Christmas and New Year in Thailand

Trish Griffiths on 24 December 2007
Me and my husband decided to spend Christmas and New Year in Thailand. We travelled with Etihad airways and treated ourselves to business class seats which are very private, with a good choice of films and music and the food is delicious.

In Bangkok we stayed at the Royal Orchid Sheraton which is situated right on the river, all the rooms have river views and are very spacious. The hotel is 5 minutes from the Sky Train Station which for around 50p can take you near to all the main tourist attractions of Bangkok.

Bangkok is an amazing city, there are temples to see, fabulous shopping with really good bargains, river cruises, excellent restaurants, and night markets including the infamous ‘Patpong’! There is so much to do and see you would never get bored in this exciting city.

From Bangkok we went down to Krabi, which has amazing scenery due to the limestone buttresses rising from the sea. So beautiful it was Scaramanga’s hideaway in ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’.

Here we chose to stay at Centara resort which is in a bay near to Ao Nang; you can only access the hotel by boat. The hotel provides a free speedboat into the centre of Ao Nang every 2 hours. Instead of waiting for a taxi back to the hotel you wait for your boat to arrive to take you back to hotel – How cool is that!!!

The setting of the hotel is lovely, it’s actually built within a National Park – you can often see monkeys wandering about. All the rooms are very spacious and most of them have good views out to sea.

We hired a car for 3 days and visited Phuket and Phi Phil. Phuket can be very lively or laid back depending which resort you choose to stay in. Phi Phi was beautiful, the sea is so clear you can see the coral from the ‘long tail boat’ – there is not much to do on Phi Phi outside the hotel. If you get a strip of beach that is shared between hotels then you can walk along the beach to the other hotels, other than that you would have to get a boat everywhere.

The whole area around this part of Thailand is beautiful, the Thai people are so friendly and welcoming, and another bonus is that everything is so cheap.

My top tip if visiting Phi Phi or if you chose to stay at Centara Grand Resort is to dress casual as you often get wet when stepping off the boats.