It’s been a month now since I emerged from my Koh Tao Scuba Diving School as a shadow of my former self, so I should probably wrap up our time in Thailand so that the regular readers of the blog (if any) can move from the edge of their seats.

The length of time between posts had nothing to do with my damaged ears; to be honest it’s so loud back home that a bit of barotrauma will probably be the best thing for them. No, the main reason for the delay is that now I am back in Australia, I am reunited with the country’s infamous internet speed (or lack thereof), which was recently ranked 56th best in the world, below such technological powerhouses as Estonia, Panama and Belarus.

But anyway, back to Thailand. Our overland journey is shown on the map below. We started with a wonderful stay in Koh Lipe, before getting a ferry up to the larger island of Koh Lanta. To be honest we didn’t love Koh Lanta; we’d read such good reviews online but Koh Lipe was way better from our experience. The beach and food were nice but nothing special compared to other Thai islands, and the place was so big that having a scooter or some kind of vehicle to explore it would have been a lot better.

Travel Route: A- Koh Lipe; B- Koh Lanta; C- Koh Pha-Ngan; D- Koh Tao; E- Hua Hin; F – Bangkok Airport

After Koh Lanta, we headed from the West Islands to the East Islands to Koh Pha-Ngan, as Carissa was doing a yoga retreat there. Judging from what I had read online, I was expecting to walk into Magaluf on steroids, full of rowdy bogan tourists and locals looking to fleece me. I couldn’t have been more wrong!

Whilst the full moon party is still going strong in the South, the rest of the island is quite different completely. We stayed near the pier on the West of the island which was far away from the crowds, with the night markets offering delicious food for the cheapest prices that we’d seen in the whole of Thailand. As for the locals, they were probably the friendliest I’d met across the whole of Thailand as well which was a pleasant surprise as well.

Following my time learning to dive in Koh Tao, we had three days spare before our flight out of Bangkok, so in order to break our journey there up we spent some time in Hua Hin before getting the coach up from there straight to the airport.

Hua Hin was a cool place to hang out for a few days, the highlight of which was a trip to the Cooking Academy to learn how to make some of the delicious meals that we’d been binging on over the last few weeks. With the prospect of Filipino food looming large, it was a great way to spend our last days in Thailand!

So that was it for Thailand on this visit. There was so much to do and not enough time, so we decided to focus our efforts on the South and leave Bangkok and the North for the next trip when we have enough time to do it properly.