Our journey to the first island, Koh Samui, started very very early the next morning with a 3am alarm. “We’ll be fine for a 6am flight!” I had casually stated when booking the trip. This felt far from fine. That was me swiftly removed from flight booking duties.
After bidding farewell to our friendly neighbourhood rabid dogs, we were delivered to the airport, checked our bag (yes, just the one thank you for asking) and were soon on our way to start our little island adventure.

What felt like 10 minutes, a gorgeous sunrise, and an interesting ‘breakfast’ of chicken sausage and fried rice later, we landed in Koh Samui. We headed to the toilets to be greeted by more mosquitos than should ever be in one room at any one time. Repellent swiftly applied, we collected our bag and were ushered into a waiting area for a taxi transfer to our hostel, the Liquid Lounge.

We were unsure of whether it would even be open at such an ungodly hour but luckily we were greeted by a super friendly hostel worker who said he’d look after our bags until check-in at 2pm. So with 6 hours ahead of us to waste, we decided to have a wonder round the streets of Koh Samui. Thailand’s version of Benidorm, we decided, was an adequate description. Bars, bars and more bars which all seemed to brag the cheapest cocktail on the island, with a pharmacy or fast food joint in between, all offering classic English post-binge-drinking food; hamburgers, kebabs and such. Not exactly classic Thai cuisine. That combined with many fat balding Brits did not give us the best first impression of Samui. 

With none of the shops/cafes open for another couple of hours we decided to head to the beach for some sun and a snooze. We found some lovely looking sun loungers outside a restaurant and set up camp, deciding that when the restaurant workers rocked up they would be understanding of our homeless predicament.

We changed into our bikinis and spent the next 6 hours catching up on sleep, dipping in and out of the crystal clear refreshing water, and being weighted on hand and foot by the super eager-to-please restaurant waiter. We ordered a couple of sprites which he delivered in a full on ice bucket. At one point I started to carry it back to get some refills; the waiter literally ran over and took it from me, profusely apologising for not coming to our table. “What is life” we found ourselves asking each other – it all seemed a bit surreal in our sleepless delirium, but decided we could get used to living in paradise. The only thing ruining our paradisical (adj.; paradise like) surroundings were the irritating street sellers trying to sell us every kind of beach paraphernalia under the sun (literally). If we so much as made friendly eye contact with one, we would not be left alone for the next few minutes with the poor guy trying desperately to convince us to buy his blanket/bikini/dangly wooden bird thing. Then when we finally got rid of one, another would come along within 30 seconds! We ended up pretending to be asleep half the time so they wouldn’t try to bother us. 

Finally check-in time had come, so we gathered our sandy belongings and headed to Liquid Lounge. We were shown to our room – a 10 bed shared dorm but nice enough compared to the shed that we had the night before. Deciding that we (ok just me, Sarah’s stomach was still struggling) needed some sustenance for dinner, we asked the staff downstairs for some recommendations and were directed to the local ‘food court’. This turned out to be a load of street food vendors (mostly seafood) set up in one place and the smell was slightly stomach turning. So we decided to find a proper restaurant, being comforted by the hope of a real kitchen where we’d have a lower risk of being…gastro’d…for want of a better word. We settled on an amazing little Italian place where you could see the pastas being freshly cooked in front of you and choose exactly what went in. I had a delicious creamy chicken vegetable concoction and Sarah nibbled on some garlic bread. Poor thing was so jealous (pesto pasta being her no. 1 fave) that we vowed to come back once her stomach was ready for real food again. We trundled back to our hostel and settled down for the night, half expecting to be woken up 8 times over by our fellow backpackers returning.