I’m back in my apartment in Shanghai now, where I’m still recovering from our recent trip to Thailand. Last week, we spent several days in Bangkok and on the beautiful island of Koh Lanta. My wife arranged this trip as a wonderful 50th-birthday gift for me, and as a Christmas present for my daughters. All in all, it was a fabulous sun-soaked journey to the tropics, although there are a couple of things we would have done differently, had we known better.

As readers of my blogsite will know already, over the past three years, I’ve made many trips to Southeast Asia, including several visits to Thailand. However, these were all business trips of some sort or another—either conference trips, or recruiting trips. True, I did have some time during these trips to do some touristy things, such as visiting a temple here and there, but the focus was always on work. So I was glad to have an opportunity to spend a whole week of leisure time with my family in Thailand over the Christmas break. On top of that, my wife and daughters had never been to Thailand before, so it was a great opportunity for them to experience and learn about this wonderful country firsthand and share my fascination for this part of the world.

During this journey, I often thought back on my first trip to Thailand in 1988, which was also around Christmas time. I traveled there with a college classmate after we had spent the summer and fall learning Chinese in Taiwan. We met in Hong Kong in mid-December and flew to Bangkok on my birthday, then we took a bus down to Phuket (about an eight-hour journey as I recall), and from there we had a three-hour boat ride to the island of Phi Phi Don, where we spent a few days relaxing and snorkeling in the bays and on the beaches of this pristine island.  I still have some photos from that trip, and from them you can see how it was a relatively undeveloped island at that point. I recall there were still plenty of local Thai villagers going about their own business amidst the growths of tourist bungalows on the island.

So, one of my goals for this trip was to revisit the Phi Phi islands with my family and recapture some of that magic. Only things did not turn out quite as I hoped.

Our Two Days in Bangkok

For our family trip, we flew from Shanghai to Bangkok and spent two days there before flying down to Krabi to reach our destination of Koh Lanta.

During our first day in Bangkok, I took them to see the Jim Thompson home. Despite some initial grumbling from our daughters (not a museum, Dad! boring!) they seemed to enjoy it. For those who haven’t been there, the Jim Thompson home is one of the most famous tourist sites in Bangkok. It was the home of an American expat who had settled in Thailand after World War II. During WWII, he was a member of the OSS, precursor to the CIA. He built up the silk industry in Bangkok and collected art, and his home is full of fabulous antiques and now serves as a museum and tourist site. He disappeared mysteriously in Malaysia in 1967, and nobody to this day has been able to explain what happened to him.

After touring the Jim Thompson home, we made our way over to the shopping mall known as Siam Paragon, to pick up a few things for our trip. For one thing, I wanted a nice day pack and was looking for the Osprey Day Light backpack (I have an insatiable fetish for backpacks), and found it there along with plenty of other choices for travelers. This mall is connected to other malls in a huge labyrinthine complex that runs along one of the central roads of Bangkok. We had a nice if expensive dinner there at a Thai restaurant called Nara, and then headed back to the hotel. 

The following day, we took a guided tour of three famous temples: the Golden Buddha Temple, Wat Pho, and the Marble Temple. I’d been to all of them before, but of course it’s always nice to go back and catch more details, and for the girls it was a real eye-opener to see these beautiful temples and Buddhas. 

The tour of the temples was arranged by a tour company, whose representative approached us at the airport telling us they could offer us a free government-sponsored tour, as long as we covered  the tax of 1000 Thai baht and tips for the guides. So we agreed. It turned out to be a very good deal and it worked out well. We were taken around the city by a safe, competent, English-speaking driver in a comfortable van, and we had a female guide with us, who gave us all the basic info we needed to know for the tour. It wasn’t high-level guidance, but it worked out just fine. The only caveat is that they took us to their company HQ at the end of the tour, ostensibly for a debrief, and put us at the desk of a company rep, who offered to book us some more services. We told them we were all covered and left without any hassle, so it all worked out just fine. They also took us to a center that sells jewelry, where my wife bought some items for reasonable prices.

That afternoon, since we were staying at the Royal Orchid Sheraton along the Chao Phraya River, we took a ferry across to the other side of the river to visit the impressive Icon Siam shopping mall. There, we navigated our way up the vertigo-inducing escalators to the upper floors, where we had lunch on the deck overlooking the river at a Korean BBQ restaurant staffed by many attentive Thai waiters, who served us up a delicious meal. We then decided to take advantage of the cinema, which was enormous and took up several floors, to see the latest and final Star Wars film, in 4D no less. (As an aside, I have to say that I’m still partial to the first trilogy of this epic nine-part series, but that could be pure nostalgia on the part of a 50-year-old man.) 

Our Three-Day Stay on Koh Lanta

The next morning, we were on a one-hour flight to Krabi and then by van to Koh Lanta. The hotel we booked at Koh Lanta, the Sri Lanta Resort, arranged a van to take us from the airport to the hotel, which is around a 90-minute ride, and includes a short passage across the water on a ferry. The road hugs the western coastline of the island lined with tour guide agencies and small mom-and-pop restaurants as well as plenty of hotels. 

