Day 14 Koh Samui Island, Thailand

After 4 days of floating around on the sea, over eating, over drinking, feeling totally ignorant going to every trivia game on board we are very excited to be getting of the ship for a day.

Koh Samui Island in Thailand has been added as a stop on our itinerary.  It sounds like mostly a beach destination, but anything off the ship for us is good.  Lenny and Noreen from Glasgow Scotland and Andre and I decide we will just get off the boat and find someone to take us to a beach for a couple of hours and a market.

This is a tender port, Andre gets up at 6:30 to get tender tickets, we are on boat number 2, yeah.  There are the boats from the  cruise ship being used, as well there are a number of local boats being used for tendering.  Because we are a half empty ship it really doesn't take too long to go ashore.  It took a while for the boat to be cleared, so the captain announced that our departure from the Island would be delayed for an hour to give us more time on shore.

 After some negotiating when we got off with a couple of people we settle on someone who takes us to a guy to spend the day with us for $100 for all 4 of us.  Since it started at $180 with another guy we did OK we thought.  We were told the driver spoke English, not really.  He stopped to pick up his wife and daughter, we told them they could spend the day with us, it was a huge van, so off we go.

Start off in some terrible traffic, there is a tiny bit of construction going on, that has caused a major traffic jam.  The driver stops and gets us some snacks and water.  I think the drive to the beach took about 1.25 hours, should have been about 30 minutes.  We are a little worried about getting back to the ship on time.

We are finally seeing land again, beautiful!

We ate breakfast here most mornings.  Usually a drink or 2 in the afternoon in the shade as well

Local tender boat

Those that booked excursion through the ship got off on these boats

Lenny and Noreen, on our way to a fun day together!

Snack the driver picked up for us.  The driver also set up his phone as a hotspot for wifi for us.

Outdoor Laundromat.

So many people driving scooters or motorcycles, gas is sold by the bottle

This tiny bit of construction caused so much traffic!

We drove about 1/2 way around the Island to Chaweng Beach, a nice beach in a pretty busy town with lots of shopping.  You can tell how few tourists there are, many many empty beach chairs on the beach.

BBQ on the beach

Town where we spent a couple of hours on the beach, so many power lines!

After a couple of hours we now head back to the cruise ship.  We are doing a complete circle of the Island as we realize the driver is going back a different way.  We are not too far from the cruise ship when the driver asks if we want to visit a waterfall, of course we do, so off we go to Namuang Waterfall.  This turns out to be so much nicer than Cambodia, we are very glad we stopped.

Drivers daughter that spend the day with us

valentines day roundabout

Tender back to our ship

Back on board for a beautiful sunset.  We actually got to see it twice because we had to turnaround not too long after we started out because some poor someone had fallen getting on the tender boat and had a big egg on her head that they felt should be attended to.  We have since heard that they flew home the next day, thank goodness nothing too serious, and they only missed one sea day which we had already had too many of.