Day 99 - Koh Samui/Koh Phangan

9am the alarm goes off and we drag ourselves out of our pit to go collect the tickets from the travel agents. He's not there when we arrive so somebody goes n finds him and he sits down with us and goes through all our tickets and it all looks good, we have overnight trains between the big cities (takes about 10-12 hours some journies so we treated ourselves to 1st class sleepr trains. I say treated it was actually about £5-£10 more and we get our own cabin with an upper and lower bunkbed and our own sink! what more do you want for £30 for a 12 hour train ride!

After we're done there we have to head back to the resort as our taxi/minibus is picking us up to transfer us to Nathon Pier ready to get the ferry so we check out and head to Nathon town. As we still haven't eaten and it's now dinner time we leave our bags at the check in desk at the pier and wonder around for a Cafe. After food we walk around the town and browse the shops, it's all very touristy as most people passing through are foreigners heading to the Thai islands or arriving back from them. Rhona spots a shop that sells dog stuff so we go in for a look. She spots the little clothing rack that has hoodies and jumpers for dogs and then finds a United top. haha as soon as she saw it i knew we'd end up getting it but atleast Wiggles can wear it on Derby day :)
All the shops are as you'd expect Thai shops to be full of knock off designer stuff, everywhere you look it's LV, Gucci, Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein etc lots of dvds and cds for a couple quid and a few stalls selling fish and crabs!

After walking the entire town we head back to the pier for an hour or 2 to wait for our Catamaran to depart for Phangan. As we're walking down to the pier we hear a familiar sound ... There is an ice cream man similar to the 1 on the Gili islands (again its a guy on a bike with a cool box strapped to his bike) but the jingle is the same except with a more uptempo beat.

The catamaran is much fancier than the ferry we got here, everybody is loaded on and they have Tom and Jerry kids playing on the tvs. The journey only takes half hour and we're soon walking through all the taxi drivers and hotel reps that greet us at the pier.
We jump in our minibus and soon arrive at Phangan Rainbow bungalows. 1st impressions are its nice, peacefull, nice private beach, nice looking huts and hammocks everywhere. We got it for a bargain £12 a night between us (this is expensive by Thai standards) We chuck our bags in and are famished so we head out hunting for food, its pretty quiet and a lot of the hotel bars/restaurants are closed due to low season so 10 mins later we are grateful to come across an English guys bar and some good homemade burger n chips.

After grabbing some beers from shop we head for home as we're pretty tired after our days travells, hopefully the sun will be shining tomorrow and for many days after that!