A variety of vehicles parades up and down the road. Most folks seem to prefer getting around on motorcycles and mopeds, including both European tourists and locals. At this time of year, there were scads of Scandinavians, who joined us on the flight from Bangkok to Krabi. There is a large Muslim population on the island, and Muslim men and women and their families were bopping up and down the road on their motorbikes. There are also lots of tuktuks and vans trafficking tourists around the island as well.

Even so, the overall feeling of Lanta is that it is much less congested and touristy than its rival Phuket. I can confirm this as I was in Phuket two years ago. I had chosen Lanta on the advice of my DKU colleague Bryce Beemer, who is an expert in this part of the world and speaks fluent Thai (I’m envious of that!). He recommended Lanta as a more laid-back alternative to Phuket. It was a great suggestion, and overall we felt we had ample space there to enjoy our vacation, and there was still plenty that we didn’t get to see during our three-day visit.

We arrived at the Sri Lanta Resort around midday and settled into our rooms. We’d booked a two-bedroom unit with a balcony overlooking the beach and the ocean, which afforded amazing sunset views and a night sky full of stars. I liked the unit, but my daughters and wife, being big-city dwellers by nature, found a few things uncomfortable. For one, they were freaked out by the white newts that kept popping up outside and inside our unit. I tried to assuage my youngest daughter’s fears by giving them names—“Oh, don’t worry, that’s just Merwyn, he’s dropped in to say hello”—but it was of little use.

Overall, the Sri Lanta Resort was quite nice by our reckoning. There was an open area with tables right next to our unit, where they served breakfast buffets, which were quite good with a variety of offerings. We also joined their Christmas Eve celebration featuring an outdoor dinner by the beach, along with live entertainment in the form of a local boy band playing gamelan-style music interspersed with lovely Thai dancers. It was quite a feast and we gorged ourselves on the buffets and stands with BBQ meats and plenty of other Thai goodies including the good old mango sticky rice combo, which we couldn’t seem to get enough of during our trip.

We also enjoyed some early-evening baths in the temperate ocean water along the beach as the sun was setting across the ocean, and I took plenty of gorgeous sunset photos both in and out of the water. The waves were gentle as was the gradient, which was perfect for introducing my younger daughter Hannah to the fun of sand and surf—as you might have discerned by now, my daughters are a bit cloistered from the rugged outdoor lifestyle, living as we have in Shanghai all these years.

One of the highlights of our three-day stay on Koh Lanta was our visit to Lanta Animal Welfare (LAW), a center for the care of stray dogs and cats on the island and from nearby islands. They bring in animals that are in distress, where they treat them, house them, feed them, and help them find owners if possible. They also spay and neuter the animals to keep the stray populations down. We took the full guided tour of the facilities along with a few dozen other guests mainly from Europe. 

I believe that we were all deeply impressed by the organization of the facility, and by the loving care they gave to the animals in the center. Since my daughters love both cats and dogs, this was a perfect place for them to spend an hour or more cuddling with some of the little critters. Needless to say, there was also plenty of spraying and hand washing on site to keep people and animals healthy and prevent the spread of diseases.

Exploring the Phi Phi Islands by Speed Boat 

The highlight of our trip was a full-day excursion to the famed Phi Phi Islands off the western coast of Lanta, which I’d booked earlier via Booking.com. This is where I’d spent a few days around Christmas time back in 1988 with a college buddy. I had so many enchanting memories of those islands, and I was looking forward to revisiting them after so many decades. This was also my own Christmas gift to my family. 

Early that morning, a driver of a canopied truck picked us up along with some other guests from Eastern Europe at the hotel’s reception area, and drove us around 30 minutes up the main coastal road to a beach on the northern part of the island. There, we climbed into a green speedboat along with around 20 other guests of different ages from various countries speaking multiple languages. Led by a group of Thai guides, we sped across the bay toward the islands at breakneck speed, arriving at our first destination in around 45 minutes. This was a far cry from my first journey there in 1988, when I recall it took us around three hours to get there from Phuket.

Our first stop was Phi Phi Lei, an uninhabited island that looks like a movie set, with tall cliffs jutting straight out of the crystal blue waters. We settled in a nook in the island along with a dozen other tour boats and did some leisurely swimming around the boat, then moved on to catch a view of the famed Maya Beach, where the story of the story of the book and film The Beach took place. I remember we visited that beach 31 years ago and got to walk on it, but this time it was closed to tourism, ostensibly to let the beach and corral repair itself. 

Then we sped off to a spot on another island called Monkey Bay, where we spent an hour snorkeling in a designated area with a corral reef. This was a fabulous part of the trip, and for my daughters it was the first time they’d done this sort of activity. There were plenty of colorful fish and anemones to see under the water, and they took to it like fish to water as the apt saying goes. The boat provided us with masks and snorkels and I also nabbed a pair of fins. I was overexcited, and soon I was diving down into the water to look at the corral close up. I also spent a lot of time swimming back and forth to make sure that both my daughters were doing okay.

