In one month from today, Emily and I will be in Thailand. We leave Cincinnati on April 5th, have layovers in Chicago and Seoul, South Korea, and then arrive in Phuket, Thailand after about twenty-four hours of travel. We will be in Thailand for one month, making it back to Cincinnati on May 6th.
We don’t have many plans for the trip. We know we want to spend a lot of time on the beaches and there is a school/orphanage/hotel/restaurant that we want to visit. Other than that, it’s pretty much wide-open.
The tentative plan goes something like this....
1. Arrive in Phuket on the 6th and spend the night there. This is the only night that we have a hotel room booked ahead for the entire trip. We figured it would be nice to know where we are going when we get off the plan and try to get our bearings.
2. After a day or two in Phuket, make our way to Yaowawit School (the aforementioned orphanage) in the village of Kapong. Kapong is in the jungle, about 100 miles north of Phuket. We aren’t sure how long we will stay there. Probably a couple of days.
3. After this, we will head northeast toward the gulf coast. The goal is to make it to the island of Ko-Phangan (the smaller island just above Ko Samui). We are looking forward to renting a motorcycle and exploring the island for a week or two. It’s lined with great beaches and some small towns, while most of the interior of the island is mountainous jungle. We will probably visit some of the other islands in the area while we are there. We have some friends who honeymooned there a while back. They basically said that Ko-Phangan is beautiful and peaceful, but there isn’t a ton to do. After a couple of weeks of serious relaxing, they were ready to get back on the road.
4. After Ko-Phangan, the plan gets pretty cloudy. We will likely hop on a train and make our way south to the Malaysian border. We would like to cross over for the day, and then begin making our way back up the western coast. We’ve found some pretty sweet looking places along that coast including secluded beaches national parks and reserves. We want to make sure to check out the town of Krabi (below Phuket on the west coast) on our way back to Phuket.
To say that we are excited would be a bit of an understatement. We have been planning a trip for this spring for well over a year. At first we talked about going to Europe, but after lots of tweaks, we have somehow ended up en route to Southeast Asia. I think that we have all of the gear that we need for the trip, and we have already done a “test-pack” to make sure we can fit everything in to our backpacks......
Not bad for a month long trip. I’m hoping to update the blog a couple times from Thailand. Stay tuned for details.
