My Thailand Holiday, May 2008

Koh Samui - Love it!

noreply@blogger.com (Aden Hepburn) — Sat, 17 May 2008 11:14:00 +0000

The view from another one of our pools! With a few crazy frogs!

And Another view from another beach front pool... :) Split Level...

A beautiful waterfall after a 20min treck up through the jungle...

A dragon rail on a staircase infront of a very cool Temple...

Our extremely dangerous 4WD - no seat belts, no seats, just a bench!

Chocolate mouse tourte, with sweet lemon tart & choc gelato!

The view from our seat in the beach club restaurant.

The BIG Budda, at Koh Samui. It was about 40m tall!

Our beach bar, serving my iced Espressos with Sugar syrup!

Crazy crocodile show - with guys putting their heads in crocs!

Another view from our table... A perfectly sunny day (for a change!)

I rode an elephant - not as a passenger - the driver got me to drive!

The pool at night, perfectly still - with some nice elephant fountains!

The food here is seriously fantastic! Probably the best we had - so far.

The beach at night. Very calm, not even a single wave.

Our super scary prop plane. I didn't realise these were still in service.

Phi Phi Island Adventure

noreply@blogger.com (Aden Hepburn) — Mon, 12 May 2008 04:15:00 +0000

Well, we are now on Koh Samui - after visiting phi phi island for 2 nights. Phi Phi was very interesting indeed, instead of writing a lot this time, ill post a whole bunch of photos with quick captions! Here we go...

We stated out at the marina - 30 big boats in disgusting waters!

Pulling out, the sky was blue, but the water murkey...

The further out we got, the nicer it started looking!

1.5 hours later we were pretty much there! And the mountains, water and fish looked amazing. The water very transparent, the mountains almost vertical.

With in the rock formations, there were these amazing little bays... (but the boat was far to big to get in close.)

Above an old viking cave... Below is our view out from the resort. (Holiday Inn - Phi Phi)

The Rain Has Stopped!

noreply@blogger.com (Aden Hepburn) — Tue, 06 May 2008 05:37:00 +0000

Well, the rain has stopped and the sun is trying to peak through which is a good sign for us to head into Patong today in search of a few dvd's and perhaps a few cullanary delights from the street vendors! Those pancake guys look packed every where you go!

A quick run down of our itinary:

Thursday Leave for Phi Phi Island (2 nights)
Saturday Leave for Phuket Airport - Fly To Koh Sumai
Stay At Koh Sumai for 6 Nights
Then Fly back to Phuket
Stay at Twin Palms on Surin Beach Phuket for 6 Nights.
Fly up to Bankok for 3 nights for some shopping and temple sight seeing!

Anyway, off to Patong now.

Dinner & Massage!

noreply@blogger.com (Aden Hepburn) — Mon, 05 May 2008 18:06:00 +0000

We found a great place for dinner tonight. Great price, fancy food and good service. I had fillet steak with red wine sauce & Hayley had a nice beef in oyster & garlic sauce with steamed rice. That plus 2 Entree's and 3 drinks for about $30... Then to top it all off, we went across the road for a 1hour massage for 300 baht or about $12... :)

It's monday night, and we leave for Phi-Phi Island on Thursday morning so it's weirdly sinking in that our holiday is flying way too fast! The rain was annoying today, it feels like we lost a day and a half from the holiday but all was not lost with such a good dinner!

We also found a bottle shop! 7 eleven again! They litterally sell everything. But they didn't have any nice wine, so we headed out in search and found a corner store selling a few aussie drops like Taylors 2004 Shiraz Carbenet which has won a few awards - but what wine hasn't so we picked that about for about $25 (rip off compared to AUS, but cheap compared to any restaurant) and will give it a tasteing with another aussie drop...

Anyway, off to bed. Fingers crossed that the rain has stopped tomorrow. We are also tossing up wether we should spend $50 for thai cooking classes tomorrow... We have not seen any classes out of the resort just yet.

Cyclonic Storms...

noreply@blogger.com (Aden Hepburn) — Mon, 05 May 2008 12:19:00 +0000

Well we had news today of a cyclone passing into thailand. It's a miserable day with pooring rain! Still hot, but wet unfortunatly. So we pretty much slept the day away. Fingers crossed its better tomorrow.

Oh, Wine - Very expensive. If you come to thailand. Bring as much as you can. Some ordinary chile cab sav is about 1400 baht - approx $45 a bottle. Kai at work has a mate running an importing wine company to Thailand/Asia and has property in Thailand so i'm hopefully going to hook up with this guy for a dinner and no doubt some wine if we can tee it up! Fingers Crossed!

