A Week on Koh Samet

This was our first trip to a Thai island and we were excited to get away from the big city of Bangkok with its heat, noise and confusion. We disembarked the ferry from Ban Phe to be greeted by a gigantic bronze mermaid statue emerging from the sea ( Read more about our journey from Bangkok here ). This mermaid has quite a look about her...pretty terrifying! Our hotel, Runa Runa 'the best guesthouse' was located in Samet village, easily walkable from the ferry pier. Luckily, we travel light (with Osprey Farpoint 40 backpacks), so walking was fairly easy. We immediately noticed the small, family-run shops and restaurants, and many, many mopeds! No high-rise apartment blocks so far, which was worlds away from where we'd come from in Bang Na, Bangkok. The climate was tropically humid and we soon worked up a sweat trying to find our guesthouse, which was surprisingly hard to find. We followed our offline map to where we thought it was but ended up in a local&