A "Stair-Master" Vacation in Koh Samui

Doris and I enjoyed a week-long getaway this April to Koh Samui, an island in the south of Thailand located about an hour by plane from Bangkok. We were taking advantage of several days off because of the Thai New Year, also known as Songkran. Our trip will always be memorable for me, for several unexpected reasons.

We started off staying in a hotel that Doris had found and booked online. The room was quite nice and was near the beach, even though we didn't have much of a view. We probably would have stayed there all week, except for the computer bugs we experienced on the first day. No, I'm not talking about computer viruses. I'm referring to the many microscopic bugs that were crawling over the keyboard of my laptop every time we tried to check our e-mail. When I also found some of them crawling on my arms while lying in bed and watching TV, we started thinking about finding a new hotel.

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 Bay of Thailand, called Cliff View Resort. The hotel lives up to its name by clinging to the side of a steep cliff, so not surprisingly, the rooms are accessible only by many, many wooden stairs. With the help of staff, we lugged our bags all the way to the bottom for a beachfront room. After we spent an hour or so unpacking and getting settled in, I discovered that the advertised wireless internet access wasn't functioning. The hotel's so-called "IT help" wasn't able to solve the problem, and they suggested the signal might be stronger higher up. So, we packed up again and moved to a new room, scaling our way halfway up the cliff we had just come down. Sadly, we discovered after making the move that the signal there wasn't any better, but we decided to stay anyway.

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 Doris at the pool and told her of my epic battle against the biggest and baddest living spider I'd ever seen. We decided this kind of thing was inevitable in the tropics and brushed the incident off (though I made a silent vow to flush the toilet each time BEFORE using it).

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.

These are not ALL the stairs, but only one section of many...

The view from the bed in our room

View from the pool area -- about halfway up the cliff

View of the pool from our balcony