Our Honeymoon in Thailand, Part 3 - Koh Samui

After our adventures in Bangkok and Elephant Hills, it was time for us to head to the last leg of our journey - Koh Samui. We had experienced some amazing things but now we were ready to sit back and relax at the gorgeous Centara Villas.

From Elephant Hills, we were driven to a ferry which took us to the island. It was a crazy long journey and we were feeling awful by the end of it. We were so relieved to finally reach the resort.

 

We were greeted with refreshing drinks and lemon-scented face towels served cold. I cannot tell you how grateful we were for these.
The manager of the hotel informed us that they had made a mistake. We had originally booked a Deluxe Pool Villa with a beach view and a private pool, but they had given our room away. He apologised profusely and told us that we would spend one night in one of their Deluxe Spa Suites - a room with its own hot tub out on the deck - but then they would upgrade us to the Family Deluxe Pool Villa in the hotel for the rest of our stay. He told us that the villa was spectacular and way better than the room we had originally booked. Honestly, we were so tired and he was genuinely being brilliant so we happily accepted. He thanked us for being so understanding and gave us tickets for free drinks, meals and massages on top of the upgrade. Everywhere we had been, the Thai people really wanted us to be happy. Thailand is the land of smiles and it's a big deal if someone makes you drop your smile, especially in the hospitality sector, so we could see that the manager really did want to do his best to make it up to us. He was fantastic.

We made our way to our temporary room and relaxed in the hot tub while we ordered some room service. The room itself was gorgeous, it was a decent enough size (the manager had apologised to us for putting us in a 'smaller' room than we were expecting) and after the really long journey, we were just happy to be in such a beautiful space and be still for a bit.

The bed was decorated with some gorgeous flower and petal arrangements. It was almost too pretty to disturb (if we hadn't been so relieved to stretch out and relax on the bed with some grub).

The food, again, was amazing. We were really being spoiled with our food everywhere we went on this trip. Jim decided to go a little more western and had himself a pizza as a starter. Sure, why not? It had been a really long day. I stayed traditional and got some chicken satay. I always go for red curry and Jim always goes for green, so we were able to try them both on our first night there.

Our room wouldn't be ready until late morning so when we woke up, we went to explore some of the resort on our way to breakfast.

The communal pools were gorgeous! The resort had 3 big pools tiered at different levels, some with waterfalls and all looking over the beach. Admittedly, we never actually swam in these pools, we stayed more to our own private pool and the ocean.

We had breakfast included with our package and we really enjoyed leisurely strolling down to The Reef Cafe by the beach every morning to get some grub. Jim would usually go for the croissants (he adores French food).

And I would usually go for what I called my Thai Fry-Up. My eggs, sausages and bacon were the egg fried rice, the pork dumplings and, of course, the bacon. Anything else was just lovely extras, like the noodles and sometimes bao.

We always had fruit too. There was a huge array of fresh fruits to choose from. I loved how the oranges were a proper green - their real colour before they were bred to be the bright orange we know in the west. My favourites were the dragonfruit in the photo above and the rambutan in the photo below. I couldn't get enough of the rambutan. I ate so much of these in the mornings.

This was the view from the restaurant where breakfast was served. It was an absolute treat to look out onto this every morning.

After breakfast, our room was ready. I cannot begin to describe the shock when we were shown how amazing this suite was. It was walled off from the rest of the resort with high stone walls (which we loved because we adore solitude) and the entrance had traditional Thai wooden doors. It was pretty awesome being tucked away in there. In the room we were to have originally, the pools were quite exposed to the public walking around the resort, so it was a really nice treat on our honeymoon to have some privacy.

The villa had two buildings. The first was an entrance parlour which could be used also as a living room or an extra bedroom for three people.  We kept the second building as our spare chill-out room. It also had an extra shower and an extra wardrobe with more robes. We took full advantage of all of these.

After that, you came out onto a beautiful, long deck that led to our main bedroom.

Our bedroom was beautiful. And huge! The photos don't really do it justice - to the right was a walk-in closet and dressing room which led to the bathroom.

