Got a taxi from Stable Lodge to Bangkok airport early in the morning to fly to Surat Thani. Surat Thani airport reminds me a lot of Avalon Airport. Pretty small and smells funny. Once we grabbed our bags, there was a guy selling tickets to Ko Samui. Perfect.
Air Asia plane at Surat Thani
We jumped on the bus and it took us to the Sea Trans ferry at Don Sak. We got off the bus and onto the ferry for about and hour and a half. Once we arrived at Na Thon port at Ko Samui, we got our bags off the bus and got a mini bus to the bungalow, except the guy must have mistaken me, and dropped us off at the Beach House, not Beer’s House. Simple mistake. Once we worked out where we were, we jumped on a ute with a roof, which finally got us to Beer’s house.
Beer’s house was awesome. We had a bungalow right on the beach. For the few days we were staying in Ko Samui, the weather held out. Just before and just after, Ko Samui had rain and thunderstorms, so we were pretty lucky.
Beer’s House Beach-front bungalow
Ko Samui is an interesting place. Like the rest of Thailand, the roads are full of motorbikes, doing crazy stuff. We did lots of walking around, but mainly around the Lamai beach area which is on the west side of the island. The way the trip worked out, we only stayed there a few days. I could have easily spent much more time there.
Sunday morning we left early to make our way up to Chiang Mai. We organised our trip to the Surat Thani airport with a travel agency, which might have cost us a little more, but it did make it easy. Although Bek and I had this feeling that something would go wrong and we’d miss our flight, it seemed to work out fine in the end.
A mini-bus picked us up at 6:30am from Beer’s House and took us to Na Thon port.
We were told to get on a bus at Na Thon port, which was crammed full. People were standing in the aisle. Nobody had any idea what was going on, we just were fed small bits of english which gave us an uncomfortable feeling.
We took the bus 15 minutes to the Raja Ferry pier. Bek had read lots of bad things about the Raja ferry, so when she saw the sign, she began to get really nervous. Not to mention she also gets sea sick. She’d heard stories about the ferries running aground and other dodgy acts.
Boarding the Raja ferry
We were told to get off the bus, and get onto the ferry. We were also told to leave our bags on there, which made us a little nervous. The ferry ride was fine, so that was a relief. We got back on the bus at Don Sak and travelled about an hour to the town of Surat Thani.
In the middle of nowhere, we had to get off the bus and get into a different one. We when traveled a bit further and had to get out again. This time it was a little shed, which was some sort of bus terminal. We got in a mini-van with a few other people from there on our way to Surat Thani airport.
Meanwhile, I had brought my Nokia Internet Tablet with me and my external GPS. I had pre-downloaded all the Google Maps tiles so I could track where we were going. It was really handy, because we got lost a couple of times. I was following where the guy was taking us for a while, and he was going in a totally different direction to the airport. I was getting a bit nervous, but he eventually turned the van around. He was taking a short-cut 🙂
One interesting moment was when we were overtaking a truck. We weren’t going that fast and there was a car coming towards us in the other direction but it seems there was time for another car to overtake us at the same time. Thailand drivers are nuts.
We checked in to our Air Asia flight with plenty of time. We flew from Surat Thani to Bangkok airport but had to wait 5 and a half hours to then board another Air Asia flight to Chiang Mai.