A "Stair-Master" Vacation in Koh Samui
We started off staying in a hotel that
The following morning, we negotiated a release from our week-long booking and headed off to a new accommodation. Doris found a nice place overlooking the
A little while later, I went into the bathroom, which wasn't air conditioned. The reason appeared to be that it wasn't very well sealed off from the outside, and the disadvantages of this soon became clear. Immediately after I finished using and flushing the toilet, a HUGE spider appeared in the swirling water. He apparently had been lurking under the edge of the toilet bowl, and he was now frantically trying to climb his way out of the whirlpool. How huge was he? Look at the palm of your hand (and I'm talking to adults now). Imagine a spider whose legs reach to the outer edges of your palm, whose body is thick and meaty, and who is black as night. I let out a yell and kept flushing that toilet until my racing heartbeat returned to normal. A little while later, I joined
Climbing the stairs back to our room after leaving the pool, we encountered a female member of the hotel staff who had been trying to deliver something to our room. As we were approaching, she let out a few screams while waving her arms excitedly, and when we pressed her for an explanation, she told us she had just seen a snake slithering in the brush next to the staircase leading to our room. We weren't too thrilled about this.
To make a long story short, we changed rooms yet again, to one located nearer to the top of the cliff. Honestly, the change had nothing—well, almost nothing—to do with the spider and snake. The new room still had its share of bugs, but that's to be expected in the tropics (we kept telling ourselves), and the wireless internet access still was hopeless. The most important feature of the new room, though, was that it was relatively close to both the lobby at the top of the cliff and the pool, thus reducing the number of stairs we routinely had to climb.
I'm inserting below several pictures of the resort, none of which captures very well just how steep the cliff is and how many stairs the resort has, but maybe you'll get some idea. All things considered, I'd say the spectacular views were well worth the effort one usually reserves only for a Stair-Master exercise machine.
The view from the bed in our room