We were supposed to fall in love with Koh Samui, one of the biggest and most beautiful islands in the Gulf of Thailand. Backpackers “discovered” the island back in the 1970s and since then tourism has become the mainstay of the island’s economy. It’s easy to understand why: the water can be spectacularly blue and the beaches are long and white. There are accommodations to meet any need – you can stay in a backpacker hostel or spend $1,000 a night on an entry-level room at the Four Seasons Samui.

To be sure, we had a great four days here. Our resort is beautiful, with some great outdoor spaces to lounge in. Fortunately some of the outdoor area is protected by roofs, as the weather was pretty uncooperative, with rain and clouds over the last two days. Today we’re leaving (we actually wanted to stay one more day, but the hotel is full today) so of course it’s beautiful again.

We keep having to learn that one of the keys to a great hotel is location, location. This resort is beautiful, but away from most everything. So we rented scooters to get to the beach and around the island, which was entertaining in its own way. Ultimately, though, I never felt as though I really got to know Samui; I just always felt like an outsider in the various places we went to. Location, location, location.

From here we move down to Krabi for a few days on the beach on the Andaman Sea, the west coast of the peninsula, and then we hop down to Singapore. And now we’re rethinking the plans to go to Korea and Japan in the spring; we may end up in Indonesia after all. Stay tuned…

At any rate, here’s what we saw in Koh Samui.

John Denver seemed to have thought West Virginia was almost heaven, but I have to think he’d never been to islands in the Gulf of Thailand. We’ve been on Koh Tao, just a little island north of the bigger and allegedly more fabulous Koh Samui, for four days now. We were originally scheduled to leave today, but we’re staying two more days before taking a boat on to Samui.

It’s really a simple recipe: an early morning run, breakfast, at the pool with a book by 8:30 or 9:00, off to lunch at a beach restaurant, late afternoon on the beach. Mark goes off to a massage – at $8 to $10 for an hour, it’s not a big splurge – then it’s a stop for a drink before dinner. Rinse and repeat. Food, beach, books – really a good life. I finished a biography of Douglas MacArthur (freak!) a couple days ago and today finished And the Mountains Echoed, a fabulous novel about Afghanis from a fictional village. Really amazing. One of my goals in traveling was to read more fiction, and so far it’s working!

It gets easy to understand how the older, skanky guys get stuck here – and a little scary to think how easy it could be to end up to become one of those guys who’ve been here too many years. I think we’re going to resist the temptation though, moving on to Koh Samui for a few days and then on to a beach near Krabi before flying to Singapore to meet up with Mark’s brother and father.

Here are some pictures of life on the island.

After all the excitement of our two-week holiday bicycle tour of Myanmar, we’ve slowed the pace way down. Biking in Myanmar was exhilarating, exotic, and truly memorable. But after two weeks of hard work, group meals, fun conversation, and moving around a lot we were ready to take it back down a notch.

And what better way to do that than to spend most of January beach hopping in Thailand? So just after the New Year we flew back to Bangkok and began a Southward odyssey of beach stops along the Thai peninsula.

Last week we got the exciting news that my dad and my brother John will meet us in Singapore on January 29 for a couple weeks of travel together, probably in Malaysia. So we shopped around and found a couple cheap flights to Singapore from Krabi, Thailand, and decided to fill out he rest of January with more Thai beach stops. That means a few more weeks of long, uneventful days, warm blue ocean, amazing Thai food, and plentiful cheap massage. That kind of January beats the icy mess back home!