Railay Bay & Vow Renewal

Railay Bay was surreal. It was a remote, small peninsula that's part of the Krabi Province. It's surrounded by huge limestone cliffs jetting out of the ocean. Our resort, Railay Bay Resort & Spa, had huge cliffs on either side of its stretch of beach. We would definitely recommend this place. We went with a "privacy cottage" so we had our own area with a private patio and a small pool tub (like a hot tub, but with cold water). We were very pleased with the resort and everything was extremely affordable. In general, we found that once we got to Thailand most of the prices were really reasonable (I mean, hello, a $7 hour-long massage)!  

We were on the west side of the peninsula, but could easily walk to the east side. The west side has the beautiful sunsets and the prettier beach. The sunsets each night were amazing. I'm not sure that we've ever seen anything that beautiful in our lives! The east side isn't near as nice, and the tide goes out pretty far, so it's left with muddy, ugly beaches for part of the day. There was a stretch of restaurants and shops along the "walking street", one of the ways to get from the west to the east side. There was a restaurant at our resort and we ate there a decent amount, but there wasn't a shortage of other food options. There were several other resorts on Railay Bay with restaurants as well, including Rayavadee, which was extremely nice (and expensive). We ate dinner there on our last night and it was amazing. Great views and fantastic food.

We were in Railay for five days, so we had a great time relaxing and mixing in a little adventure. We booked a trip through ChokPaiSan Andaman Speedboat for a daylong speed boat / snorkeling trip.We were able to book the trip through our resort, and we got picked up and dropped off at our resort; it was extremely convenient. On the trip we went to several of the Phi Phi Islands, including Maya Bay where the movie "The Beach" was filmed. We also went to Bamboo Island which was beautiful, and went snorkeling in a couple of spots. It was a nice mixture of a snorkeling, relaxing, and time on the boat.

I also took advantage of a Thai beach massage which was awesome. I've always wanted to have a massage on the beach, so it was a perfect spot to cross that off my list! Again, it was super cheap - probably the equivalent of $7.

There were also a lot of places to explore near our resort, including a great viewpoint area that was accessible via a somewhat of a difficult hike / climb. The view was well worth it. There were tons of monkeys around our resort, too who were very friendly! Phra Nang Bay, which is known to be one of the most beautiful beaches in the world, was also just a short, easy 15 minute walk from our resort. This was where we renewed our wedding vows. 

Since it was our fifth wedding anniversary and we were going to be in Thailand, we decided it would be a great time to renew our vows. We also don't love our wedding photos because they were taken inside my home church which was very dark. We're beach people, so we love outdoor, bright scenery and photos. Since we were going to be renewing our wedding vows, we hired a local photographer who we found online to document the occasion and take some professional photos of us. We're so glad to we did - we love the photos he took and it was very special to renew our vows. We wrote custom vows for year #5, and read the original vows we said at our wedding. It was very informal and quick, but still special and memorable.

There were certainly a few bumps in the road, but overall we had an amazing trip. It was so interesting to be able to see a new continent and witness a culture that's completely different than ours. We're so glad we went. Our favorite spot was Railay and while we're typically against returning to the same spot more than once, we've already said it would be great to make it back at some point. We'd also love to just do a beach hopping trip around Thailand since it has so many beautiful beaches. I'm sure we could have been happy doing that on this trip, but I think we would have been remiss if we didn't take the time to see Bangkok and some of the other cities on the mainland. I'm curious to see where we'll end up next year!

5th Anniversary Trip to Thailand!

We can hardly believe it, but Brian and I have been married five years already! We wanted to do something big for this milestone anniversary. (Well, we thought it would be a good excuse to go on a big trip...) We've had Thailand on our travel list for some time - we know several people who have been and loved it, and Brian's mom lived there with her family when she was in middle and high school. She lived all over the world, and Thailand was her favorite. All of this was enough reason for us to check it out ourselves!

We talked to people who have been, and did some research ourselves, and came up with the following itinerary - Bangkok, Ayutthaya, Chiang Mai, and Railay Bay. All in all it was an amazing trip. We were able to see where Brian's mom grew up and went to school, visited a lot of amazing Wats (temples), rode elephants, went hiking up waterfalls, participated in the Songkron Festival (the Thai new year celebrations), went to the largest outdoor market in the world, went snorkeling in the Andaman Sea, and renewed our wedding vows on one of the world's most beautiful beaches. We packed a lot into our two week trip, but had an amazing time.

Logistics
I've been saving Delta Skymiles since 2005 when I took my first international trip to Europe for my study abroad program. After nearly seven years, I finally had enough for a flight to a far away land! As you might expect, it proved to be difficult to find a flight and actually use the miles, but we eventually made it work. I recommend calling the airline directly to find out what flight options are available because flights with their partner airlines don't show up online. We were able to get a much better flight, for less Skymiles by flying Delta domestically and Korean Air internationally. We flew from Jacksonville to Atlanta on Delta, and then from Atlanta to Seoul, South Korea and Seoul to Bangkok on Korean Air. We really enjoyed Korean Air - everyone was extremely friendly; the customer service was phenomenal. I think a large part of this is the Asian culture - in general, from our experience, they just seem to go the extra mile for you.

The flights weren't as bad as we anticipated. The flight from Atlanta to Seoul was about 14 hours, and the flight from Seoul to Bangkok was about 5 hours. The entire trip from the time we left Jacksonville until the time we landed in Bangkok was 26 hours. The long flights had individual TVs in each of the seats with movies, games, music, etc. So between that, reading material, food, and naps, the flights went by much more quickly than we anticipated.

One difficult thing with Korean Air is you can't book your seats online. You have to call within one month of the flight and request specific seats. We booked my flight through Delta to use the Skymiles and wanted to book Brian's through them also, but it was going to cost about five times as much to do so, so we booked through Cheaptickets.com. (I'm not quite sure why or how much sense that makes, but oh well...) Since we booked through two different venues, it proved to be somewhat difficult to ensure we had seats together, requiring five or so calls to Korean Air and a lot of frustration. At the end of the day, after giving our sob story of it being our anniversary trip and being heartbroken if we weren't able to sit together, we did get seats next to each other AND Korean Air had an anniversary cake for us on our way to Asia! We tried to look at the seat map on SeatGuru.com to figure out the best seats and request those, but something went awry and we missed the "best" seats by a couple of rows on each flight. Bummer! Oh well, we survived and somehow managed to have a row to ourselves on each of the flights going to Asia, but not so much on the way back.

One more note about the flights - apparently, what "class" flight is booked determines whether or not you'll get frequent flier miles for the trip. We were excited because we thought Brian would get 20,000+ Skymiles for this trip (getting us another free flight in the near future), but apparently when we booked through Cheaptickets.com we booked the "class" that wasn't eligible for Skymiles. A bit ridiculous if you ask me. Cheaptickets doesn't post the class before you book, so we had no way of knowing that would be the case. We complained afterward and all we ended up with was a wasted hour on the phone and a $50 credit from Cheaptickets (which they gave us a hard time about using when we tried to cash it in). So the moral of the story is - you have to call Cheaptickets before booking a flight to make sure the class you're booking is eligible for frequent flier mile credit.

So with that, I'll leave you with a some pictures from each of the cities and will break the rest of the trip into separate posts about the various cities.