Hua Hin is a large seaside town pretty much devoid of attractions and not on the usual tourist trail but very popular with Thai Tourists and with ex-pats – British, American, Australian and others and because of the large ex-pat community we thought it worth a visit to see if it was a place where we might like to stay for extended periods.
Hua Hin is about 200km south of Bangkok, a three hour train ride or a bus ride a tad longer. We took the train and really enjoyed the experience.
We actually liked Hua Hin a lot and it’s one of several places that we would be happy to “over-winter”. The people are very friendly, it’s a cheap place to stay with cheap transport (tuk tuk rides at 20 baht), lots of nice apartments available on a monthly rental basis and as elsewhere there are some very good supermarkets well geared up for Western tastes. There’s a big night market, nightly and lots of street food available plus lots of inexpensive seafood restaurants. There are the usual red light areas but they are limited to specific neighbourhoods/streets and so its not “in your face” unless you want it to be! Here’s a few pictures from the trip
We spent five nights in Hua Hin and would gladly have stayed longer but decided to return to Bangkok for our final few days for some retail therapy before we left for Turkey. We spent five nights at the trendy THA City Loft Hotel in the trendy Ekkamai area of Sukhumvit and really did very little in Bangkok other than eat and drink and shop.
After almost 3 months in Thailand we finally left Bangkok on an early morning flight to Istanbul on 25th February, thirteen months after we had left Istanbul for Christchurch, New Zealand. Doesn’t time fly.
We landed at Bangkok early afternoon but had to wait a couple of hours until our onward flight to Dalaman. Thankfully flights were on time and we were picked up by our transfer service at Dalaman arriving at our apartment in Kalkan, well and truly knackered in the early evening.