Koh Lanta Beach Life
With some turbulence
Koh Lanta is 1.5 hour boat road away, but given the mercurial nature of the seas, we decide to take a shared van. The van takes forever to pick up passengers, but other than that, it’s a smooth journey 2.5 hour journey. Koh Lanta is ALL beach, so we decide to stay at the Lanta Sands which has a nice beachfront and family-sized rooms. The interior of Koh Lanta is just a dusty road, and all the nice hotels are down winding offshoots, so our travel TO the hotel isn’t too pleasant. But once we settle in, we breath a nice sigh of relief.
Our room on the third floor (dah, stairs) is lovely. Instead of a normal balcony, our balcony door opens up into a mini plunge pool which drains/cascades into the large swimming pool below, creating a nice waterfall sound.
We walk through the lovely grounds past the restaurant to the pools and lounge area at the beach. The hotel isn’t too crowded, and there are plenty of places to chill. We even grab a unique lounge/hammock that has a netted area that juts out over the beach with a beautiful view of the setting sun.
The sand in front of the hotel is super soft and mostly empty. Walking to the right or left of the beach takes us to some restaurants and tiny convenience stores (not much there). It’s a super chill vibe after the busyness of Ao Nang. We find a nice restaurant (they all have the same menu) and have dinner with our feet in the sand. Ah, beach life.
The next day we decide to join a speedboat tour that goes out to Koh Rok and Koh Ha, famous sites for snorkeling. After a ridiculously bumpy ride (we took seasick pills ahead of time luckily) including waves of water soaking half the boat, we arrive at Koh Ha. Unfortunately the water is too choppy for us to go snorkeling, so we immediately leave for another 1 hour trip (yes, we could have skipped the first hour) through choppy waters to Koh Rok. The water is still choppy but swimmable. The visibility and sealife if wonderful, our best yet for this trip. We see lots of christmas tree worms, clown fish, and colorful parrots and other reef fish.
We stop at a lovely beach (with a super wavy floating dock) for lunch. There are a half dozen large monitor lizards scouring the picnic tables smelling our food with their blue tongues.
We head to another snorkel site, also with wonderful snorkeling before heading home. The trip back is luckily much smoother this time, giving our backsides a much needed rest.
Tonight our hotel has a special buffet (with a nice discount for hotel guests). Everything is nicely decorated, the food is excellent and there’s even entertainment (we get prime seats). We wear our monster shirts, Christmas ears, and elephant pants for the occasion. The night starts with a traditional Thai dance (similar to the two other we’ve seen so far). Then a Thai Elvis impersonator sings for the rest of the night. He must be seventy years old, but still clearly loves his job. He especially loves to go up to the pretty young ladies and serenade them. Thank you. Thank you very much.
We spend the rest of our days enjoying beach life. We work on our computers. We walk to restaurants along the beach for lunch. We enjoy the incredible sunsets from our hotel loungers every night, and then have dinner along the beach too. Sometimes we jump in the pool as well.
At night the beach get filled with hermit crabs. Baby Bear loves playing with them. As a reward for finishing he homework, she gets to keep a couple with her in a container in the room. She is diligent with feeding them and returning them to the beach before they get too restless.
One of the restaurants we like a lot is Thai Cat. It has a large beach seating area and serves similar food to the other restaurants. We’ve found that they have garlic morning glory (very similar to Chinese “hollow stemmed vegetable”) which is excellent, and we’re always looking for green vegetable dishes when traveling. The service is extremely attentive as they have staff for 50x more customers than they have. The food is a little more expensive, but that’s because, like a sports bar, they have lots of things you can use for free.
There is a badminton court, a basketball court, and table tennis. There’s a whole gym with weights and muay thai boxing bags. The local staff seem surprised and impressed when I started working the bag (I do Muay Thai and have a bag in my garage). Most importantly, they have some cute hamsters and birds to play with. Baby Bear wants to come back to this restaurant again!
Mama Bear also finds some World Schoolers on Facebook and invites a few other families to come hang out. We have an afternoon at the pool with a family originally from the UK. Another family joins us for dinner at our hotel.
It’s another special dinner night: Street Food night. Here they’ve set up little stalls to serve skewer, pad thai, and many other foods you’d find in a typical night market. It’s cute. And while we order food at the stalls, they still just bring it to our table when it’s ready. For entertainment there’s a reggae band! We spend the night dancing to the great music. What a great four day working vacation from Long Beach (nope, we didn’t bother going anywhere else on the island) in Koh Lanta.
Next stop, Koh Lipe.