Thailand Travel Tales: Sun, Sea & Shopping With My Girls!

There is nothing as fun as an all-girls trip! Imagine crazy night outs, never-ending shopping trips and brunches discussing love, life, careers and everything in between! Women deserve a no-pressure, free-to-do-as-you-please vacation sans men and families every once in a while. So what happens when you put 4 women, three of whom had never met before, together? A fabulous trip ensues!

And it begins... A 7-day Girls Trip To Thailand

Shop Your Heart Out In Bangkok

Girls! You cannot visit Thailand and not shop your hearts out especially when you are without grumbling, impatient men. Bangkok is a shopping haven to be explored with your girlfriends. Only girlfriends will scout an entire 4 floor mall with you on no sleep for that one pair of shoes you fell in love with but didn't pick up the first time. Only they will run around a mall at closing time (which is 6 in the evening during weekends) like their life depends on it.

We recommend you do not miss Platinum Mall and Chatuchak Weekend Market! Chatuchak Market isn't for the faint-hearted or the impatient. We prepared for an entire day at Chatachuk Market like we were preparing for battle. Comfortable shoes, hassle-free clothes and water bottles and what not! There is nothing you cannot find in Chatuchak - clothes, plants, books, home decor! If I ever visit Bangkok again, it is definitely going to be the weekend so I don't miss Chatuchak Weekend Market.

The Best Nightlife Experience in Thailand

The next best thing to shopping with the girls is partying with them. Girlfriends are the right kind of protective. They will accompany you to the washroom, hold your hair while you puke and ward off creeps with just their looks. They will take embarrassing drunk videos of you, but will never complain about having to take care of you. Also, why is there no female equivalent of a wingman? Women are so much better at winging, eyeliners and girlfriends.

RCA Route 66 is hands down one of the best nightclubs in Bangkok. Good music and almost no creeps! It is situated at RCA, which is a street filled with bars and clubs in Bangkok. We went to Levels in Sukhumvit area the first night and there was just so much sleaze. I suggest you give this place a miss.

The parties in Krabi were my least favorite. We stayed at AoNang in Krabi and since we didn't want to travel to Krabi town, we partied at Centre Point in Ao Nang itself. So Centre Point is a complex with everything - shops, restaurants, karaoke bars, go-go bars with pole dancing, ladyboy cabaret shows! We mostly stayed at Chang Bar on the ground floor and danced the night away. The staff was friendly, the music was good and it seemed the nicest for four girls travelling on their own.

Phi Phi Island was our favourite. We only had a day here and I wish we'd stayed another day! But we made the most of the one night we had. The beach parties were lit! We had to take a ferry to party! How cool is that! We started with a laidback evening watching a fire show in Carlitos and went on to pub hopping. The pubs at Tonsai Village are at a hop, skip and jump distance from each other. We googled the best parties in Phi Phi and pub hopped until the early hours of the morning. Slinky Bar beach party was our favourite!

When in Phuket and staying at Patong, you cannot miss the infamous Bangla Street. A street filled with nightclubs, beer bars, live music bars, strip clubs, cabaret shows and ping pong show clubs! Since Phuket was our last destination, we decided to do it all! We even went for a ping pong show. After all the stories we'd heard about them, we just had to see it to believe it! We'd expected the club to be filled with creepy men, surprisingly it wasn't. There were small groups of friends coming in for an experience. I will tell you this: it was disgusting. Clearly, seeing women take weird stuff out of their vagina is not my thing. Bikini-clad women try to lure men to do body shots and buy more drinks and the drinks are priced exorbitantly. If you go in, everyone in the group has to buy a drink. The staff will force you to. A little shady but when you have a superwoman like Yashi with you, she manages to get you a discount even at the most unlikely place. When not exploring weird clubs, we were at Illuzion nightclub. It is the best club we visited in Thailand.

Sun, Sea & Island Hopping

A beach vacation in Thailand is incomplete without some island hopping. The four island tour to Railey Beach & Phra Nang Cave Island, Chicken Island, Tup Island and Poda Island from Ao Nang, Krabi is slightly overrated. The islands around Patong are so much better. Coral and Raya Islands looked straight out of a postcard. The water is in shades of blue you probably didn't know existed.

We lost our way and almost drowned!

Our four island tour in Krabi started with a visit to Phra Nang Princess Cave at Railay Island. The cave opened up to the beach. Even at 10 in the morning, the beach was swarmed with people so we decided to move on to the next island.

Instead of going back the way we had come, we decided to wade through the water to our boat. Such a terrible idea! The boats looked closer than they actually were! If not the strong waves, the rocks in the sea almost made us fall into the sea. To make matters worse, two of us were carrying heavy backpacks with food, phones, and camera. But we finally reached the other end only to realize the boats anchored there weren't ours and we'd reached another part of Railay Bay. So we had to wade back through the water! So much for a shortcut to the boat! By the time we left Railay, it was already 12 and we had 3 more hours to explore four other islands!

After Railey, it was time to snorkel without an instructor, if I may add. The boatman handed us our snorkeling gear along with information that we had to go snorkelling at our own risk. I was the only one who couldn't swim and also the first one to go underwater. I wasn't letting the snorkelling gear go to waste! We went into the water holding onto the ladder of the boat. We did manage to see hundreds of tropical tigerfish!

As if we hadn't had enough for the day, we almost drowned to our deaths next. You know how people tell you not to visit Thailand during the rain? This is probably why. Being out in the sea during high tide isn't the best idea! We found ourselves in the middle of strong winds, heavy rains, high tide et al at Tup Island. The people who'd come in speedboats were allowed to leave, while the four of us were stuck on the island with 2 national park employees. So much for wanting an authentic Thai experience in a longtail boat! As if being stuck on an island with two park employees wasn't scary enough, the rain kept getting worse. So we decided to leave.

Picture a storm scene from a movie. That is how the sea was that day. The peaceful blue of the water changed to an angry dark colour. The waves were bigger than we'd ever seen. Everytime our boat hit the water, there was a loud thud and with every jerk, we fell off our seats. My girlfriends had their priorities right even when they thought they were about to drown! One cried about not wanting to die unmarried and the other cried about not wanting her husband to remarry. We didn't die, but the experience was enough to scare us off longtail boats.

Snorkelling for the first time!

We even went scuba diving in Raya Island. I didn't think I could ever go scuba diving. But when you travel with the craziest bunch of girls, they make you believe you can do crazy things like go scuba diving without knowing how to swim. The minute I put on the diving suit, all my excitement to dive flew out of the window. To top it all, it took the diving master literally 2 minutes to show us some hand signals when I was expecting training for at least an hour. Between three of us (one chickened out), we had two instructors to hold our hands through it. I was so scared that I couldn't remember any of the hand signals other than 'okay', so every time I wanted to come up for air, I was flapping my hands and legs all over the place until the instructor helped me up. But the few rare moments I let myself enjoy the underwater world of Nemos and colourful coral made up for the fear of dying of a heart attack underwater. I even stood on the seabed for a while!

Travelling with your girlfriends will either make you want to pull each other's hair off or bring you closer to each other. So when you find the people you enjoy travelling with, hold them close. I went to Thailand with one friend and two strangers and came back with my travel squad. Someone very rightly said the best bonds are formed while travelling.