Links to other Thailand pages  Ko Samui  Ratchasima  Nong Khai  The North

The ferry from Penang to the mainland left in the early afternoon, which left me plenty of time to change my surplus ringit into Thai baht. Or at least it would of done, except that this was a Moslem holiday, so while some of the tourist shops were open, all the banks and money changers were shut. Oh, well, I thought - I'll change it in Thailand. Yeah, right! Malaysia has strict currency regulations, which means it is difficult to find anywhere outside the country that will change Ringit into something useful, and, of course, then the exchange rate is appalling.

Lunch - meat curry with rice served on a bamboo leaf plate

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I stopped off for lunch and had the delight to the left. I got an earlier ferry than the one I'd planned, which only resulted in a longer wait at the train station. Already in the station was the luxury Orient Express. Unfortunately it wasn't the one I was catching. That said, the Malay train I caught was very fine, with, by train standards, excellent food. This train later became the overnight express to Bangkok, so I was in a sleeper, but as I was getting off at Surat Thani, I didn't go to sleep.

The train arrived in Surat Thani at around midnight. I found that the bus for the ferry port left at about 6am the next morning, decided against crashing at the station and found a nearby hotel which wasn't great, but was handy. I stopped for a quick beer then crashed out.

Needless to say the bus didn't leave when it was supposed to, but I was able to doze on it while I was waiting for it to leave. The ferry port is about an hour's drive from the town, and we were duly dropped off here, issued tickets according to our destination (trips to Ko Pha-Ngan and Krabi were also leaving from here, the latter presumably by bus, unless it was a really long trip!), and told to wait.

On the way to Samui

There was a self service cafe, so I had some breakfast and read, while others did similarly or slept. One guy at least missed his bus because he was passed out when they called it. For Ko Samui we had to get on a different bus and be driven to a different ferry port. We then had a three hour boat journey across a calm sea.

Once we landed, there were hordes of touts trying to foist share taxis on us, so it was no problem getting to the beach. I'd decided that I wanted to stay in Lamai beach, because my reading of the Lonely Planet was that it would be more interesting than the main beach, Chaweng. Wrong! But that afternoon I was very happy. I found a bungalow at the end of the resort which was about 20m from the beach and at a reasonable rate. The full moon party was the night after next, so I checked in for four nights, figuring that I'd need a day to recover. I threw my stuff into the bungalow, changed quickly into my cossie and ran into the sea. And kept running. One of the things they don't say in the brochures is that Lamai beach is very shallow so you have to go a long way out before you can swim. Undaunted, I made the best of it, before showering and changing and heading into town.

While the walk into the centre took longer than I expected I was happy enough to be on a Thai Island. I stopped off at a travel agent to arrange a boat ticket to the full moon party and also at a chemist. I asked for something to keep me awake and was given two pills. I don't know what was in them, but I suspect they were diet pills, as I met someone later who had asked for diet pills and got something which had similar effects. Then followed a great meal and a fruitless search for a friendly bar.

The beach by my bungalow

When I was planning this holiday, Ko Samui and Ko Pha-Ngan were the centerpiece of the first part. I'd heard so much about them beforehand and I was really looking forward to them. I was disappointed. Lamai is full of girly bars. Worse, it is full of nearly empty girly bars, and while the bar staff are very friendly and willing to chat to the best of their ability and to play games when they ran out of things to say (getting 4 discs in a row in a vertical grid was a big favourite), it was nearly impossible to meet anyone who wasn't trying to sell something. The only good thing I can say about Lamai is that the food from the food court is truly wonderful. This is a set of maybe a dozen different outdoor restaurants, selling Thai and Indian, and probably Western food. I didn't have a meal there that was less than great. Other than that, I can't think of a good reason for going there.

On the night of the full moon, I went to the travel agent to wait for the pick up for the ferry. As time drew on, the owner was getting more and more frantic, making phone calls then disappearing on his moped for a while. About 30 minutes after we should have been picked up, he went off and fetched a car and drove us to the ferry port in the north of the island. When we arrived, he took our tickets, worked out which of the boat operators we were with and got the proper tickets from them. We then joined a queue, which was moving really, really slowly. After about another half an hour, the Thai controlling the queue told us that the police wouldn't let any more people on the boat. If it was up to him he would, but the police wouldn't (I believe this - I think they would have loaded it to sinking point). Instead, he said, we would have to wait about an hour for the boat to come back. There were lots of loud groans at this, but worse followed: it sank in that it was an hour trip, so it would be two hours before the boat came back.

I think this is where having been in Asia for a month helped. My reaction was that this was Thailand, you never expect things to work out how they say they will, but something always does. So, I thought, no problem, have a couple of beers here and get the next boat. This seemed to be the majority attitude. But there was a small minority (stereotypically with germanic accents) who were really pissed off, who couldn't get their heads around the idea that this was a third world country were nothing runs on time. One guy started haranguing the hapless organiser, asking him why he'd sold so many tickets if the boat was too small. The organiser made the same excuse about the police, and so the guy asked for his money back. The organiser told him he'd have to go to the agent he bought it from, which of course pissed the guy off even more.

The boat eventually came back and the rest of us boarded for a fairly subdued crossing. This was also the night that Newcastle against Everton was being shown live on TV, so once we landed my first port of call was a pub showing the footie. We lost. From there I headed to the beach. This was not as extreme as I'd imagined. I'd heard all these stories about the full moon party being a hedonistic nightmare, with bodies too full of alcohol and drugs being washed up on the beach with alarming regularity. I don't think I saw more than a couple of people who were obviously off their tits. There were a lot of drunk people, of course, but I didn't even smell any dope. Along the beach there were maybe four or five disco bars, with huge sound systems and different varieties of techno music blaring out. I took my diet pills, which worked a treat, though I was still chewing my teeth two days later, and with copious helpings of Mekong whiskey, supplemented with even more copious quantities of water danced the night away. Far too soon it was time to leave for the boat back to Ko Samui.

When I got back to the ferry port I was supposed to get a lift back to Lamai as part of my ticket. However during the course of the night my ticket had become a sodden mass in my pocket and had gradually disintegrated. I still had a corner left, so I proferred this to the driver. Fortunately he accepted it.

For my last day in Samui, I went to Chaweng beach, and wished I had gone there to start with. It is very big and impersonal, and could be any European resort - the Thais are almost reduced to extras. I think with a group it would be great fun, even by myself it was much better than Lamai.

Links to other Thailand pages  Ko Samui  Ratchasima  Nong Khai  The North

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Netherlands License.

© Copyright Chris Rouch. 1999-2012. Comments, complaints, abuse and beers to
chris_at_rouchrumble_dot_org

Last modified on 10th December 2008 2:07 PM EST

 Back to photos