Koh Tao / Koh Lanta / Railay 🇹🇭

After a quite intense start into the year, it's vacation time now. Approximately 3 1/2 weeks in Thailand, or wherever it pulls us. Since I am quite unmotivated when it comes to writing, there is only this one report written in retrospect, but a load of pictures!

We will meet in Phuket, as Madame has already traveled to Kuala Lumpur a week earlier to come to Koh Tao together from there, passing through Koh Samui and Koh Phangan.

That means for me to arrive and take a breath. Fat chance. Since I want to get my Open Water Certification, that means getting up early every day for the first three days at 8 o'clock, thanks to the time difference feeling like 2.

But that's what I wanted. Theory, diving in the pool, theory again, and then a total of 4 dives in the sea with a depth of up to 18m.

What have I seen? Extremely many fish... here I can only identify: pufferfish, stingrays, Nemo and Dory. Pretty cool, only my foot is swollen again, this time the other one. New reason, new foot, I am dehydrated...

So, I passed the diving certification, we stay two more days, check out the viewpoints, party a bit to techno, play Connect Four and set off to fly from Samui to Phuket. The plan is to take a cheap flight in any direction from the airport and spend a few days there.

Unfortunately, this turns out not to be the best plan, as all flights are expensive and nothing really seems worth it. So, after 2 hours of searching for flights, we decide to waste more time and go... to Lanta (!) 😍

We spend a total of 7 nights here, explore the island once again, meet a bunch of people, and I visit the Andaman Clinic for my foot. Funny enough, the staff and even the doctor recognize me... :)

As usual, we connect at Aleena Minimarket and that's how we get to know Sam (GB) and Chris (TXS), Rine and Louisa, who started talking to us because of various problems like losing the phone, a scooter accident, and a blocked card (that wasn't all of it).

That means: PayPal transactions coordinated from Germany around the globe to make the two of them liquid again. Problem: the scooter accident caused both passports to be taken, once by the rental agency and once by the hospital, because there was no cash to be collected without a card. No problem, we buy them back.

Together we continue to Railay Beach and pass the time with climbing, a snorkeling tour with a near-death experience and, logically, beer, beach, and sun.

All in all, I have to say this time I had little desire to travel a lot, but rather to stay at certain places more consistently. Which turned out to be a good decision in retrospect!

Exhausting:

- dengue fever non-stop at this time, especially on Lanta

- The discovery of two baby rats in our bungalow

- Return journey with the snorkeling tour straight through a storm. Mind you, in a longtail boat, together with vomiting Chinese tourists and mentally ill Thais who were more concerned about running out of cigarettes than about sinking. I was mainly cold.

- Delay of my flight and missing my train home, thanks to repeated profiling at customs. Would be nice if, in addition to checking my passport, they at least checked my bag once. Because otherwise it is very obvious based on which criteria people are selected. 🤮🙄

That's enough for now, as always, the pictures tell the story better!👋🏽