HoliYAY
A young bunch of girls gong to Santa Ponsa as our FIRST girl holiday, you can imagine the excitement!!
Checking in at the airport, the Facebook and Instagram pic, Snapchat polluted, what else do you expect from 18 and 19 year olds??
Few years later, now ‘mature’ 22 year olds, off we went again holiday planning.
The same group of girls, minus a few… deciding in a group chat where shall we go on holidays? Exciting of course, but not your ‘ordinary’ sunny two week holiday to France, Spain etc (as much as I did try to persuade this)
Reality hit, it was May, there we were sharing ideas in the no other place than the local pub!
As I said before, not once could I persuade a two week holiday to France or Spain etc, I may as well of been talking to the wall!!
One extreme to the next and later that night, flights were booked to Thailand 🙂
Not knowing one thing about this country other than it would be a long flight, it has many different bugs and people recommend to stay in hostels as they are ‘cheap and cheerful’.
Listening to many people about how cheap Thailand is (note to self, it is not cheap if you travel like us girls) we thought, why not? We are only young the once!
In all the excitement of course we didn’t research into much detail and booked it for ‘rainy season’
Future advice, check the seasonal weather changes!
Off we went 4 best friends to the land of Thailand, no clue where to go, what to do, what to expect, or what to eat (nothing but pizza, chips, pasta and garlic bread). To say the least we ‘took the bull by the horns’ and what an experience we had!!! Arriving at numerous airports etc with my surname on a board with a slightly different spelling which was ‘holywood’ for our airport collection
We lived the dream for 2 weeks!!!
You could say it was like a girl version of the film ‘hangover’… I suppose a little less extreme, a group of girls like the film ‘Bridesmaids’ you could say. The least to say one girl got ate alive by god knows what kind of bugs and swoll like a balloon (literally). It was like team bonding busting blisters with needles you could say!! Drinking ourselves out of a hangover… I am sure you get where this is going!
It was an amazing experience, every girl trip has a few hiccups of course, would we really be friends if we didn’t?? Travelling from Bangkok (HUGE eye opener!!) vomiting at the smell of the streets as soon as we touched down. The ‘famous’ city smell of Bangkok consisted of on the street cooking of fish which looked highly contaminated (I promise, this is not a joke), the dead fish crying for help!
Then travelling to Phuket, Phi Phi then arriving in the most amazing, scenic place I could imagine Maya Bay
This island is worth travelling to Thailand simply for the most exotic, peaceful views, no words can describe! Another boat and a long ass journey to Ko Samui then Ko Tao and back to the beautiful Ko Samui followed by a plane journey to the busy city of Chang Mai! Two weeks of travelling and we finally jumped on a plane to Bangkok to head back to the sunny Ireland (joke of the year)
4 girls who didn’t save 2p to go on holidays but managed between our savings and budgeting, we ended up having an absolute blast! If you take anything from this blog post, my advice is to put Thailand on your bucket list when your young folks!
*PS*
You NEED to go to the elephant sanctuary in Chang Mai
**PPS**
I advise not to take a back pack if you do NOT travel light (girl problems)
***PPPS***
Go for at least 3 weeks… 2 is not enough to enjoy each destination!
BUT everything is a learning curve, Thailand is a must see 🙂
Breige Hollywood is a final year BSc in Communication, Advertising & Marketing student at Ulster University. She can be contacted on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/breige-hollywood-a7b035116/ and Twitter @HollywoodBreige