Life is pretty normal here in Thailand in the middle of a world wide pandemic. Thailand went 100 days without any local transmission. There were cases reported, but those were people in quarantine, traveling from other countries. Anyone entering the country must have obtained a visa, and those are only given for specific reasons, and stay in quarantine for 2 weeks before traveling elsewhere.
There have been a few sporadic Covid cases, but they seem to be mysterious and random and hard to track down.
We are supposed to wear masks all the time, but most people don't.
We are allowed to travel throughout Thailand so over the past week we went to Koh Lanta for a few days.
From Hat Yai we caught a bus (van) to Trang. We waited 1 1/2 hours for the 2 1/2 hour bus to Trang to arrive. We arrived in Trang at noon and needed to catch a bus to Koh Lanta, but we were informed the next bus to Koh Lanta was 4 hours from now. The Trang bus station isn't exactly the kind of place to kill 4 hours. It's just broken benches between 2 rows of parked vans, a dirty pay toilet, and a few places selling chips.
I wussed out so hard. We found and hired a driver to take us the other 2 1/2 hours to the island. We finally arrived at our hotel LONG before our Trang bus was scheduled to leave.
Koh Lanta is a rather under developed tourist spot. There are no McDonalds and no typical tourist spots. It's spread out and we quickly learned we needed motorbikes to get around. Of course it's Covid and tourism is Thailand has been wiped out. We were mostly alone. It was surreal at times. Most restaurants were closed as were most shops.
We were the only guests at our resort and the only people on the beaches. It sounds like paradise and in some ways it was, but with no tourists there is no reason to keep the beaches clean. There was quite a bit of rubbish. At times it was hard to find a place to eat and we had sandwiches from 7-11 for a meal.
There were lovely beaches and lovely people and we really loved our time there. We hope to go back again in the future.
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