Christmas in Koh Lanta

My first real visit to Thailand — Bangkok had only ever been a brief transit before — happened almost by accident: a group of close friends, mostly people I'd met through the Deevstock community, decided to spend Christmas and New Year on Koh Lanta, a small, quiet island in its slow season. It was the first group trip I'd actively chosen to go on, and if they're all like this, I'd happily do more.

Days mostly followed the same easy rhythm: rented motorbikes, rides up into the cliffs for the views, long lunches, swimming, and evenings along the beach bars. No DJ sets, no festival logistics — just friends, in a much slower setting than the one we usually share.

On Christmas Eve I broke off from the group and spent the morning at a Thai cooking class — Time for Lime, a school on the island with a sideline in animal welfare. We ground spice pastes in a mortar and pestle, learned to balance the four flavours that Thai cooking keeps coming back to, and ate what we'd made at the end. I cook at home often enough, but there's something useful about being made to slow down and actually understand why a dish works rather than just following a recipe.

The real highlight of the trip, though, was underwater. After snorkeling together, the rest of the group went on to scuba dive — something I'd never done — so I peeled off to do my PADI Open Water certification on my own. It wasn't entirely smooth (my instructor had to recalibrate a few things to account for my size), but nothing unsafe, and by the end I had my certification and a long list of reasons to get back in the water for the next level.

Christmas Eve in our rented villa came with one small drama — a break-in where, fortunately, whoever got in wasn't after money or electronics, and nothing of ours was taken (though it did prompt the owner to upgrade the locks). Everything else about the villa — not least the pool — more than made up for it. The group itself was a nice big mix: a couple of us flew in from Europe — Sweden, in my case, plus another friend from the UK — alongside one friend already living in Thailand, another using the trip to scout a potential move, and two more who'd rerouted their own travels around Asia just to be there.

We closed things out with a last night in Bangkok before heading home — business class both ways, no complaints there — and it turned out to be exactly the kind of trip that makes me want more group trips like it.