One week in paradise

Search, and you will find. That is what we wanted to prove right. In some borrowed travel guide we read about Koh Mook - an island, which is hard to find on the internet, even if you look for it! There was one big reasort homepage popping up all the time, and two blogs which told us about the beautiful remote- and loneliness, which the bloggers had obviously experienced out there...

We booked a bus for the next morning and left Phuket. After 5 hours we found ourselves in Trang, some provincial town south of Phuket - just a necessary stopover on the way to the island.

We arranged our transport, did some shopping, slept a night and dreamed of this miracoulous island we were heading to..

Next noon, a minivan fetched us at the guesthouse and brought us to a pier, where a longtailboat awaited our arrival. We boarded and left the mainland.
After ca. 30 minutes out on the open water, we reached our destination: Koh Mook. Lonely Planet describes it as "Not really discovered by tourists", and a travel agent had told us about three accommodation facilities. What we found, was double of that...

Our first two nights were secured in a little, pretty bungalow, with an unpretty view onto some red roofs and brickwalls. The staff was weird, the food expensive and all in all it was not what we had dreamed about in Trang...

Two days later, we checked out and moved maybe 200m down the road. What we found was - paradise. A pretty bungalow nestled under shady (palm-)trees right at the beachfront. Unaffordable? No way! this peace of heaven was still cheaper than any Australian hostel I have ever slept in!!!

We booked in. For 5 days. and those 120 hours were full of lazyness, sunbaking, reading, talking, foto-sessions, chillin', refreshing in the ocean, going out for breakfast, lunch & dinner and do pretty much nothing. Awesome!


Our part of the beach was almost always empty, the crowds preferred the other end, where that big resort from the internet covered a lot of space.
We woke up with sunlight sneaking through some holes in the wall in the morning, enjoyed life a whole day long and went to bed with the sounds of a calm ocean. I don't think I have seldomly had a more relaxing time in my life!


One day, we ran out of money, and due to the lack of an ATM on the island (no surprise, the electricity was limited to a few hours a day), I had to go back to Trang. To save money, I decided to take the local ferry, which was really, really crowded, but well worth an experience - locals can't afford air-con or some one-person-per-seat sort of thing... I spent the bus trip to town on a box attached to the rear of the bus... :-)

Next day, after possessing enough cash, Isabel & I rented a kayak and went out to Emerald Cave, little beauty for itself. After 80m of swimming through a tunnel, some of it in black darkness, we reached some 15m of beach, surrounded by steep and high walls - unaccessable from the inland.
Lucky we went there in the morning, so we could still enjoy the cave for ourselves. After half an hour, there was one tour after another pouring in, loads of people, and as we swam out again, we wondered, how that little cave was supposed to handle all these people...


Days in paradise always pass by too quickly, and so we found ourselves dining in the most expensive restaurant on our final night. Next day, we'd take the longtailboat back to the mainland and try to get up to Bangkok and over to Cambodia - and next time you'll read if we were successful.


P.S.: Sorry for the lack of pictures, it is all so complicated without my own laptop in these loud, hectic and slow internetcafes...