Koh Phangan to Khao Sok to Phuket

DAY THREE

Finally arriving at our amazing Best Western hotel in Koh Phangan after being woken up at 6am on the train by a random Thai lady peering through my curtains and shaking me, then a one hour taxi journey and two hour boat journey (where I gained my disgustingly bad sunburn) to be greeted with this was bliss.

We headed straight for the sea and chilled out until we had to go and get ready for the amazing sunset that Rhys had promised us. It was gonna be ‘really something.’ And it was.

Unreal. I’m still in awe at it.

We headed to a lovely family-owned Thai restaurant and afterwards it was party time. We got ready, pre-gamed (what Americans and Aussies called pre-drinking) and headed to the Jungle Experience Party. The set up of this place was incredible. It was literally in the middle of the jungle and the stage sets were shaped like skulls and dragon’s heads. So cool. I got some awesome glow in the dark body paint in the form of a dragon too.

My hair was also glowing in the dark the entire night which I secretly loved.

There were also several professional photos taken that night by the photographer walking around and on the website there are literally five pictures of me just by myself staring at the camera and I have no idea when that actually happened. Rhys guessed it was because my hair looked cool against the lights. But still… weird. Below is the only solo one I liked.

As bad as this sound I really like this next one even though I’m posing soooo much. I just thought it was a cool photo.

And I have no idea who the guy is in this one either. This was because I was drinking buckets where the bartender was literally getting what looked like 2/3rds of a pint glass filling it with Samson vodka (dirt cheap stuff) and topping it up with orange juice. I was GONE. Still an awesome night though.

DAY FOUR

The next day I deserved to be a lot more hungover than I was. Me and Rachael decided to go exploring Koh Phangan and found the infamous Full Moon Party beach after getting lost for about an hour. Rach came up with the idea of hiring a jet-ski which I’ve never done before and with all times I’d had a ‘fuck it’ attitude towards everything so far I split the price with her and stuck her in the drivers seat. When we got back to the beach later Silvia and Faith told us that even though we were probably about half a kilometre out at sea they could still hear us consistantly screaming for the full fifteen minutes. It was so fun though. Below is the only decent photo I could get on my GoPro.

We then went for Thai foot massage. I was originally up for a full-body one but I’d gotten so badly sunburnt on my shoulders I couldn’t do it. It turns out that that didn’t matter because once they got bored of your feet they start to work their way up the rest of your body (including your ass) just kneading their knuckles in. To be fair I felt awesome afterwards but once she started doing my shoulders the tears came.

That night we met up for our second and last sunset on Koh Phangan. Surprisingly I was drinking again…

We went for food and sat on the beach on the ground. I had the yummiest Pad Thai ever.

It’s funny because that Banana Daquari was VILE.

After that poor Brad got really sick so we took him back to the hotel and put him to bed. Being the alcoholic that I am I still wanted to go out though so me and Rachael decided to go to the beach party on the full moon beach and meet Rhys as everyone else had bailed because we had a 6am get up the next morning. Probably a more sensible choice. It was still freaking awesome though. I saw what looked like a two year old fire-dancing perfectly.

DAY FIVE

The next day I passed out on the two-hour boat journey on the way back to Surathani then passed out in the three-hour taxi journey to our TreeTops hotel in Khao Sok National Park. I’m not gonna lie I thought I was gonna enjoy the elephant trekking a lot more than I did. But as soon as I got there I realised “Oh shit yeah, this is probably pretty inhumane” and felt uncomfortable right away with what I was doing. In the photos I looked like I was having a ball but really I didn’t want to be doing it at all. The trainers kept whipping our poor elephant whenever he got stuck or wanted to eat a plant while we were waiting for the one ahead to move. I kept falling off the seat so the trainer told me to sit on it’s neck and I politely obliged feeling even more guilty. He’s a selfie of me on an elephants neck. Sorry.

After that we went river-tubing. Now I’ve done this before and was appalling at it. This time I was even worse. I have a video on my GoPro of me crashing backwards into a tree, falling out of my ring and being unable to get back into it because the current is so strong. And all you can hear is me screaming and Rhys laughing in the background. Such a nice tour guide hahaha.

The views were amazing though.

We headed back to the TreeTops hotel where now Rachael was ill. She missed out on the really (not really I lied) fun trek we had to do through the jungle the next day lucky gal.

DAY SIX

The only good part about that trek was this really pretty river I dove straight into as soon as I saw it as my sunburn was driving me insane (hence the tshirt in every photo).

That afternoon we left for Phuket which I’ll talk about in the next post as it was an interesting first night…