This week, we vacated! We left to celebrate our five year anniversary on the beaches in south Thailand, just before high season begins next week.
But first, we took a flight on a little Asian airline with the tiniest amount of legroom you can imagine.
We then arrived to find our hotel absolutely amazing. In Thailand, hotels are always hit or miss. You get onto a website—Agoda, TripAdvisor, what have you—and search and search. You flip through the photos knowing full well that you are bargaining at least 50% less than what is pictured. You read review after review, attempting to weed out those that just wanted a Western experience and were taken by surprise at the “Thai-ness” of it—complaints about a hard bed are disregarded, as all the beds we’ve encountered are in fact hard. Complaints about ants are thrown out, as we have a billion in our own home.
And after you’ve read review after review, you know it’s just hit or miss. And you go for it.
We did just that—we bargained on a new hotel near the beach, that had very few reviews and all very recently, but they were positive.It was a stunning hit. It was a very new hotel, just five minutes from two lovely beaches—one in each direction. It was within walking distance of a huge variety of restaurants and had a lovely huge pool that was perfect for laps. It was stylish—classy, clean; the nicest place we have stayed in Thailand by far, for under $30 a night!
I know I am probably writing too much on a hotel experience, but until you’ve had some of the experiences we’ve had, you probably won’t realize what a gift that is. I won’t even describe our worst experiences, because you just won’t even come visit!
I’ll just say that this one was absolutely amazing.
And we had a surf board on our wall, which was oddly great.
Oh, and they also included the minibar for free everyday. Very weird, but we did love the free snacks every day!
I won’t hide the fact that we were still in Thailand, so our little path to cut through to one of the beaches did look like this:
And it smelled exactly as the photo implies.
But the beaches were absolutely lovely!
We spent time on both, mostly finding shade under palm trees and playing in the waves.
I might bore you with the sunset pictures, but it was just too stunning. Stephen is such a great photographer and captured them better than I could have imagined.
We also really enjoyed the food while we were there. Mae Sot has some true gems, but it was so fun to have Western food—not Thai or Burmese—every night, without making it myself!
We enjoyed some amazing Indian, including Indian tea.
An Italian restaurant provided your very own Kraft parmesan cheese shaker to the table, which is a real treasure here. Such a treasure that I usually bring one over each time we come, as a little container like this will cost $5-$6. I probably used about half 🙂
And of course, we found ice cream. Homemade banoffee ice cream!
On our last night we went out for a nice dinner. We walked the beach on the way to the restaurant to catch the sunset and just enjoyed the waves and sand on the way back.
While the food was stunning, we quite obviously didn’t fit the mold of their usual clientele. We’re not very good fakers, I’m afraid.
That’s about the summary: we spent our days reading in the sand and playing in the waves, playing games and watching movies. We had wonderful meals out, including the breakfast spot we went to all but one day that made wonderful homemade bread and quiche. And we rested.
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