Blue Andaman Resort Ko Lanta

It was with a mixture of emotions that I bid farewell to Cambodia, Taura, Naomi and the Landmine Museum. It has been up and down, and I was ready to move on, but the heart strings were tugged when Da said, "Cat... Australia? I wait for you." So we await more reading of 'The Golden Fish' stories for another year... The shock of Thailand, consumerism and the haven of 7-11. It was off to Ko Lanta to see my buddies Darren and Helena. Darren just secured himself a Divemasters job, so whilst he wor...

We left Penang right on time at 5.30am for the 8 hour bus ride to Ko Lanta Island. This bus ride turned out to be 14 hours of frustration and fear for our lives!! The first leg of our bus ride was great but then we were dropped in a strange town and told to wait 1.5 hours for the next bus. This was odd, because we thought the bus took us the whole way. Anyway, another bus did arrive, thankfully. We then had an insane bus driver, or so we thought at the time (turns out they are all psycho) tha...

I took a boat to Phi Phi, but it was jam-packed with tourists. A nice Engkish girl at Visa Diving suggested I have lunch then take a boat to Lanta, where it was quieter. This proved to be near fatal advice... I was booked into the Blue Andaman resort and was told someone would be at the boat to collect me. Nobody showed after two phone calls over an hour later, so I called Visa Diving on Phi Phi. At last someone turned up - no apology, though. But this was just a foretaste of things to come.....

We managed to fit in one last stop in Thailand, on the island of Ko Lanta Yai. Lanta is a quiet place with some lovely beaches, they only got mains electricity and phone lines on the island in the last ten years. A minibus took us from Krabi down the coast and to get on to Lanta we had to take two ferry crossings. The minibus company always want to flog their customers somewhere to stay but we lied and just told them we'd already booked somewhere for a quiet life. When we arrived at the place...

This is the second time on this trip that I find myself in Thailand and as I am making my way to Malaysia I decided to take as many ferries to get there as I can. the easy ( and cheaper) thing is to take a flight from Phuket to KL, but that is not for me.

So it was aferry to Phi Phi Don which was an hour away and said to very beautiful. We were given free tea and cakes on the trip so that was nice. As we pulled into the bay there were boats everywhere. Its a U-shaped island and the bot...

II have been speaking to different people about their experience when the tsunami hit. Where I have been travelling was not the main area although it sounded bad enough. One chap now working on one of the isladas told me that he was working in Phuket at the time and for some reason on that day he decided to go to work late and was in bed when he felt the first shock. I did not take too much notice but a while the whole building shook vigoriously. He went to the window and was in time to see t...

This island is just too random. We left Phi Phi Don in the morning to get the ferry to Koh Lanta with the idea that it would be just as built up as Phi Phi Don but quieter, so maybe a chance to find space on the beach at least a metre away from other people - all impressions giving by several travel agents. We booked a place to stay in one of the hundreds of travel agents that have taken over Phi Phi Don. Our little dashing agents convinced us to stay at the Blue Andaman. As we hadn't seen wh...

Hello again from the Land of Smiles! We left you at sunset on our first night in Koh Lanta with high hopes of exercising and sunbathing the following day ... no such luck ... we woke to grey skies and heavy rain so we pretty much hibernated all day, enduring the one English-speaking D-rate movie channel for most of it. In the evening there was a break in the rain so we chanced it and took a stroll down to the nearest small bunch of shops (about 2kn away) to upload the 280 photos to the last b...