Our bathroom was glorious. It had a huge open, walk-in shower, two sinks and a gorgeous bathtub which they filled it with rose petals when we arrived.
The whole room was made up of these astounding floor to ceiling windows which looked out onto the swimming pool and the private deck. It was really awesome to take incredibly relaxing baths overlooking the jungle trees with the ocean sounds right behind them.

The bathroom also led out to our pool. We absolutely adored this pool and spent so much time in it during our stay. It was bigger than the one we were going to get in our original villa, so we were stoked.

The doors from our main room led out onto the gorgeous patio deck that I've mentioned before. It stretched the whole way around the villa's two buildings, led to the pool and had some jungle trees and plants as a backdrop with the beach behind them. This meant we had loads of privacy and some awesome nature sounds right outside our door. We could barely hear anyone else from the resort.

The deck even overlooked the other pools. This was our first holiday where we had our own private pool, so we couldn't help but feel a little smug being able to stay in our closed-off haven.

I honestly don't ever think I could holiday somewhere with a shared pool ever again. I will always be looking for places with a private pool. It was awesome to jump in whenever we wanted to and not be disturbed or have any forced interactions with other people.

The pool also looked out over the ocean, which was gorgeous. We would sometimes just float in the water and watch the boats go by.

There was so much plant life around the pool, which I loved. It was super lush and green and just bursting with life. There were even trees that cascaded above us, which kept the pool lovely and cool.

Yeah, like I said, we spent a lot of time in the pool. And both Jim and I love to relax by reading, so the combination of pool, sunbathing and some great books was utter heaven.

Of course,  I totally played around with some underwater photography.

In the evenings, we would bring drinks up from the bar and get a bit tipsy in the pool. When we were extra lazy, we would order them via room service with our dinner. We felt after all the adventures we had, we were allowed to be pretty hedonistic.

The sunsets from the pool were breathtaking. Every hotel I've ever stayed at always had a closing time for their pools. This was the first time I had ever not had a restriction on a pool. We would stay in the pool well into the late hours, sometimes drinking, sometimes just relaxing. It was just so awesome to go in whenever we felt like it.

One of the best things about this place was the space for yoga. I loved unrolling my mat on the deck, anywhere I pleased, and settling in for a long practise with nothing but the sounds of the trees rustling and the ocean waves skimming the shore.

There were no studios near me when I lived in England, so I do a lot of yoga in my living room. Being able to get outside in the gorgeous sunshine and just flow through some asanas was glorious. As you can imagine, there's very little opportunity to practise outside in the type of weather England has.

I lugged my yoga mat all around Thailand (not really, we travelled really light with only a backpack each and the mat folded up to fit in the bottom) just to be able to do this. With the other places we had been on this trip, I wasn't really able to roll out my mat because it had been all go go go (in a really good way). Now that we were being still for a bit, it was just perfect.

I obviously spent my savasanas floating in the pool. Splashing into the cool water after a hot practise in the heat was a must.

I also spent a lot of time meditating in the pool. I'm pretty new to meditation, but I'm breaking out of the idea that your mind needs to be 'clear' or 'empty', that it's more about keeping yourself in the present moment and letting sounds and sensations pass on by. What better way to do this than to sit in lotus, close your eyes, breathe, and feel the water get more and more still until it's completely glassy.

We also, of course, relaxed down on the beach too. It was a stunning beach as well. There was plenty of room to go and explore and the resort put out sun loungers and hammocks. I'll give you three guesses as to where I spent most of my time on the beach.

My new husband reading in the hammock on the beach. This made me so happy to see.

And my new husband playing the butler and bringing me drinks in the hammock made me even happier!

Part of our honeymoon package included massages (of course) and we also had some free from the upgrade. We adored the time we spent at the spa in Bangkok, so we were super pumped to visit the spa at our resort. It was amazing! We were able to get all kinds of treatments and massages (I went for hot stone most of the time), and we were in here quite a bit. Like I said, absolute, unashamed hedonism!

We did venture outside of the resort a few times. It was tough, I mean, there was very little we didn't have right at our doorstep in our villa. Honestly, if it wasn't for the sheer thrill of exploring, we probably wouldn't have left at all.

