By coming to Samui the night before we could chill out in the morning before our flight. We got up leisurely and got the taxi to the airport. Koh Samui airport is an outdoor airport with a beachy vibe. It reminded me of the airports in Hawaii. We boarded the plane no problem and soon we were up in the air. We had an inflight breakfast which was pretty good- thanks Bangkok airways!

A short 1 hour and 30 mins later we had landed in Chiang Mai. To our amazement the rain had not started yet. We had been warned about going north due to the heavier rain than usual rendering a large number of roads unusable. Talking to the taxi driver, he told us that they are in between storms with this as the one day of peace.

Arriving so early meant we could check out the bouldering gym nearby as we couldn’t check in to our room yet. Alpine Outpost had the best climbing we had experienced so far using the grading system we were familiar with; the V system. We climbing for over 2 hours which is a record for us back home and in the 28°C muggy weather. For not climbing regularly in 3/4 months managing a V3 was pretty good.

After climbing we could check in and so we unpacked and took advantage of our free drink token. Feeling peckish we went to the nearby night market for some Thai grub. We had 2 variations of noodles and chicken paired with some chicken satay. Sorry Thailand, Singapore satay street still wins with the satay! For dessert I had a banana and Nutella crepe and Robin had the tik tok famous rolled ice cream.

The hostel we are staying in is full of 18 year olds taking a gap year before university. Despite what you may think, there is a big difference in maturity between them and us. We have been to university and are nearly 22 years old. We just don’t align with their personalities very well. It’s okay as that means we have the hostel to ourselves whilst they go get battered on a bar crawl. We have had our over-drinking experience at university whilst they have yet to have 5 legal UK pints. We will be up bright eyed and bushy tailed ready for temples, waterfalls, and jungle whilst they are hanging until the late afternoon. For us hostels are hard because often you don’t find yourself with slightly older people who are traveling for a significant amount of time for traveling sake. We don’t want to go get pissed every night or try and ‘pull’. What’s good is that we have each other and we can make fun of the others when they cannot make it out of bed in the morning.

Tired from traveling and climbing we have climbed into bed to watch some TV before drifting off to sleep.

-M