Opportunity Blog

For as many times as we have been in Thailand, Sue and I have not taken many vacations. There was our first time in Thailand when we came with a group in 1995. We spent a week and saw major attractions in Bangkok, Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai. The next was just last year with a week trip to Pattaya where we stayed in a very large resort hotel that had seen better days. The guests were all Russian except for us. The resort had over 1000 rooms, not all full, and Sue and I were the only English speakers there. We did have a good time.

View Ko Lanta, Thailand in a larger map

This year we will go to the fabled south of Thailand and stay at a beach hotel near an underwater reef national park on the west coast of Ko Lanta island. Ko Lanta is a large island off the Thai west coast just southeast of Phuket. We’ll take three days for a leisurely drive down. There will be two inexpensive trips on public car ferries (20 min and 5 min) to get our car to the large southern island. We have never been south along the “elephant trunk” of Thailand before.

We are booked into the Moonlight Bay Resort which, at nearly $150 per night is a bit pricey by our standards, but gets us a room on the beach with a beach view in a resort that appears to get uniformly top marks in many internet reviews. And it also pays breakfast and for being there during “peak” season. (note entered later: We only stayed one night at Moonlight Bay Resort – I cannot recommend it)
Sue wanted to spend Christmas at a resort, and at many of these southern Thai resorts prices can nearly double just for the week before Christmas. I saw one (not ours) whose price doubled again for the 24th and 25th.

There is an underwater reef park just south of our hotel, and the list of dive shops and dive tour operators operating on the southern island is very long. We hope to do a lot of looking around in the water there.

It is getting harder to find an “undiscovered” resort area in southern Thailand. First it was Phuket, then Koi Samui. Less than ten years ago Krabi was the new relatively unspoiled place. Each of these places started out with bungalows on the beach, then resort hotels. Now there are high rise condominiums, shopping centers and six lane highways to get you there. Ko Lanta does have resorts, a number of which are still under $50 per night if you are not there during Christmas week. There are still a few bungalow places, but no high rises or big shopping centers that I have heard of.

It should be great, although I won’t know until I get there and see for myself. I’ll tell you more when we come back.