Koh Tao & Koh Samui - The Gulf Islands

Koh Tao

Unfortunately, my last night in Khao Sok was spent with a particularly nasty case of food poisoning. I won’t go into details but it was pretty much as bad as you can imagine food poisoning could be. 

That made our travel day between Khao Sok and Koh Tao pretty painful for me. I’d woken up feeling surprisingly acceptable (perhaps because my body was entirely empty), so we decided to just go and hope for the best.

The 2 hour van ride from Khao Sok to Donsak Pier wasn’t exactly fun, but it was ok. Little did at know that we’d were able to get on a truly traumatic ferry ride. When I think ferry, I think slow moving, steady boat. I’ve never got seasickness, I thought I’d get to chill out. No. That did not happen. We got on a ‘high speed ferry’ (it was actually a catamaran and it was ROUGH! I’m not normally seasick but having barely recovered from food poisoning… I did not fare well. We had three legs of this ferry ride - an hour to Koh Samui, half an hour to Koh Phangam, then about hour and a half to Koh Tao. It did not get easier. There were a lot of extremely seasick people, so much so that the crew were handing out plastic sick bags like lollies. Meanwhile, I was staring at the horizon like it was an extreme sport and I’m oddly kind of impressed with myself for not being sick all over again. 

0/10 - would not recommend.

A side note - around Christmas 2024, all these islands were hit with extreme storms and flooding. Four weeks later and the flood damage appears to be have been cleared but the weather is still very windy and the waters are still very rough. 

Apparently this more or less happens every year - there’ll be a few weeks of intense and heavy rains and flooding, then a week later it’s blue skies and things are mostly cleaned up. Although, from what we have been told, this season was more intense than most. 

We had beautiful accommodation on Koh Tao - a wooden bungalow on stilts, on the side of the hill overlooking the ocean. 

I was in full recovery mode (both from the food poisoning and the ferry), so we weren’t very adventurous. We were fortunate to have a day bed on the balcony of our bungalow and it was well used.

We went on a few walks around the main town of Sairee, but otherwise spent a few days resting up. 

Koh Samui

Unfortunately, there is only one way off Koh Tao: the ferry. I was dreading this. But, this time we were prepared. We bought motion sickness tablets in 7 Eleven (50c a pack, great value) and were prepared to find a place to sit outside - even if it meant copping sea spray.

It was a better journey, I will say that. I’m not sure if it was because the sea was less rough, I was less unwell or the motion sickness tablets actually worked. Maybe it was a combination of all three? I still didn’t enjoy it and will never be doing it again! Sorry, Koh Tao, this is goodbye!

We arrived on Koh Samui in the early afternoon, wandered around the town and went on a rather challenging beach walk. It was super windy (monsoon winds, we read online) and the beach had been pretty messed up by the storm a month early. The sand is undulating and runs steeply into the water now, so it’s awkward to walk along - but I love a beach walk so we did it anyway.

We also located some very overpriced smoothies and a nice place to sit for a while! 

Koh Samui is very popular (it has an airport) and the number of tourists and jacked up prices certainly reflect this (you can pay prices comparative to Australia if you’re not careful).

Our second day here was spend lying around by the hotel pool - we decided to splurge a little and book a hotel right on the beach, so we had to make the most of the location! 

We went for another beach walk that afternoon and found a pretty nice view point - behind us is Lamai Beach (the area we are staying in). 

We headed to a night market for some cheap eats that night - but, while I’m physically over the food poisoning, it’s now become a bit of a mental battle to get back into the foods!

Roti, however, will always go down well. 

It’s quite tricky to get around Koh Samui unless you want to spend a ton of money on taxis or hire a scooter (I’m very wary of this because I’ve seen a lot of foreign tourists driving like idiots and / or walking around with bandages from scooter accidents). However, we were able to walk to a nearby viewpoint - Lamai Viewpoint. 

It was only about 10-15 min walk uphill and we arrived at a lovely viewpoint. We ordered some more overpriced smoothies (oh well) and spent about an hour taking in the views. The ocean looks far calmer from this vantage point! 

You’d think we would be sick of street food by now but I’m actually not - it’s so affordable and when it’s cooked right in front of you, you can’t go too far wrong. We grabbed spring rolls and cheese balls ($6), giant chicken skewers ($5), and fruit shakes ($6) from a little food court in Lamai and felt very well fed! 

Much of the rest of our time in Koh Samui was spent lounging by the beach or by the hotel pool. A record amount of books were read and relaxing was done! 

We did hunt down a little local Thai restaurant for our last dinner - the food was amazing and we sat in little cushions on the floor.

I think we peaked early due to our visit to Koh Lanta - Koh Samui has a lot of fancy restaurants and hotels, but Koh Lanta was hands down my favourite Thai island! 

Sadly, it’s nearly the end of our adventures in Thailand and I’m certainly not ready to go home :-(