Mr. Pong’s Beach Shack

After a week in the city, I was desperate to get to the islands and feel the sand beneath my toes, so we hopped on a plane and two hours later landed on the beautiful island of Koh Samui.

We stayed in our family home, the place I grew up. I almost forgot how beautiful it is. Look at that view!

If you’ve never been to Samui before, the airport is right near the water, just nestled behind the big golden buddha you can see there. Often when people first fly in they panic and think they’re going to land on the water.

We live on the north side of the island, Tong Son Bay, and the complex our house is on has its own little private beach just down the road. Well I say private, it used to be when I was growing up apart from a little beach shack called Mr. Pongs I used to buy my ‘nam manaos’ (lemon shakes) and chicken fried rice from. But now they’ve built a fancy new resort on there, but the beach shack is still there thankfully!

Everyone was starving and so was I! But I couldn’t resist a quick paddle in the water. Its so warm, its honestly like a bath.

Cheers Samui…

Not a bad place to grab a quick lunch.

We feasted on garlic and pepper prawns, Thai green curry, fried rice, stir fried veg in oyster sauce, pork fried with basil and chilis known as ‘pad ka poaw moo’ (I have an excellent simple recipe for this, I will share it with you one day.)

Once we were all full and agreed to come back and visit Mr. Pong’s tomorrow morning for breakfast, we wandered back along the beach, picking up a few shells along the way and jumped into the pool to cool off and catch some sun.

We’d made plans that evening to meet up with old friends so we had a relaxing afternoon. We visited a really cool little bar for cocktails to watch the sun go down.