Ko Sa-sa-somethin or other

saraeschultz
Mar 30, 2015
2 min read

Look, I don’t know what to tell you guys. We’re basically island hoping now. We don’t do a whole heck of a lot. But for now, we're on to Ko Samui. Samui is known to be a really developed island with all the Western amenities and chain restaurants that you could ever want. It is very popular with you big Package Tourists. We came for the Visa extension and then stayed in Bophut “Fishing Village”. This may have originally been a Fishing Village, but is now a collection of shops, stores and bars. It was a little more, quaint, I guess, than the rest of Samui that we saw. We stayed a few nights, and didn't do much more than sit on the beach, walk around some shops, and eat at some local eateries. Mostly we got back into travel mode and sketched out the rest of our time in Thailand and beyond. From Ko Samui we decided to check out Railay Beach which is south and all the way on the other coast in the Andaman Sea.

Railay isn’t an island but you can only get there by boat so we booked a ferry off Samui, then a bus to the Krabi area, and a quick Long Tail boat to Railay. I had gotten a little sea-sick for the first time on our last ferry, so I thought I would try taking some Dramamine. Here's what my trip looked like. Side effects may include drowsiness...

Railay beach was pretty cool and looks like what you think an island in Thailand would look like. Railay is to rockclimbing as Ko Tao was to diving. There are large limestone crags rising out from the water all around. It’s a little quitter than Ko Tao and Samui, but not off the beaten path by any means.

Our first day we found a place to stay and then explored some of the shops on the walking street and hung out on Railay West Beach for a while. The next day we went on a few hikes to a cool view point and down to a lagoon that only fills up during high tide. The hike was a little more of a climb than we expected, but nothing we couldn’t handle in flip-flops.

We then walked over to Phra Nang Beach and spent the rest of the day relaxing. The beach was beautiful but slightly crowded as all the day trips to the area drop people off here. On that side of the beach is Phra Nang cave which is somewhat of a shrine to a local fertility goddess; thus all of the well, you know...

Not wanting to get too fertile, we kept our distance and instead we grabbed lunch from a row of the Long Tail equivalent of food trucks.

The next day we walked a bit further to Ton Sai Beach, which is a little more remote, little less developed, a lot more hippy. This is where all the big climbers stay