Anyway, 7pm and time to go find some dinner. Venturing off into the local town of Kata Beach for dinner, drinks and hopefully a massage :)

Random Pics!

noreply@blogger.com (Aden Hepburn) — Mon, 05 May 2008 08:44:00 +0000

Thought I'd throw up a few random pics for you...
Below is a pic of the beach from our deckchairs by the pool!

Here I am testing the underwater camera on hayley!

My Desert at one of our Restaurants! Coffe Icecream & Apple tart.

Patong - boats filled with seafood are at every restaurant.

Elephants, Tigers And More...

noreply@blogger.com (Aden Hepburn) — Mon, 05 May 2008 07:58:00 +0000

Firstly, appologies for not posting a little sooner. There is no free wireless internet, but 200 baht will get you 1hour by the pool at the hotspot. So right now, I'm sitting there at 11:55pm attempting to write - hope this keeps you happy mum!

So the last 2 days have been great, we've explorered the resort a little more and it's about twice as big as it seems. It actually covers the entire of length kata-noi beach, which from what i've heard is one of the cleanest in Phuket because it's the only resort. Apart from Mom-Tri's Kitchen - one of the most famous restaurants in Phuket - but it is up on the mountain side so it doesn't really count.

I walked in there to have a look around, and it's an amazing resort as well. Unfortunatly not in our budget when we are staying for so many nights! But check the view from the hill side!

There was a wedding at the resort yesterday, aussies ofcourse. Probably 35ish in total. It's pretty annoying having them there when 25 of them take the entire front row of deck chairs facing the beach, get hammered and become insanly loud... but, then again it's more enjoyable than the weird europeans who wear g-string bakinies and sunbath topless - they are the 40+ year olds who looks 60+ from too much sun!

We headed into Patong Beach for dinner and a little shopping. I can't get over the smell - every 100m there is a drain and it's stench is a disgrace! The water there is.. well, lets just call it brown. I thought it was a pretty touristy place, but it seems patong is filled with locals on their scooters, eating and partying - perhaps trying to find a new husband like a few we saw were (and probably will!).

No only is the water dirty, the air there is thicker... it's scary to think I overheard someone saying that patong is about 10x cleaner than bankok! Patong Is a mixture of restuarants, resorts, shops, stalls and annoying indians that try to shake you hand and impersonate an aussie "g'day mate" thinking you will shake their hand and magically buy a suit off them. Picture 20 of them in a row over 50m all watching you walk past waiting to give a doddgy sales pitch to you. It's weird - the annoying ones are only thai indians. All indians. Normal Thais - nice and pieceful.
We paid another visit to 7eleven - I love it there. I bought a coke for 10 baht or $0.40c. Not long after we were by the pool again, this time though there was a few clouds in the distance and it was a cooler day. Things seemed to go quiet and the sky got dark in a matter on minutes.

From the pic above there was about 5 mins before everything was blown away and the rain pounded into the resort, by then we had run for cover at one of the restaurants and sat down for lunch. We moved tables twice when the rain got harder and harder, before flooding the place and lashing through the plastic blinds designed to stop it! (my first thailand storm!)

Later on we booked seats at Fantasea. The Thailand cultural themepark. What a great place. It's got a Disney land feel to it - just on a miniture scale in comparison. However, it was still incredibly large and we had a buffet in the biggest hall i've ever been in. There must have been 10,000 seats! See the pic below, and that was only 1/4th of the entire building!

By the time the show began, we'd had photos with elephants (they are rediclously hairy, but dam smart) and fed the carp under the waterfall, played some side show games and ventured into the themed toilets. See a few pics below...

We entered the elephant castle (as i'm now calling it) to take our seats, but in true disney style there was a themed maze to get to the theatre which included a mini jungle safari, being searched for cameras/phones, picture oportunities with traditional thai costumes, baby elephants, tigers and ofcourse a gift shop...

We had our seats upgraded to gold class for 250 bath - $8 that allowed us to sit front and centre which was great for hayley who i swear must be blind these days!! What a view, they were the perfect seats. The show was about 1.5 hours and an stack of fun, certianly no disney show but it came close with the elephants and wild animals used...