After an hour of strenuous activity, we climbed back in the boat and sped across the waters to our next destination, Bamboo Island, where they fed us a Thai lunch. After lunch, while my wife wisely rested in the shade of a tree, my daughters and I did some more snorkeling and searched for colorful shells in the waters off Bamboo Island, until we were called back to the boat around 1:30 pm to head to our final island: Phi Phi Don.

By that time we’d racked up around three hours of swimming and snorkeling in the clear blue waters in the middle of the day. 

We arrived thirty minutes later in the sparkling blue bay of Phi Phi Don, the most famous island of the group and also the most touristy. The bay was replete with boats of all shapes and sizes, and the dock was chock-full of tourists from all over the world speaking dozens of languages. The area around the dock was built-up to bursting with bars, restaurants, hotels, cafes, knick-knack shops, and even a McDonalds and Burger King. It was a sad awakening all right. My distant memories of this pristine, quiet island were shattered. All along the bay, you could see developments of all shapes and sizes.

After walking around the docks a short while and stopping at a bar for a drink, at 3:15 pm we got back in the boat to head back to Lanta. On the way back, we rode at the front of the boat, which was speeding across the ocean at a great pace, when all of a sudden it stopped in the middle of the ocean. Obviously something was wrong with the engines. Presently, they got the engines going again, but we were only puttering along, and any chance of returning to the shore by the allotted time was kaput. Eventually, a somewhat larger boat belonging to the company sped out to rescue us from Lanta. We were all transferred over to that boat, and within minutes we were whisked back to the shores of Lanta, much to the credit of the tour company.

Returning Home, With a Price to Pay

By the time we’d returned to the Sri Lanta Resort, I was feeling the exhaustion of the long day’s journey. I accompanied my daughter Hannah into the gentle ocean for our ritual evening bath and felt a strong headache coming on. Over the trip back to Lanta, it had become apparent that I hadn’t taken proper care to protect my back from the strong sun. By this time, my back was burning red. My shoulders were aching from all the exertion of those hours of snorkeling on the Phi Phi islands. Basically, I was a complete wreck. That night, I slept poorly, suffering from both my sunburned back and from a pinched nerve in my left shoulder. To top it off, I hadn’t brought any medications, which I always do on trips. Fortunately, the shop at the reception area had packets of Tylenol for sale, which kept me alive the next day.

The next morning we took an early van ride back to Krabi airport to catch our flight back to Bangkok. By the time we arrived at the airport, I had come down with a bad case of diarrhea. I was making frequent trips to the bog at the airport and all through the flight. By the time we arrived in Bangkok, I could barely stand. We took a van to the hotel, where I crashed into bed and spent the afternoon and evening resting while the girls spent our last day in Thailand exploring around the neighborhood of our hotel, the Novotel, which we all agreed was quite a nice place to stay.

Fortunately, the next morning I felt well enough to get on the plane back to Shanghai with my family. It took me another three days or so to recover from my various illnesses, which were obviously brought on by the strenuous exertions of our Phi Phi islands trip, combined with my lack of protection from the sun.

Lessons Learned

Were we to do this again, I would do a few things differently. First, we all agreed it would have been nice to spend another day or two in Lanta. There was still so much to explore there that we didn’t see. Also, after the enervating day trip to the Phi Phi islands, I’d recommend a day or two of complete rest and relaxation. 

Second, the next time I go snorkeling in the tropics, I will be much better prepared. I should have known this already from my many years of living in Sydney, but not covering my back was a cardinal sin. I will bring proper attire next time and keep my back covered. I also overestimated what my 50-year old body was capable of doing in the water without serious consequences.

In any case, this event was a big wake-up call for me. From now on, I’m going to put more emphasis on my fitness and not make any assumptions about my physical condition. I love the tropics and I love snorkeling and maybe someday I will even be motivated to try scuba diving, so this trip has encouraged me to get back into a regular swimming regime and also start a weight-lifting program. In any case, now that I’m 50, I need to focus more effort on keeping my body healthy and fit, and not assume that my 50-year-old body will function just as my 18-year-old body once did.

Looking back to that memorable first trip to Thailand in 1988, I now recall that at that time, I had the fitness of an elite athlete. I was a competitive swimmer in high school and during freshman year of college, and I had been swimming regularly in Taiwan all summer and fall. I’d also been weight-lifting and running, and was probably as fit as I’d ever been in my life. The idea that at 50, after ten or more years in an administrative desk job, I could return to all those tropical island activities without a price to pay was ludicrous. 

On the other hand, despite the white newts and other minor nuisances, my wife and daughters seem to have done just fine, and they all emerged unscathed from our journey in Thailand. We all agree that we’d love to go back there again soon, and to other tropical places as well.

Finally, there’s one more thing I’d like to do before going back to this sunny paradise: Learn some Thai.

Koppun kap, Thailand, and thanks for all your hospitality—I will be back again soon!