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Ko Lanta is a pretty big island, so it was nice that the place we booked picked us up from the ferry terminal to drive the 40 or so minutes to the other end of the island. We picked a place from the Lonely Planet that had bungalows on the beach and was 1200 baht per night ($40), but the bungalows were not very nice, so we moved the next night to the place right next door with much nicer bungalows for only a little more (1400 baht). This is *quite* a bit more than we had been paying for lodging up to this point, but it was also nicer, on the beach, and setup to be all inclusive so that you could just charge everything to your room and pay at the end.

Our first day we just went to the beach right outside our room and drank fruit shakes at the beach bar. We hadn’t really done much laying on the beach up till this point, so I put on a bunch of SPF 50 sunblock and generally tried to stay out of the sun. However, there was a slack line to play on near the beach bar, so I spent too long goofing around on that after swimming and forgot to reapply sunblock so ended up with a mild sunburn on my shoulders. The sun is very strong.

The beach is fairly large and only has 3 places to stay on it, which is much fewer than most of the other beaches, so it feels more private. There are only a few dozen people on the beach at a time, so it’s never crowded feeling. Each of the places on the beach had a restaurant with pretty good food, so we would hop around between them for meals to check out the different bungalows and menus.

Geneveve loves the ocean. She can’t swim, but she runs into the waves with a fearlessness that both delights and worries me. The waves would knock her down and she would laugh. There seemed to be quite a few children on Ko Lanta, and Geneveve took a liking to a little German boy that we kept running into and would follow him around and play with him whenever possible.

Overall we spent most of our time on Ko Lanta just relaxing on or near our beach, but some mornings we would go out on a scooter to see some of the island sites. One day we went to Khao Mai Kaew cave, which was a really fun adventure and made us feel pretty badass to do with a baby. To get to the cave required a little jungle hike with steep stone steps with vines and giant spiders. Once in the cave required climbing ladders through narrow spaces, some minor rock scrambling, and at the end crawling through a tunnel that is small enough that Geneveve had to do on our own since it was too small to carry her through. We also rented a motorbike to see the old town on the east side of the island and did a hike through the park jungle on the south end of the island to the sound of screaming gibbons.

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