After running all over 4 islands in Indonesia, we decided to finally take a breather and enjoy exactly what Koh Samui is known for – its beaches and sun.

We slept in for a change and rolled down to the resort’s restaurant for breakfast.  The breakfast buffet of 550 THB ($17) felt steep so we ordered some pretty random things a la carte: a selection of toast, fresh fruit, scrambled eggs with ham, and although we thought we ordered chicken sausage, we somehow got boiled rice with chicken instead.  Slight language gap, but the boiled rice ended up being my favorite dish that we got.

The resort opened up into its own private beach, and although I do love to venture off of resort properties to get my full “local” experience, this resort really offered us no reason to, at least with regards to its beach.  When they provide beach bags with some really nice lounge chairs, free towels, and drink service, with very little people to keep an eye out on, we had everything we needed!  The beach was also exactly what we needed, aside from a peaceful ambiance the sand was warm and pebbly, and the water was as warm as bath water (although much saltier!).  We spent a few hours relaxing here, then made our way back in around mid-afternoon as we were getting hungry and it was starting to get quite overcast.  Good timing, since within minutes of being inside, the skies opened and dumped rain for what would end up being the rest of the day.

We wandered around town to look for a place to eat, and there wasn’t much in sleepy Mae Nam.  A few roadstands that looked more like hangout bars whose food would be questionable at best, and this wasn’t going to fly after Doug’s latest eating incident on this trip.  We ended up just going to a restaurant outside of our resort (despite our resort pushing their restaurant on us), and it was pretty mediocre.  It started promisingly with a bowl of tom kha gai and plate of roasted spiced cashews, but my pad thai was pretty abysmal and also had 2 hairs in it!  It didn’t get much better than that.

The rest of the afternoon was awash, literally, since it was too wet to go outside, but there wasn’t really anything to do in the town itself.  We tried to plan out a trip for tomorrow, since I really wanted to go to Ang Thong Marine National Park, but with the weather forecast and the threat of losing our money with a booked trip due to cancellation, we ruled against it.  It was actually pretty frustrating trying to figure out a plan since so much of it was reliant on weather, and in the end we decided to skip any tours altogether and perhaps focus on other things we wanted to do, like cooking classes and finding tigers to pet.

We eventually wandered back out to look for a spa because if there’s ever a good rainy day activity in Thailand, it’s Thai massages.  Doug had his first experience today at a place called Heaven’s Hands, and I think he was quite the handful for his little Thai lady, who literally was throwing her body against him to crack joints and what not, and couldn’t stop giggling the whole time (I also think some of it came from Doug who was ticklish).

For dinner, we still couldn’t find any better spots in town, but it was too land to wander elsewhere, so we just tried out a place on the main drag that ended up being pretty much terrible.  Frustrating since we came to Thailand in search of good food, and the first two experiences (minus breakfast) were a bust and didn’t even feel authentic.  Better luck to us tomorrow…