First Backpacking Trip to South East Asia! - Part 1

 A trip to South East Asia 🌏

One of the first long-distance trips that I did as an adult was to Thailand - and I absolutely loved it! After my first semester at university, I had already saved up enough money to splurge on a 3-week vacation with my best friend.

And let me tell you, it was wild!  But first, I want to tell you about how we ended up in Thailand in the first place.

Since I returned from my Working Holiday in Australia, I had become obsessed with finding the best deals for my next trip. So over New Year, less than 2 months before departure, I discovered a really good flight deal (300€ return) which resulted in me calling my friend at 1am to convince her to come with me. Luckily she loved the idea as much as I did, so we quickly booked our tickets with Emirates. 💸

While we were trying to organise our trip, we were also fighting our way through our first exam period at university - and ended up having the last one about 2 days before departure. It was a stressful time but we managed to organise our train to Geneva, book our hotel for the first 3 days in Bangkok and even a plane ticket to South of Thailand. That was it. We had the first 3 days planned out and the rest was completely up to us and what we wanted to do at that exact moment. 👯

And we were so damn excited! 

As our flight arrived in the evening, we took a taxi straight to the hotel. This is also where we started to make simple mistakes (I am still pretty sure that we overpaid our driver!). 👀

The next day was already planned out with a tour through the city.  I had a local friend that I got to know through my exchange programme and she and her brother were so kind to show us around. We visited temples, got a taste of the local cuisine, street food markets and got very adventurous while hopping on a local bus! Not sure if tourists actually do that but it was very... interesting. This bus had no windows left, the door was also gone and we had to jump on and off while the bus was still moving! 😂it was brilliant.

The next day we went to a mall that was closeby for a bit of shopping. Needless to say that every single tourist that just returned from the South was there as well - with a gorgeous tan that left us not only jealous but also looking very sick (given the fact that we were as white and pale as one could be that just arrived from a country with literally no sun during winter ❆). It was about time that we headed south and discovered the islands and their beautiful beaches! 🏖

So the following day we hopped on our flight to Krabi. While we managed to get a shuttle to Ao Nang right away, we still had to figure out accommodation. We knew more or less what we were looking for - walked into a small hotel, discussed the details and that was pretty much it! In the afternoon, we grabbed our things and headed down to the beach. We made friends with some tourists from New Zealand and then headed back to our hotel to get ready for dinner. This dinner ended up to be much better than the disaster we had for lunch - which included cockroaches in places that they weren't supposed to be...

I think I don't have to tell you what happened that night. We were 2 girls that just turned 20, passed all our exams and were in Thailand where food and drinks are cheaper than in Europe. We ended up partying and made new friends!

Unfortunately, I won't be able to put the entire 3-week trip into one blog post. Look out for the next one where I will be getting more into our little day trips and island life. 🏝