Koh Chang

Arriving in Thailand my first destination was Koh Chang, a large island near Trat and close to the Cambodian border. This island is very nice with lots of nice white sand beaches and it even has the palm trees to make it look almost picture perfect. In addition it seems to have taken the tourism industry a few years to find so although the Northern end of the island is dominated by resorts and large hotels, further south there are still lots of smaller bungalows and more of a backpacker area.

I ended up staying in an area called lonely beach and although it certainly isn't lonely anymore it is still quite good. The atmosphere is very relaxing and it's a lot quieter than further up the island at white sand beach, and again similar to Sihanoukville there seems to be a party on the beach from one of the resorts every night.

While staying on Koh Chang I passed away a couple of days just relaxing on the beach and reading books, as lonely beach was nice and quiet with some stretches that were pretty empty and very few people walking around selling things. On another day I rented a motorbike to check out the rest of the island and visited a couple of waterfalls that were only trickles in the dry season. The western side of the island was not touristy at all, probably because there weren't any sandy beaches but there was a nice fishing village that hadn't been affected by tourism so it was a nice chance to see how the locals live.

Finally the only other thing that I did on Koh Chang was to do a snorkel trip to 4 nearby islands. This trip was kind of a disappointment as I was hoping to be able to see 4 separate islands and get a feeling for how the diving was so I could determine if it was worth it. Well the 4 islands turned out to really be 2 islands and 2 piles of rock sticking out of the sea near the islands so we didn't get to see very much change. The snorkeling wasn't very good as we didn't see very many fish and the coral was really only good at one of the locations that we stopped at. As a result I decided to save my money for diving in the Similan Islands which is supposed to be one of the top 10 dive sites in the world.

From Koh Chang I caught a bus to Bangkok where I only spent a short amount of time before heading down south to Krabi and Koh Lanta. As a result I won't make an update about Bangkok quite yet but my next update will be for Krabi and Koh Lanta down south of Phuket.