A road trip in Thailand.

We still had some things on our must see list, most prominently Khao Sok national park. Jeroen was also curious to drive around a bit in Thailand so our route was roughly set.
Phuket -> Khao Lak -> Khao Sok -> Phuket

Phuket 🚗:
Picking up our car from sixt was a little different than usual but also the same with cards not working etc. our first car had a flat tyre so it was exchanged, lucky we caught that at the inspection. We rented a pretty new Honda civic and felt like a Mercedes S class in Thailand, didn’t have any problems with it and actually made it with one tank on our whole trip. In Thailand you drive on the left but due to Cyprus we had some practice.
We arrived in the evening so our first stop was a hotel just outside of Phuket. The hotel sector was hit hard during Covid and you could feel that throughout our entire SEA trip, in particular this one a “ five star hotel” that seemed never really finished but already needing some love after 5 years. Still the bed was huge, much needed as we arrived pretty late.

Khao lak 🌊:

The next day we made our way up the coast to the famous Khao Lak. Our dive was quite pretty with good quality roads and not much traffic, occasionally we would drive through a palm tree forest or past the coast.
Khao Lak has been a super popular resort destination in particular for German and Swedish tourists since the 80s, we were surprised how many German signs we saw. However, you may know about it because it was one of the hardest hit regions of the Boxing Day tsunami in 2001. It was pretty eerie to be at a second line beach front hotel, have all these signs about a potential tsunami evacuation route and see the memorials of how high the water reached, 11m. About 4000 people died due to the Tsunamiin Khao Lak but it’s believed the real number is much much higher due to unregistered migrants from
Burma.

We weren’t overly impressed with the town as it was super touristy and just a long street with resorts. However we had some exciting things planned for the next day.Read more