Koh Samui

We stayed in Cosi Chaweng Beach—the first hotel of the trip. While there was still lizards inside the hotel was super clean and the staff were very friendly. It’s in a great location- on the grounds of Central Festival- a big open air shopping mall.

The hotel had a rooftop infinity pool and was about a ten minute walk to the beach.

Most of the beach is taken up by resorts but once you walk through the resort or restaurant you can lay your towels out on the sand for the day. There water is upper clear and pretty shallow for a good distance out. 

We were a 15 minute walk (google maps time) from Khao Huajook Pagoda- a temple with amazing views of the island. 10 minutes out of the 15 minute walk was straight up a hill but other than that the temple was very nice. There’s a 20baht entrance fee for tourists but they give you Sai Sin- a cloth and bracelet blessed by a monk. The temple overlooks Samui airport so we got to sit and watch planes take off and land right next to us. 

We also went to the Big Buddha Temple- 20 minute drive from Chaweng Beach. The Buddha statue is 12 meters high and you can see it over the tree line as you drive in.  There are little stall on the grounds of the temple and entrance is free. There are places for monetary donations at all of the temples—or you can make a donation and light incense or leave flowers. There was one area at the base of the big Buddha statue where there was a monk doing blessings for good luck. We gave a donation and were kneeling at the altar—and the monk continued to watch his Netflix show on his laptop in the corner. After a few minutes he came over and grumpily doused us with water and mumbled a blessing— which hopefully wasn’t actually a curse! 

From Big Buddha we went to fisherman’s village. The market wasn’t on but the streets are lined with little store fronts and restaurants and is a really quaint beach area. We found a cool bar with swings at the bar and bean bags on the sand to sit at for the night.