Koh Samui

We got off the train the next morning in Hat Yai and quickly found a travel agency to buy bus and boat tickets from. The bus we took from Hat Yai to Surat Thani took about 6 hours. At Surat Thani we took an hour long ferry to the touristy island of Koh Samui.
That got us to Samui at around 7pm. It was dark by that time so we just hopped in a taxi and got the driver to takes to a good hotel on Lamai Beach. The room was pretty good, good for the night anyhow. By the next day we were well aware of the Samui taxi mafia. The extremely exorbitant taxi prices were a huge shock considering we were just in Indonesia where you can get a 13 hour taxi for only $70. And in KL you can get a taxi across the city for only about $5. It cost us 400baht ($13) to drive about half an hour-from the jetty to Lamai (not cheap like what we are used to, but that doesn't even start to explain the mafia's ridiculous prices). Then when we wanted to get a taxi from Lamai to Chewang-about a 5 minute drive, they asked us to pay 500baht ($16). Yes that's right...$16 for a 5 minute drive!!! We managed to get local transport-benches on the back of a truck for 300baht ($10) to Chewang (evidently they are part of the 'taxi mafia' as well!). The 'taxi mafia' kind of restricted us from going around and checking things out so we only spent a few days on Koh Samui.
While we were on Samui we found a great little restaurant called Sunshine Café with tasty baguettes and Thai food. The fried bananas and ice cream were absolutely amazing! They were every bit as good as I remember from Thailand six years ago. I'm so glad I'm in Thailand, the food in other places we have been is great, but in Thailand it's excellent. It's really different in the way of flavours, lots of lemongrass, coconut, curry and chilies.

The beaches on Koh Samui were pretty nice, although Chewang was super busy and lined with really fancy resorts, Lamai had more of a nice laid back vibe. It was hard to explore Samui, because it was all very spread out and the extreme taxi mafia prices weren't making us inclined to go check out other beaches.

So after a few days we got on the Songserm ferry and headed to Samui's neighbour-Koh Phangan.