After our time in Bangkok (posts here and here), we hopped on a plane to Samui, one of Thailand's beautiful islands (and where season 3 of The White Lotus was set). Flight time is only an hour with return flights costing around 11250 baht (about £260 each, but if you book at least six months in advance you can get some flights around £100).
The main purpose of our trip was to relax - alongside eating some yum Thai food - so we booked
Nora Buri Resort & Spa, purely because we got a great Black Friday deal that landed us a villa with a sea view and our own pool for a very reasonable rate (it really was a decent size pool, as you can see below - quite often they can be more plunge pools but we could swim in this).
But, what did we get up to when we weren't relaxing by our pool? The biggest pull for me to choose Samui over some of the other Thai islands is I wanted us to explore the Mu Ko Ang Thong Marine National Park, which is a beautiful archipelago of 42 islands. We booked a
day trip for £60 each which included snorkelling, kayaking, lunch and exploring a few islands. I'd had visions of recreating the lovely time we had kayaking in
Ha Long Bay but it was much choppier that day! And the water wasn't the clearest for snorkelling, unfortunately.
We landed on two different islands: Ko Mae Ko and Ko Wua Talap. Ko Mae Ko is known for its emerald lagoon, which you can view by climbing lots of steep steps. (Of course!) It has tropical island vibes, spurred on by the fact you need to get into a longboat to reach the island itself. This is the same for the next island we visited, Ko Wua Talap, which went further than the longboat. You had to disembark on to a floating deck which was reminiscent of the show Wipeout. It was tricky walking along it, I'm not going to lie!
Ko Wua Talap is the biggest island that tourists tend to visit in the Mu Ko Ang Thong Marine National Park, and it's one you can actually stay on. It also has monkeys! Dusky langurs, to be precise. Which you'll see on your hike up to the highest part of the island - it's tough going but you'll get the best view of the national park from there. You'll need to climb 500 metres, up steep steps in the heat, though there are stopping points every 100 metres with a viewpoint that gets increasingly better. Took us round 35 minutes to get up, the same to get down, and a dip in the ocean was much needed afterwards before we took our boat back to Nathon Pier.
Another thing I wanted to do was see the elephants, though there are various places all over Thailand where you can do this. We headed to
Elephant Jungle Sanctuary where we fed and watched elephants for about an hour. Do your research, but no one should be riding elephants, and washing them feels a a bit iffy, too. But I think feeding is fine as they need to eat between 200 and 400 kilos of food a day so charging people £20 to help with this sheer volume is quite smart! And then the money further benefits the elephants.
Top of Olly's list was seeing some real-life Muay Thai, so we headed to the
Phetchbuncha Samui Stadium one evening to see a variety of matches. Locals get free entry to fights, which does make the prices for tourists quite high - you're looking at roughly £35 for a bench seat or £47 for a ringside seat. We saw six fights, a mixture of men and women, plus the first one was actually a junior fight between two local teenagers. The fighting was fighting but I actually enjoyed the ceremonial elements to it - and we did see two knockouts!
As like anywhere in Thailand, there are temples you can visit. There's the Big Buddha temple (Wat Phra Yai) which we saw from the road as we were walking to a different temple - you might also spot Big Buddha as you land at the airport in Samui. But we had a quick explore of Wat Plai Laem which is located on a lake and has a giant laughing Buddha there (amongst other statues and temples).
Finally, we headed to Fisherman's Village to see a fire show at
Coco Tam's. Which seems to be on every list of what you need to do in Samui. We worried we wouldn't be able to get a seat without getting there super early, but we ended up going there just before it started and were absolutely fine as the beachfront is massive. It was fun to see but it lasts 45 minutes so does tend to get a bit repetitive! (And you obviously need to buy a drink or two to be there.)
Have you been to Samui? x
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