smoothies and thai banana chocolate pancakes (okay, those weren't too cool us, but wow...were they ever delicious).

We didn't have long to enjoy the beauty of the place...we had to get back to our boat and back to Krabi less than two and a half hours after arriving.

But we managed to soak in a lot of happiness in a short period of time. It was just so nice to know we'd hit the beach portion of our trip. We had a lot more sand and surf in our futures.

Other than my dad cutting his hand really badly on some sharp rocks or coral, it couldn't have been any nicer bobbing around in the (very salty) water.

The whole place looked like a postcard...

As for this little series of gems...let me just say it isn't easy getting all five of us looking in the right direction with eyes open and smiling.

We had a brisk walk back because none of us wanted to leave and we left it until the last minute to make it to the boat (having said that, we beat the German couple back, so that's a victory!). No time to enjoy the monkeys...

Then, a sunset ride back to Krabi town.

Once we got back and showered off, we did a bit of searching online for a good spot to eat.

One of the places Dad had spotted from home was a Krabi restaurant called Mr. Krab-i.

We had a nice walk to get to the restaurant and a great time meeting the owner of the restaurant...an Italian guy who married a Thai woman and settled in Krabi.

We meet a ton of people from other places who settled in Thailand for all kinds of different reasons. I found the stories interesting and the characters fascinating. There's a big difference between Thailand and Italy...

We headed to bed that night satisfied and excited. We had an early morning coming...catching the boat from Krabi to Koh Lanta. Our beach holiday was waiting...