Thailand Island Tour
We’ve taken our travels across the country! After three years of road trips around the US, Mason and I decided to take a leap in life and quit our jobs to travel. I’ve shared our story in detail in my post, Quarter Life Crisis, I think it’s worth a read!
Anyway, let’s talk Thailand and our experiences so far. After spending 28+ hours traveling from Chicago to Bangkok, we started a group guided tour exploring some of the Thailand islands. The decision to do a group tour was not what I saw a lot of backpackers doing. Many groups online told us that we should plan it ourselves and save the money but after our experience, I personally think it was such a great investment in our travels.
We booked ours through Backpackingtours.com which offers tours to so many countries. However, our tour guide, who we called “S”, was someone who made this trip so great. He started his own business and I would totally recommend you go through him if you ever visit Thailand!
Phi Phi Island!
Why I think investing in a group tour was worth the money:
You’re in a new country where you may not speak the language so having a local tour guide cuts out any worries with communication.
I didn’t want to have to figure out transportation, accommodations, food, and so on right after traveling 20+ hours. They had it all planned for us.
All of our excursions were booked and planned. No need to haggle prices with tuk-tuk drivers, longtail boats to beaches, tour guides, and so on.
You are forced to make friends and in our case it was an amazing experience to see 6 strangers become lifelong friends in just two weeks.
There was plenty of time for Mason & I to go off on our own plus we had a private room for the majority of the trip.
I said majority of the trip, our group had 6 people and for two nights we all shared a dorm room in Phi Phi Island. It was a big adult sleepover and looking back, how often are you going to do that? It was a blast having the giggles at 2am!
We had a personal photographer, our tour guide, S was always snapping candid pictures left and right which we all got access to after the trip.
S reassured us that he would always be there to answer any questions as Mason and I continued to travel Southeast Asia on our own - that in itself was worth the investment.
We were grateful to just relax for two straight weeks without having to plan the next thing. Now that we are fully on our own, the flexibility to do whatever we want is great but you always have to be thinking “so, what’s after this”.
The money will come and go so you might as well fill your memory bank up, do the things you want, make friends, and experience the world while you can!
Here’s a list of the big places we explored during our time in Southern Thailand:
Bangkok
Amphawa (Floating Market/Train Market)
Khoa Sok National Park
Krabi
Railay Beach
Phi Phi Islands
How did we get to all these places? Well, let’s go in order. We had a car pick us up from Bangkok and take us to Amphawa. Following our time there, we took the night train to southern Thailand. This was a 12-14 hour train ride that did not include AC (the one big flaw about the tour company) which we experienced and would never do again. After I survived that, we had a driver with a very comfortable 10 passenger van taking us to all of our destinations. When we left Krabi, we took a ferry out to Phi Phi Islands and then had a private long-tail boat to go island hopping one of the days. As I said, it was all planned out which made for a great 12 days of fully enjoying what was around us!
If we had to pick our top two places during this trip, I think our first place would be Khoa Sok National Park because it was absolutely unreal. Staying in a floating bungalow was an adventure in itself plus we had the freedom to explore the lake by kayak which we loved. Our second favorite spot was Railay Beach. We took a long-tail boat here from Krabi which is the only way to access it. Again, it was like nothing we had ever seen before. I remember my eyes and brain not comprehending the beauty we were surrounded by. We loved Railay Beach so much that we paid to get our own long-tail boat to go back a second time and explore more!
I’ve dumped a gallery below for you to check out our adventures from this tour. It was truly an experience of a lifetime and I’m so thankful it was all planned out for us to enjoy with new friends!
I hope that this post inspires you to get outta town and book that trip you’ve been thinking about!
