Christmas and New Year in Southern Thailand

We met up with my parents once again to spend Christmas on Koh Lanta, a southern island off the coast from Krabi. We arrived at the north of the island and stayed for four nights on Ao Pra (Long Beach), where we celebrated a low-key Christmas. The north is quite unspectacular, built up and very touristy and the unexpected grey weather didn’t do any favours for my first impressions. Luckily for us we stayed in a great bungalow as a Christmas treat from my mum and dad, and spent the rainy afternoons drinking Chang and playing cards on the veranda. Christmas dinner was Thai curry.

A hungover fry-up on the beach, Christmas Day.

After a few days we moved to the south of the island to Klong Jark Bay. The south is much less developed and a lot more like my idea of a Thai island: small coves with pristine white beaches, clear seas and cliffs covered in vegetation. The sun even made a long overdue appearance. It was the perfect place to relax for a few days.

Klong Jark Beach

Sunset, Klong Jark.

One day, whilst sunbathing on a rocky beach, we were surrounded by about 20 monkeys, jumping from tree to tree, combing the beach for left over food. They picked up discarded cans and drank from them, holding the cans with two hands as humans do. They spotted a young couple having a picnic on the beach and wouldn’t leave them alone. For a while there was a stand off between as the couple threw sticks to scare off the monkeys, but more and more monkeys kept arriving until the poor couple abandoned their picnic and left the beach.

The next stop in our family backpacking trip was Ao Nang. We took the ferry from Koh Lanta back to the mainland during a terrible storm. While most of the 200 passengers sat inside the boat, Ric and I stayed out on deck drinking beers with two German guys who were determined to smoke in the pouring rain. Day turned to night as the heavens opened and the boat pitched and rolled in the swell.

There wasn’t very much to see in Ao Nang other than the lovely beach and our hotel’s swim-up bar (!), so we took a short boat ride to near-by Railay, a dramatic bay framed by karsts and white cliffs. While mum and dad soaked up the scenery from the beach, Ric and I went to get a closer look in a sea kayak. Bobbing over the waves we paddled our way around the karsts, stopping at isolated island beaches and exploring caves. It was an amazing way to admire the landscape.

Railay.

Sea kayaking.

We saw in the New Year with a cheesy (and compulsory) gala dinner by the hotel pool. The following evening we wrote our new year’s wishes on a lantern and set it off in a fine ceremony on the beach.

NYE

New Years Day lantern.

Continuing our theme of tagging along on my parents’ holiday, Ric and I flew up to Bangkok to join them for a few days in Bangkok before we left to go to Burma. We excitedly showed them some of our favourite spots: the river, Chinatown, shopping for tat on Khao San Road and we explored some interesting new places together too…

Our first meal together in the capital was in a restaurant intriguingly named Cabbages and Condoms. The restaurant, decorated with condom lamp shades, a condom Father Christmas and a condom post box, is run by a local community development project whose motto is that condoms should be as accessible as vegetables throughout Thailand. The project aims to make contraception widely available throughout the country and provides education on sexual health. The food was excellent and we were served by students from one of the project’s schools.

Condom lamp shade at Cabbages and Condoms.

We progressed from the condom restaurant to a more evident demonstration of the country’s sex life – the red light district at Soi Cowboy! Not an obvious choice for a place to take the parents but it was close to their hotel and a notorious area of Bangkok we thought we ought to see on our fifth visit to the city. After barely twenty minutes of squinting into the dazzling neon lights, surrounded by tiny tiny hotpants and spangley bras, we’d all seen more than enough and we retreated to a less seedy part of town. Seeing the old European men pawing the young Thai girls was an uncomfortable reminder of the other kind of tourism that goes on in this part of the world.

After three weeks of cities, beaches, monkeys, posh hotels and spicy food it was time to say goodbye to my mum and dad and leave them to fend for themselves in Bangkok. It was hard saying goodbye not knowing when I’ll see them again but we had a fantastic time together and I dare say they enjoyed Thailand a tad more than they enjoyed visiting us in Korea!