Anyway, it's late - so i'll post the elephant & tiger pics tomorrow! Oh, and Go the broncos! Ps. If you click the comments link below - you can post a message to this page, I'll approve it next time i'm on and it will go live instantly :

First Day At Katathani

noreply@blogger.com (Aden Hepburn) — Fri, 02 May 2008 15:31:00 +0000

Hi All, so it's been a pretty amazing first day! We arrived at the resort last night at about 12:30am Sydney time or 9:30pm Phuket time. Were greeted with cocktails and ice cold face towels. Checking into our Junior Suite was going smoothly until Hayley spotted about 10 geckos awaiting us at the door to our room!

Our room is big, huge infact and it's pretty stylish. We have a day bed, huge balcony, king size bed, huge shower and a bath plus the usual exrtas! The view from the room is even better, straight over the pool and to the beach - unfortunatly through trees as we are on the top floor (3rd). 1 floor lower and we would have the perfect view. But it's great - central to the entire resort - so the extra $$ spent were worth it as the room is as good as i'd expected.

We headed up to breakfast at about 10am phuket time, it's a fantastic buffet. As good as at any 5 Star hotel in Sydney. After that we set out to discover a little about the resort, starting with the pools (about 10 of them!) which are amazing. Pics below - but was a little cloudy at the time.

We had a free 15 min massage. Which was great, and checked out the massage prices in the resort - 1750 bht... Down the road - 700 bht per hour - or $25 AUD :)

Check out a few pics below from today...

For the most part of the day we lay by the pool, slept or swam. Cocktail in hand off course! The cocktails are great, but at resort prices - 230 Baht (about $8) they come out in coconuts, pineapples and all sorts of things! Out of the resort, cocktails are about 130 Baht but not sure if I’ll trust them - so for now - resort prices it is!

We had lunch by the pool - padthai (prawn) & satay chicken skewers. They were great, but we ordered pad-see-eew (chicken). I forgot to take photos but I can say they looked amazing. The Presentation of everything here looks to be perfect. For dinner, we had Thai again - off course. But we left the resort and walked into Kata Beach looking for dinner & a little shopping - Katathani is located on Kata-noi-beach, a seemingly quick walk apart from the ridiculously large hill that felt more like a mountain. We found a great little restaurant called Kata Kitchen. This time I ordered padthai chicken - I kind of wanted to test the taste against the in-resort restaurants.

We weren’t disappointed, great flavours, amazing colours and less than half the cost of our resort. Much simpler in presentation but, I wasn't fussed for 150 baht ($5ish). However, I had my first mozzie bite - we had not noticed any around until we sat outside at the kata kitchen with the local cats that are every where... oh and they seem to get along with the dogs, which are on every corner.

So on the walk into kata beach for dinner, we were looking around to see what's about - we didn't need to - the locals pretty much drag you into the store, when you tell them no, they say what about tomorrow, so I agree. Little did I think that on our way back (some 2 hours later), each of them recognised me again and said - see you tomorrow for a suit, cheap price, cheap price they say... so that will make walking around interesting!

I made my first mistake - going into one of the stores. They had some fantastic material and amazing patterns that sucked me in to ask - how much - suddenly they are measuring me up and saying just 6000 baht for a suit. I play dumb, oh it's my first day, I’m not really ready to look... lucky - next store had a sign saying 2,990 baht for everything but the kitchen sink. The real mistake was agreeing to get a shirt, 900 baht ($30). But the material/pattern was better than anything I’ve seen back home! So we will see how that tailoring goes!

Fruit Stores and 7elevens are ever where.
In the 7eleven there was something not seen since the Simpsons episode where homer puts on that hat with the camera in it! Check it below... that's got a hospital visit written all over it!

The fruit stores are also pretty cool - although I’ve got no idea what the hell they are!

Powerlines are pretty scary - not the typical 4 lines - try about 40 - oh and they like to leave cables dangling straight down to knee height, but that’s cool because some of them have a bit of electrical tape around the live parts, the others - make little sparking noises... we crossed the road...

There was a guy walking past with a HUGE lizard on his shoulder. Deadset about as big as he was. One of those crazy iguana things! I was too slow to get the camera out while dodging scooters.

Anyway, pretty late here now so I’ll throw a few more pics below. But all in all it was a lazy day. Just the way I want it. :)

2 Days To Go...

noreply@blogger.com (Aden Hepburn) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 13:38:00 +0000

Ok, so it's 2 days to go and I'm setting up this new blog for my holiday. Hopefully this is a tad quicker than postcards (certianly cheaper) while also giving you a much better idea of what I'm getting up to :) I'll try to post a few images each day plus a caption about the days events.

Ofcourse, this is all counting on the fact I selected accomodation that has free wireless internet! Which I'm now realising I forgot to check up on. So fingers crossed.