Koh Lanta - sunbathing, swimming and basically doing nothing all day-everyday!

Our main reason for going to Koh Lanta was to visit our friend Marc who we first met by chance during this trip when we were in Chitwan in Nepal. Marc and his friend Erin were celebrating Erin's 40th Birthday and we invited them to join us for a beer.

Marc is a ‘digital nomad’ and has lived in Koh Lanta for 3 months of the year for the past couple years. He’d really talked the place up and we'd agreed to visit him whilst in Thailand so we decided we'd to go to see for ourselves and we weren’t disappointed. 

One of the best things about this part of Thailand is that it’s big enough to not feel overwhelmed by the tourism but there are also enough nice resorts and restaurants to be able to visit a different spot everyday. Koh Lanta also has lush jungle aswell as plenty of gorgeous beaches.

We however found our few favourite places and for two weeks we just sunbathed, swam in the pool, swam in the sea and in the evenings enjoyed the daily sunsets over the ocean from our two fav beach bars - Lyms and Ozone.

 

Sunsets from Lyms Beach Bar

                                      

The lovely lights at Ozone beach bar (this place played the best live sunset techno sets we've found anywhere on our travels so far)

We made friends with a lady called Aoy who is the manager at Lyms, and so each time we visited the bar it was like we were going to visit our mate!

Marc and Aoy

She also came on a day trip with us to the national park where we went in search of monkeys, monitor lizards and a waterfall. We found them all:

Yes that is Wout all the way up there and you'll be pleased to know he didn't jump!

Whilst we were here we were waiting for the delivery of a parcel from Mum and Dad.

We also got the news whilst we were here that our friends from the Netherlands were planning to visit the Philippines in Feb before heading over to Australia so we decided to change around our itinerary and join them in The Philippines before we headed to Vietnam. (originally we were going to do Vietnam then Philippines).

We were all set for booking our flights to Manilla in the Philippines when the news came of the Taal Volcano erupting 😕
The first we heard about it was via a Philippines backpacker group we'd joined and these images (although amazing as they are)  definitely made us want to delay booking our flights!

Based on this we decided to delay booking our flights and wait to see how things went over the coming days.

Each day we would check the news for Volcano updates and also check to see if our parcel had been delivered. When our parcel finally arrived we decided to bite the bullet and head further south into Malaysia to spend some time and keep check on the volcano before booking our flights from Kuala Lumpur to The Philippines.

The parcel finally came!

Koh Lanta was definitely the perfect place to enjoy being still for a while and just relaxing. 

This is Wout's friend who he rescued from drowning in the pool and then couldn't get him to leave him alone.
For about two hours this little guy sat on Wout's shoulder and each time Wout put him down he would jump back onto Wout and go right back to sit on his shoulder - very cute!
We finally found a leaf which he approved of and were able to 'break the bond' and return him to the wild!