Beach Life and Reggae in Ko Phayam

Last night when we got back we had our first unwanted guests into the hut. Two rather large cockroaches. Liam was happy to leave them roaming the bathroom but Chelsea wanted them moving. So Liam had to catch them and take them outside. While this was happening we had the bathroom light on and when we finished with the cockroaches we had a massive wasp in the room. We left that and jumped into the mosquito net.

Apart from that we slept well, we were up quite early and decided to try somewhere new for breakfasts. We walked into an area near our hut a little inland that has a couple of shops and café’s and went to a Burmese vegetarian place. It is a sort of tiny hamlet on a cross road that had developed. There is one clothes shop, one shop with supplies, a few places to rent bikes, a diving shop and three or four quirky café’s. All are little bamboo huts either side of a small road. The place we went was very laid back and the food was amazing, we both had a Burmese noodle salad. We had to wait quite a while as everything is cooked fresh to order but it was worth it. They have a little library and games to play while you wait so we played connect four for a while.

We noticed that the café also hired badminton sets for 50B, so we decided to rent one and take it with us on the beach. The rest of the afternoon was spent pretty much the same as yesterday, laid on the beach. We played badminton for a while although it was too windy really, swam a bit in the sea and when we had had too much sun sat in the shade and read.

We didn’t go back to hut until nearly six and our plan was to go to a concert that we had seen advertised further up the beach and that everyone has been talking about since we arrived on Ko Phayam. We had a quick dinner at our huts bar, we both had a rice dish and watched the sun go down then made our way up beach. We were a little shocked when we got there because the entry fee was £7 each, which would easily take us over our budget, but in the end we decided there is no point coming all this way to not do things we want to do and went in.

It was a large area of the beach that had been cornered off and inside there was a stage for the band, a DJ, a stall selling t-shirts and jewellery and a couple of bars. The whole place was surrounded by multi-coloured lights. The band themselves ‘Job 2 Do’ were a Reggae band and they were good, they played a mixture of Reggae hits and popular songs that they had changed into the Reggae style. We enjoyed it and it was worth the money. The band played for a while and by midnight we were ready to go back (too many hours of Reggae and every song starts to sound the same) so we made our way back down the beach in the pitch black with our tiny torch.

When we got back to our hut we were greeted by two cockroaches that look suspiciously like the ones we had evicted yesterday. Liam chased them around the bathroom for a while until they creept under the sink and we could not get them, so this time we left them be and ran for the safety of our net again.