There were some bikes and mopeds for hire outside the resort. We really liked the idea of exploring parts of Thailand on one of these, but we were far too intimidated to do this in Bangkok (we saw some crazy stuff on the roads there). But Koh Samui seemed like the perfect place to try it out. The roads were pretty quiet and it was mostly tourists like us.

We went to the main strip in Koh Samui and, honestly, we were a bit disappointed. It just didn't feel right. Everyone around us appeared to be so angry and frustrated. All the anger and shouting seemed to stem from the tourist traps. It was really palpable after coming from Bangkok where everything felt much more authentic and the people happier. It felt like an angry version of a strip in Spain. I would have been a bit disappointed to have spent our entire honeymoon there. I'm so glad we did trips all over Thailand, it would have been awful to travel so far and feel like we ended up in a place that may as well have been one of the extra touristy strips we were so used to in Europe.

I even had to be really careful with my dairy allergy when eating at any of the restaurants on the strip as they had tried to 'westernise' a lot of the dishes by swapping the coconut cream in their curries for milk cream. Any of the dishes I had to avoid, Jim told me were awful anyway. We weren't big fans of the place.

We did get to explore other parts of the island, which we really enjoyed like these beautiful beaches dotted all around Koh Samui.

It was nice to shake things up a bit and get drinks elsewhere on the island. We chatted to some tourists around the place, but we missed talking to locals like we did quite a bit in Bangkok.

So, admittedly, for the rest of the trip, we pretty much stayed in our super comfy hotel robes (these things were amazing! I wish I had bought one) and ate, drank, swam and chilled out for most of our stay. We felt we had satisfied our exploring side on the island enough. We had seen quite a bit elsewhere, but a lot of it was too touristy for us. We even came across some wildlife tours which on first glance looked a bit like Elephant Hills, but when we went to look into them online, we found out that they drug and chain down a lot of the animals. We really didn't want to give these places any business, especially after coming from an ethical sanctuary where they treated the animals amazingly.

We utterly loved our room service. Pretty sure we did this more often than going down to the restaurant for food.

There was also a lot to do around the beach near us. We were there during jellyfish season and we were warned about when we could and couldn't go in the water. They would have staff members swim out to collect some of the jellyfish for us to look at. Their sting was deadly to people who might be allergic to it or have a big reaction, and apparently, most tourists do. You don't know until you've been stung, so it's not worth the risk. A lot of the staff, some of whom were locals, knew they would be fine around the jellyfish, so that's why they were able to venture out without any consequences.

When the lack of warning flags on the beach let us know we could go in, we grabbed our snorkels (which we also brought for such an occasion) and explored around the rocks.

When we weren't snorkelling or marvelling at jellyfish, we chilled out with some drinks (have you guessed by now that Pina Coladas were my drink of choice?).

The restaurant served some seriously amazing grub. Their menu had a 'street food' style to it. It was pretty good, of course nowhere near the awesomeness of the street food in Bangkok, but we were still happy with it. Jim tucked into his prawns and fried rice a lot, and I couldn't get over this insanely awesome Pangnan curry.

One of the things included in our package was a honeymoon dinner on the beach. This was a pretty cool experience. We had a beautiful evening for it and the sunset was shaping up to be really gorgeous. There was also a thunder and lightning storm way off out to sea, so we got to see some lightning bolts streak across the sky in the distance.

It was a pretty cheesy thing to do, but it was a hilarious experience. We could barely see our food so we had no idea what we were eating. It was all amazingly delicious, but I kept eating this one huge stalk of lemongrass (I think) over and over again because I kept not seeing where I put it aside and kept scooping it back up. But it was super chill and neither of us had ever dined like that on a beach before so I'm glad we got to do that.

Some evenings, there was live entertainment. We would chill out on the hammock on the beach and listen to the music coming from the bar.

On our last night there, we decided to go nuts with the room service and ordered a bunch of food. We sat down and watched a little bit of Futurama while sitting out on the deck.

On our last morning, we headed down for a late breakfast before packing up and begrudgingly heading back to England (where we were living at the time).

It was such a beautiful trip and, as you can see from three really long blog posts, we experienced so many amazing things. It was honestly such a life-changing adventure, we had never done anything like this before. It's a really cool feeling to have loved our honeymoon so much and to have experienced it with such a brilliant adventure buddy like my husband.

Aoife x