Going North for a break – Part 1

Wow, finally the hectic working weeks settled!  It’s time for me to take a break and recharge myself.  So, I’ve took a few day off, and together with my other half and another 2 friends of mine, we drove up North, and visited a few areas in Southern Thailand.

We begin our journey early at about 4am from Butterworth as we wanted to beat the crowd and traffics at the border.  We arrived at Kayu Hitam, Malaysia/Thailand border town and, thanks god!  We settled everything and step into Sadao, Thailand in about 10minutes time only.  Imagine if we are later a little while more, we might be caught in traffics and sometime ones might be stucked here for few hours.

We planned to spent our first and last day in Hatyai, and when we arrived there, it is still too early to check into our hotel, we decided to detour and visited Chedi Thaimongkhon, a big stainless steel monument built by devotees.

This is certainly a good place to do Timelapse, and I was told that the night view here is even better.   On the first night at Hatyai, we stayed in Hotel Hansa JB, a little off town but generally the hotel is very comfy for short stay.

We had some really nice ‘Siam-laksa’ in Hatyai, thanks to a Mr Ang’s Aunty, who stayed locally.  You can pick the sources to go with the rice noodle – ‘Laksa’, and along with it, you can have fresh vege, deep fried chickens and very sweet desserts!

*taken with my galaxy note 10.1*

Our day 2 is a bit more adventurous, we drove further North and visited Ko Yo, a small Island near Songkhla.  Our first stop is a temple, located right when you pass by the bridge connecting the mainland and the island.  I forgotten the name of the temple, but it has a very big reclining Buddha statues, don’t think you can missed it.  I took a few shots at the fishing village nearby here.

Along the way,  while we were scouting for some refreshing drinks, we discovered a nice restaurant right in front of a nice fish farms.

And we have the best steamed fish head of a gigantic 2.8Kg sea bass!

The tail portion of the sea bass was deep fried and also super crispy and tasty!  The whole meal consist of beverages, the fish, a tomyam seafood, a pad thai (Grass noodle salad) and a grilled giant squid cost us ~RM 180.  We thinks it is very cheap in term of the food quality & the portion.  The services however, is below par.

A panoramic view of the fisheries, taken with my tablet and edited with snapseed,

Our journey continued into Songkla, and we stayed at the Hotel Pavilion Songkhla, which is the generally lack of maintenance, and not worth to consider unless you have no other options.  The other hotel such as BP Samila Beach should be a better option.

We took a rest at the hotel, and later that night, we visited the road-side local food hawkers nearby for our dinner,  there’s plenty of good and cheap foods here that you should try!

Before we call it a day, we also visited the infamous Mermaid statues at Samila Beach, and I was really having a hard time photographing it nicely as we arrived there a little too late, the best time would be during Sunset golden hour, so you can get a nice background/skyline.

Continue in Part 2

 

 

4 thoughts on “Going North for a break – Part 1”

  1. Where is the exact location of the stainless steel temple? I have been in and out from northern Thailand all the time, but honestly speaking I don’t even know where is the temple..

    How far is it from the Hatyai town area?

  2. Pingback: Going North for a break – Part 2 | Albert Yap's Journal

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