Map, Journey and Costs

Note: prices are for 2 adults with baggage

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From	To	Mode	Duration	Cost
🇹🇭 Koh Lipe	🇹🇭 Koh Lanta	Ferry	03:30	£84.30
🇹🇭 Koh Lanta	🇹🇭 Krabi	Minibus	02:00	£21.69
🇹🇭 Krabi	🇹🇭 Bangkok	Coach	11:00	£61.43

Much of our travel in Thailand involved uncertain logistics, and it all started with the ferry to Koh Lipe.

It was our first time crossing a border by sea, so we were unsure of what immigration measures would be taken. After filling in an entrance form and joining a long, slow queue we were told something that will strike fear in any wanderer:

"you must now surrender your passport to the captain of the ship" 😱

That’s ok, that’s ok. It goes against everything we were taught in backpacker school about never losing sight of your passport - but hundreds of others on the boat were cheerfully obliging - so why not.

We were among the last on the ship, and our bags were added to a gigantic communal pile at the front of the boat. How was this going to pan out?!

After a short, uneventful crossing the ship anchored just off shore. We were guided immediately to a longboat, realising we were now to leave both our passports and our bags to the mercy of the system.

Thai immigration consisted of a bunch of plastic chairs on a beautiful beach

There was nothing to stop you just sneaking off, so it suddenly became clear why everybody had been separated from their passports.

What followed was hours of an immigration officer working through a stack of surrendered passports as tall as Martin. He worked from the top down, calling the name with a few pronunciations for good measure. The person would eventually realise they’d been called, go up to the desk, and get cleared for entrance.

After a while, we gave up hope that our passports were somewhere near the top as we had boarded last, and noticed something odd. After leaving the immigration desk, people were escorted to a tent where they would: look confused, then look concerned, and then empty their wallets :thinking_face:

Rumour soon got around that the Island had an entrance fee (?!), and we sorrowfully remembered that we’d again entered a country without having any of the local currency. Further rumours spread that they would accept other currencies, but they would use an extortionate exchange rate in doing so.

Weighing up the strategy we decided that Martin would peg it out of immigration to try to find an ATM. Risky business as if his passport was called in his absence, a spanner would be lodged in the Thai immigration machine.

Luckily it paid off, he arrived back with a wodge of cash bang on when our names were called 💪 good timing for once!

We were reunited with bags, and hit the beach bar for happy hour 🍺

Again, stellar food offerings. At this rate we’ll be able to float back to the UK at the end of the trip 🌊

We mainly stuck to local Thai food. Martin gradually upped this spice tolerance, embracing the fire breath 🔥 🐉 and tingling face whilst Laura put midwifery skills to good use smoothing him through the situation.

A couple of main meals with drinks set us back about £10. Bargain as it’s one of the most expensive places in Thailand.

A large beer cost about £2.50 and cocktails about £5, with BOGOF happy-hours running until about 8pm. We got very confused at one post-beach establishment, and after lots of Google Translate worked out their happy hour was actually buy-two-get-one-free. This led to an accidentally large session as the only way we could work out how to settle up was to stay for an extra 2 rounds on the house 🥴 🍺 🍸

An oddity we never got to the bottom of was a fair number of Winnie the Pooh references on the island.

Including a mural in our shower:

An eatery called Pooh’s Restaurant (which we avoided).

And several other Eeyore and Tigger murals out and about. How perculiar.

Most of our time on Koh Lipe was spent relaxing. This ticked many boxes, and we actually extended our stay by a day (a good advantage of having a vague itinerary with very little booked!).

On a typical day Laura 🐠 was putting in a solid 8 hours of snorkelling. Martin :nerd: was doing barely a fifth of that, but making up for it with lots of Kindle time.

Snorkel lessons learnt:

• It’s really useful to use your feet to a up-close shots of cool fish, but according to Google it’s very bad form in Thailand to use your feet for anything except walking. Oops.
• It might be called soft coral, if you accidentally brush past it you’ll certainly get cut by it. Oops.
• If blokes don’t shave their tash area, sea water leaks into their mask and they won’t have fun.

One day we went on a longboat tour. With a small group of randomers we were ferryed between a few snorkel spots on local islands.

There were some cool fish, but the standout memory of the day was another dude on the trip.

He politely asked Martin to take a photo of him. No problem, Martin took a snap, and an extra for good luck before going to hand his phone back. Oh, that’s bizzare, he’s striking up a pose like we wants another.

This continued over the course of the day, and crescendoed in him using a good 20 minutes of every snorkel stop to corner the boat driver into taking photos of him posing in increasingly provocative stances wearing decreasingly modest swim trunks.

On the final stops the driver remained in the solace of his boat, with other trip dwellers scarpering out of sight. We assume he’s insta-famous, but haven’t been able to track him down.

One evening Laura found the need to form an advance party back to the accommodation (💩), and a bit of a predicament followed.

In her haste she mistook our room, and tried to unlock the one next to it. This wouldn’t be an issue, but our room key was able to unlock it (?! 😱).

Laura entered and immediately realised, as the occupants were much tidier, that it wasn’t our dwelling. She quickly tried to remedy the situation by re-locking the door, but:

😱 😱 😱 Our key wouldn’t lock it again (?!?!?) 😱 😱 😱

Martin arrived back to a very panicked Laura, and after a few more attempts to lock the room we had to fess up to the guy on reception.

We hopped over to another island, in search of more snorkelling. It took a few hours to get there by a large (50 ish person) speedboat. The journey was quite smooth until a storm started.

Travelling via. speedboat when it’s pelting it down with rain isn’t an experience we’ll be in a rush to repeat. Especially when we thought our bags were on the exposed deck, getting thoroughly soaked through as we wizzed through a cold and bumpy power shower.

We hunkered down in a beach-towel fort, hoped for the best, and won 💪:

• Our clothes were only mildly damp, we got lucky that the crew happened to put our bags under rather than on deck
• We got a free upgrade on our £10/night hotel room, and it was mashoosive. 2 bathrooms, a kitchen, 3 beds and a large lounge bit. Loads of space to hang our damp clothes

💥

The only thing we did during our short stay on Koh Lanta was an organised snorkel trip. It took us to 4 islands (Koh Ngai, Koh Muk, Koh Kradan and Koh Chuek), we saw some amazing fish:

And swam into a cave to chill out on an inner island for a bit:

We end this part of our Thailand adventure by popping up to Bangkok, as a gateway to Northern Thailand. I say pop: it involved 2 hours on a minibus followed by an 11 hour overnight coach, getting us in at 4am :sleeping_face:

Only managing a few hours kip on the coach, we were very grateful that our gamble of booking a hotel room and hoping that we could check-in at 5am paid off.

We supplemented a few more hours sleep and woke up around lunchtime.

First order of business was to grab a curry, as whilst there was a food court stop on the coach with vouchers provided all the food looked questionable so we opted out.

It became apparent that Bangkok is very spread out, public transport seemed to be limited, and whilst taxis were cheap the congestion was awful.

With only a half a day left to play with, we headed to Wat Pho temple for a mooch. There was a very giant Buddha, a gong to try your hand at, and some very cool surroundings to take in:

Martin was a bit tempelled out, so left Laura to explore Wat Arun. It was a lovely sunset and a pretty temple. There oddly seemed to be lots of dressed up couples taking selfies, and monks drinking from disposible plastic cups :thinking_face::

With a big travel day ahead we had a few local beers and tried some streetfood with a worryingly Google Translated menu:

And that was that, next stop is Chiang Mai in the North of Thailand.