I am actually still in Surat but I went to Koh Muk last weekend. It's a tiny island off the west coast. I went with a friend called Andrea and we were meeting Tamara and Doke who live in Trang.
On Saturday we got the 7am bus from Surat to Trang which took about 2 hours 45 mins. We then took a mini van transfer to the pier, another 50 minutes because the road is very windy and luckily we had one of the rare safe mini van drivers that didn't feel his masculinity was being threatened if he took a sharp bend at less than 100km p/h! We then got the public boat over to the island. Even though the weather was sunny, the journey was quite rocky - I have a video but haven't uploaded these yet.

We get to koh muk but the water is too choppy to dock at the usual pier so we go to the other side of the island and then take a carry on style taxi trip to the resort. This consisted of 4 slightly hefty girls and their back packs in a cart attached to the side of a motorbike - it's the closest I've been to an extreme sport trying to stay in that cart! The place we stayed was called Mookies. It's run by an Australian chap called Brian and his Thai wife Som. They also had a Scottish guy Ron who had just been knocking around for 5 months so he helped out a bit. You stayed in tents that were put up on a permanant base with a matress, light and fan inside. Each tent was under its own thatched car port type thing so the tents didn't get rained on. It was nice because in the morning you could hear the sea.

The place was really peaceful, only saw 2 other tourists there. We went to a lovely beach but couldn't swim because there were really strong crashing waves. The water was the warmest I'd been in since I've been here. At night we had food at Mookies - raw blue prawns with chili and lime which apparently made it safe to eat. I was dubious to try at first staying in a tent with a shared bathroom 15 metres away through nature on an island where the electricity gets turned off at midnight.....But then I thought 'when in Rome...' They tasted good and had no undesired effect so all was good!

The next day after breakfast it started to rain so we just hung around Mookies and waited for our taxi to the pier. There are no cars on Koh Muk so it was another motorcycle and cart but this time the driver knew how to drive it with such a heavy load! When we got to the pier the waves looked BIG. Because we had missed the public boat (that goes at 7am - no thanks) we had to get a long tail. These are small taxi/fishing boats that have a long rudder (see phi phi pics).

Oh my god- it was awful as you all know I'm not a natural water baby so got a life jacket on straight away (only me wearing one, think they were all trying to look hard!) then the driver jumped into the water to pick up a plank of wood. I still don't know whether it was part of our boat or not! So panic attack over due to small boat with potential of missing a vital piece in BIG waves with no driver, we then set off.

Well the waves got bigger, and you could tell it was bad due to the look of concentration on the drivers face, he would speed through a wave then cut the engine as another wave hit us so even though it seemed to me that we had a schizophrenic driving us to our death, I was assured that this was very good driving through this kind of weather.

The upshot of this was that we didn't die but I'm stiil not a fan of water. I also left my dotty p suglasses suitable for my pea head, in a toilet cubicle when I wa getting changed. We then had to wait an hour for a connection back to Trang then missed the bus to Surat by 5 minutes so had to wait an hour for the next. So we were sat around in wet clothes waiting and then driving slowly due to bad weather in air con. The journey back took 7&1/2 hours and we'd been on the island less than 24 hours.

I slept for 11 hours that night - could be a record for me, but deffo a good trip that I would recommend (but wait for good weather )