South-East Asia

Next day we went by bus to the lovely island of Ko Chang (8 euro per person for aircon bus and ferry crossing). We decided to stay at Lonely beach first, which comes recommended for its nice and yet not too touristic, fancy and expensive atmosphere. It lived up to our expectation of a long, clean, sunny beach with lots of friendly backpackers around. It is quite surprising how many people nowadays take their timeouts for a long break. Got a nice bungalow there (Siam Hut Ressort, 15 euro with fan) and a fine sea-view restaurant with sunset-chillout atmosphere and really good food. By the way, this is the first country I travelled where a main meal cost only half of what a beer costs! The food here is a marvel, and not as spicy as expected, though its often enough to make you sweat and cry! The only thing we did not yet dare trying are the stir-fried worms, maggots, crickets and caterpillars as well as fish intestines.

After hanging out a couple of days there and getting the first sunburn and mosquito bites of the season, we changed location to White Sand Beach just 20km away. We got a bit lost there as we had to discover that our hostel of choice at a couple of euro had turned into some luxury resort coming at ten times the prices. That taught us to carefully check the issue date of our guidebooks. Anyway, even in this rather touristic spot you still have a couple of budget hostels, and we can recommend Maylamean Bungalows (from 8 euro per night with shower and fan), with monkeys just in the backyard and your private monster-sized gecko doing a hellish noise several times per hour during the sleeping period. I actually though it was some huge bullfrog until informed otherwise... Also a very nice piece of earth, you get a lovely beach for yourself if you just walk a bit northward from the main city beach. This is probably one of the places where one would like to settle down to retire.

After lengthy discussions, we decided to rent a motorbike for a day. This might appear to be a normal action for anybody back home. Here, thanks to left-side driving, aggressive drivers and steep hills, the number of accidents is pretty high. The typical victim: white, male, sunburned, wearing nothing but swimming pants and crocs. Easily to be identified due to its bad-healing abrasion bruises, wrapped ankles and crutches. All pharmacies offering crutches for rent speaks for itself.
Luckily, with some scary moments we got away unharmed, though the trip itself was not exciting, as the eastern shore of the island is not too exciting due to its lack of beautiful beaches. Well, not so much more to tell about Ko Chang. To sum up, a very nice place to start your vacation and get yourself into the right mood for the months to come. Hey, we still got 18 weeks left!!!