I found paradise in the Gulf of Thailand. It had everything I look for in a beach island, and more than I bargained for…

There was lots of tree cover, gentle waves, and beach bbqs. I passed my days soaking up the sun, scarfing down endless tropical fruit, and snorkeling with giant sea turtles, cuttlefish, parrot fish, jellyfish, and sea cucumbers.

But it was not all sunshine and roses, as beach islands seem to be in all the holiday commercials.

Here are a few other unadvertised dangers I experienced first-hand…

Sea Lice

I had the misfortune to learn about the existence of sea lice while swimming. They are like baby jellyfish, floating in clouds underwater, nearly invisible to the eye. First-hand, I learned it feels like tiny electrical shocks all over your exposed skin and how hard it is to swim away from them when you cannot see them.

Coconuts

Another unmentioned danger of the beach island is the coconuts. In the ads, you see the palm trees swaying in the island breezes. You see the coconuts growing in bunches and think to yourself, ‘that will make a tasty drink later’. The ads don’t show that when the breezes blow a little too strongly and the coconuts rocket toward the ground, they leave a massive crater in the sand. There is a reason the beach loungers are not set up under the shade of the coconut palms.

Dinosaurs?!

One morning I lay in a hammock, blissfully swaying in the shade of my balcony at my treehouse chalet, and thought to myself, “this may be the most wonderful place on earth”.

Balcony view

“Why doesn’t everyone come here?” I thought to myself, closing my eyes.

And then I heard a large rustling on the forest floor two levels below me. I cracked open one eye and peeked over my hammock to look through the gaps in my wooden porch floor. Nothing…

Then I heard a large crack, as a big branch snapped on the ground. I softly rolled out of my hammock and lay down on the floor to peer through the space between the floorboards.

THERE WAS A 7 FOOT LONG DINOSAUR UNDER MY TREEHOUSE!

Alright, so technically he wasn’t a dinosaur. He was a monitor lizard. (And this is a photo of his smaller cousin who was only 3 feet long, because I was too scared to move/get my camera when I saw the big one).

Why did I not realize that he was a monitor lizard? Because every monitor lizard that I had seen before was only about a foot long.

It may not be the scientific definition, but I classify anything big enough to eat me as a dinosaur. I learned an important lesson that day: Dragons/dinosaurs in theory = Awesome. Dragons/dinosaurs in real life = Super scary. I also learned that if you stay completely still, you may get lucky and the dinosaur will not come investigate how tasty you are.

Note: the dinosaurs were also not mentioned in the brochures.