Koh Phangan cockroach mafia

If you haven’t read it yet – here’s Part 1. Since the sun sets very early in Thailand (7 PM) we were pretty sure it rises early too, so we set our alarm clock for 5 AM. When we woke up it was still pitch black outside, so we tried our luck again at 5:40. And I’m glad we did, because the sunrise was beautiful… We made ourselves some coffee and enjoyed the view.

We then went to have breakfast at the sky bar and got sooo full! It was like a combo of breakfast AND lunch as we had pancakes, toast, fruit, coffee, juice and then a massive portion of noodles and rice. And it was delicious. Afterwards we went to see how wonderful the seaside lounge area was and thought why we hadn’t come there earlier…

Unfortunately we then had to check out from this heavenly place. But while we were waiting for the taxi to the village we decided to check where the ‘To Beach’ sign lead to. We walked down a steep road and came to a beautiful beach. After a while we realised it was the same beach we walked into the night before, just from the opposite side!

The taxi took us down to the village where we caught a songthaew to our next hotel. The difference was striking: the receptionist was really rude and he requested we leave one passport at reception for the duration of our stay! No other hotel that we stayed had such requests. Luckily he was happy with an ID card instead, and we walked to our room. It was a tiny dark ridiculously-hot paper-thin bungalow with a tiny window and a padlock for locking it. It didn’t look clean either. We set the fan to maximum, but it didn’t help at all, as there was no oxygen to be circulated in it!

So we walked to the village and decided to eat at the same place as yesterday. But this time Vidmantas drew the Thai name for ‘fried rice with vegetables’, as the girl taking our order just left a notepad and a pen for us. The lady who cooked our food yesterday laughed and asked whether we want just one portion suggesting she understood what we had written! =)

We walked to the pier and watched the storm on the other side of the island. Looking at it from a great distance made it look so beautiful and peaceful. Back at our resort we jumped into the pool (the only good thing about this hotel!) and that was just cool enough to cool your body down, but warm enough so you can stay there for a while, listening to chill out music at the poolside bar, looking at palm trees, beach, the stars …

We got back to our bungalow and saw a giant cockroach on our porch. We pushed it down with the clothes drying rack and went inside – it felt even hotter than before. The fan was making a huge noise and wasn’t really helping, so we turned it to a minimum, which was still noisy, but slightly better. It took a while before we managed to fall asleep in that heat.

But then I only slept for an hour until Vidmantas woke me up and pointed to the corner of the room. The giant cockroach was inside, on the wall, looking at us. Bye-bye precious sleep! Vidmantas pushed it outside with a broom, but now we knew that the gap under the door was large enough for cockroaches to get in. We turned the laptop on and started googling about cockroaches. There wasn’t anything helpful for how to keep them away though. As if that wasn’t enough, there was a black bug in the bathroom, even bigger than the cockroach. Although it crawled really slowly and mostly stayed inside the hole in the shower drainage corner, and the bathroom door had no gaps, so we knew he wouldn’t get in. But it was still scary to sit on the bed knowing that the cockroaches could run up the wall next to you or behind you any second – and they run fast!

Finally we came up with a solution – to fill the gaps around the door and near the bed with our blankets, as we didn’t need them anyway. We then set the alarm clock for 5:30 and tried to sleep for a couple of hours. Ironically, when we woke up the cockroach was sitting on the rubbish bin – we had sealed the three of us in the room!

We walked outside, it was cloudy so the sunrise that we hoped to photograph didn’t happen. But it was nice and cool on the beach with a gentle breeze coming from the water, and no cockroaches as it was too bright for them. We took our blankets from the room and napped for an hour on the deck chairs on the beach. At 7 AM having had a little rest after a stressful night we were packing our bags for a trip to Angthong National Marine Park.

For more stories from the same trip read: Koh Samui and Koh Tao.

More photos on our Flickr page here.