Hua Hin

This past weekend a few of us decided it would be nice to take a trip to one of the many beaches in Thailand.  A couple of us don't start teaching until next week but even the ones that started this week did not have to teach on Monday because it was a national holiday.  This allowed us to make plans to travel to a beach that is about eight hours away from Bangkok, called Koh Tao.  We were all very excited to have a nice relaxing weekend.  Unfortunately, we got to the main train station in Bangkok early Friday morning only to find out that all of the buses to Koh Tao were sold out.  This was obviously a buzz kill and in most situations, our entire weekend would have been ruined.  However, this being Thailand with its abundance of beaches, we just picked at different beach and got a van there.  The beach we hastily settled upon is called Hua Hin.

It turned out to be a fantastic decision.  The trip was way shorter than it would have been if we had gone to Koh Tao.  The town was fantastic.  Very small and a little bit more touristy than many places but everyone was very friendly and constantly tried to make us feel at home.  When we first arrived, we checked out a few hotels but none of them really appealed to us.  Fortunately, we stumbled upon one, Pattana Guesthouses, that turned out to be outstanding.  It is a small, family run hotel with antique, teakwood furniture all over the place.  The best part about it was that it only cost 250 baht a night.  This is a little bit more than 8 dollars.

After getting settled into the hotel, we headed down to check out the beach.  It was a great stretch of beach with chairs and umbrellas available everywhere.  Like most tourist places, there were vendors all over the place.  If you managed not to let them annoy you too much, the place was everything you could ask for in a tropical beach. The sand was white as can be and the water was so warm it felt like a heated pool.  We had a very relaxing few days.

The nights were also a lot of fun.  As I said, it was very touristy so there were a lot of young people around.  We made friends with a group of people from the Netherlands and sang a lot of karaoke with them on Saturday night.  That was also the night that a few of us worked up the courage, with the help of some beers, to try fried grasshoppers.  Once you got past the idea of eating a grasshopper, it actually didn't taste too terrible.  The texture, more than the taste, was what I didn't like.  Needless to say, while I'm glad I tried it, grasshopper is not something I'll ever feel the need to eat again.

Our spontaneous trip to Hua Hin turned out to be a big success.  If all of my weekend trips turn out to be this much fun, its going to be a quick five months.