Jun 26, 2012
I know the section this blog is in says ‘travel’, but I feel like it should say ‘home’ now. We have been living in Koh Samui for three months now and if I look back to before we came, I couldn’t have dreamt I would enjoy living here so much. We are able to have a wonderful indulgent lifestyle. We live in a beautiful little bungalow, tucked away in a tropical Eden. Sometimes the tropical Eden houses more insects than I’d like, but it’s pretty close to perfect.
We have the most amazing veranda that is a joy to sit out on anytime of day, it’s a beautiful sun trap and really generates all those happy smiley thoughts people have when they are content with their life. The swimming pool is our other life luxury, we love the pool. I could never get Tom in the pool in the UK, but he’s like a new person since we’ve moved here. He swims, eats fruit, veg and rice, and often asks for more! I often have to check his temperature to make sure he doesn’t have some obscure tropical fever, but I think he’s really just getting into the swing of it. The difficulty I think we’ll have on return to the UK is how can we afford a private swimming pool?
Tom and I are pretty busy during the week, so the weekends are a really special time for us. I love Samui weekends as its like going on holiday every weekend (but we don’t have to go anywhere as we live the holiday). Whether you want to swim in waterfalls, lounge on the beach or just tour the island seeing the sites, it never gets boring.
Our favourite weekend activities often involve some wonderful bike rides, we are always trying to find new parts of the island to discover and it still surprises us every time. Samui is not a big island and most people like to stick to the outer edges with the tarmac roads and sea views, but we love the jungle and the hills!! If you can get high enough on your scooter you are more than rewarded with spectacular vistas of Koh Samui and on a beautiful clear day it is truly breath taking.
Getting lost and abandoning the map is part of the fun. I had just hired a new scooter and was taking it for a test drive on some quiet jungle roads, so immersed in the scenery I forgot my turn off and was meandering through delightful traditional Thai villages. I tried to take a short cut and ended up at a dead end, but I made great friends with a gaggle of small Thai children all round faces and smiles waving over enthusiastically to the lost farrang (me)! I then tried to retrace my steps and came across the chanting and pageantry of a Thai wedding. I love exploring the area of Mae Nam on the island, there are always rewarding discoveries on each trip! However whilst I was having a magical Thai adventure, Tom was worried I’d come off the bike and was dead in a ditch, I said I’d only be ten minutes! Whoops!
Tom and I are real food people so there’s a couple of treats we like to indulge in over the weekend. Saturday afternoon is the perfect time for a trip down to a little place outside of Lamai, where they have beautiful waterfront views and you can stuff your face with a particularly delicious ice-cream sundae absorbing the perfect panoramic views of sun, sea and sand! Our other indulgence is a hearty Sunday breakfast! There is a place in Bangrak called Tuk Tuk, we love for breakfast, it’s pretty disappointing for lunch and dinner, but for breakfast it comes up trumps.
We’d love to do more activities that feature a lovely stroll along the beach or even a brisk climb up the hills, but each time we try this we melt faster than butter in a frying pan! A sweaty Tom and Gev is not a good 
look. Tom’s dad suggested we hire bicycles, we explained that if cycling on the roads here doesn’t kill us the humidity will. He didn’t really understand though, Tom relayed that he gets hot just walking up the hill to the house and I added I get hot walking down it!
We are so lucky and have so many things to be cheerful about, we’re nicely rooted to Koh Samui and are happy to extend our trip here from the initial three months to a year plus! Let’s just hope our Thai develops well over the remaining period.
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