ESCAPE TO PARADISE: 3 DAYS ON KOH CHANG, THAILAND

After 2 weeks of non-stop visiting in Thailand, we were ready for some serious relaxing and some “us-time”. We headed to Koh Chang, where we’d booked a ‘pool villa’ for 3 days and 4 nights. We chose Koh Chang because it’s not too far from Bangkok, a little bit isolated but not too much either and because the summer isn’t the best time for visiting the islands on the west side of Thailand because it rains a lot.

We left our hotel in Bangkok around 9am and 7 hours and a nerve-wrecking trip later (I’ll write a seperate post about different ways to get to Koh Chang and how much it costs later), we arrived at the beautiful Mercure Hotel, at the west side of the island, a few miles south of Lonely Beach.

The hotel is a little bit isolated: there’s only 1 or 2 restaurants and 2 tiny shops at walking distance and there are no bars, but that was exactly why we came here. For those who do want to be a bit more social, more restaurants, cheap accommodation and bars are only minutes away, at Lonely Beach. Bang Bao, at the south end of the island, is a 15 minute drive by sorng taa ou. This isn’t the place to be for partying, but there are some restaurants and it’s nice to walk around for an hour or two.

Our room was great: it was about 100m², had a huge badroom, an outdoor shower and a terrace with a private swiming pool and jacuzzi. The pool even had a waterfall and there was a frangipani, which is our favorite exotic tree! We paid €80 per night, which was the most we paid for accommocation during our whole trip, but it was really worth it. Cheaper – and even very cheap – hotels are also easy to find on the island.

The hotel also has a pool for all the guests, beautiful gardens and offers direct acces to the beach. It’s the last hotel on this part of the island, so the beach is really calm.

It started raining right after our arrival, so we went to get an umbrella at the reception and headed out to get something to eat. The Happy Turtle is the restaurant that’s closest to the hotel, so we decided to go there. The food was delicious and the owners (Nick from Sweden and his Thai wife) were so lovely! There were so many dishes on the menu that looked good that we decided to go here for breakfast the next morning, and for dinner, and for breakfast again… well, you get the picture: we ate all our meals over there 🙂 We did check out the other restaurant near the hotel but it didn’t look as good, so we decided to just go back to the Happy Turtle. Sometimes, you just have to stick with what you know’s good! 🙂

OK so we had a room and knew where to find food, so it was time to start doing what we came for: nothing! Lay in the sun, swim in our private pool, drink, repeat!

We did this for 3 whole days and it was great! We did make the huuuuuge effort to go to Bang Bao the second morning 🙂 We didn’t regret it because it was just lovely!