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Khao Lak 2015

Pictures by Jo & David Spinney

December 18th - 21st 2015

Khao Lak, Thailand

Our journey to Khao Lak, Thailand

The journey from home to Khao Lak took about 24 hours and involved 4 different forms of transport.

  • We travelled from our home in San Bartolomé in Spain to Elche in our family car driven by our son Kevin.
  • We then took an overnight coach from Elche to Madrid. David fell asleep within 40kms and slept all the way to Madrid.
  • At Madrid airport we had to take a shuttle bus to our terminal, where we had a few hours wait for our plane.
  • The plane to Moscow was a nice new Airbus widebody flight, the only bad news, they don't serve booze.
  • The next step was a flight to Moscow airport on another Aeroflot flight. Nice modern plane, but still they didn't have any beer or wine!
  • After a 3 hour layover we took another Aeroflot flight to Bangkok.
  • We then had to travel to the other side of Bangkok to their other airport.
  • We now caught a flight to Phuket.
  • On arrival at Phuket we were picked up in a Taxi van and driven the 100kms to Khao Lak.
  • The last stage was a motorcycle and side car ride to our room.

Bangkok

While we were getting the tickets for the transfer from one Bangkok airport to the other David had to open the section on his bag where the tickets and Laptop were.

In the rush to get on the bus he forgot to do the zip up and as he swung the bag onto his back the laptop went flying across the pavement.

We grabbed all the bits of computer and jumped on the bus, David dreading that he had broken the computer. After 10 minutes snapping all the bits back together we turned it on, and it worked! Apart from a crack in the plastic in on corner the computer had survived flying a few metres through the air and hitting the pavement from at least 2m above ground. Well done HP. (David puts it down to no beer in his system)

Khao Lak

The resort we booked was very nice, with rooms scattered in a large grassy area shaded by palm trees.

This is our first trip to Thailand, and we were quite surprised by the way the locals interact with tourists. Everyway you turn they have their hands out trying to separate you from your money. Every few yards along the street you are accosted by tailors trying to sell you a bespoke suit, or a cafe owner trying to get you into the establishment, or a souvenir shop trying to get you to buy their goods.

Once we got used to it and avoided eye contact and just kept repeating No, No, No, we managed to get around the town a bit more quickly.

We were very impressed with the ease of getting access to our money, almost every convenience store had at least 1 ATM. Within about 200 metres of our resort we had over 30 ATM machines, and this is in a small town in the jungle!

Another plus is that every bar, restaurant dive shop and even beach bar has free high speed wi-fi - the speeds were often better than you can get in most towns in Spain.



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