My family journey through Thailand — a goodbye disguised as a holiday
Kai scans the bay from a height on Koh Yao Yai. Pictures: Chani Anderson (courtesy of her personal collection).
A few weeks before we left for Thailand, I wrote a short, slightly breathless entry in my journal, the kind you write when you’re trying to convince yourself that something is a good idea. I described our upcoming journey as monumental. I mentioned my three children, and the sense that this trip mattered more than most.
What I didn’t write, because I didn’t yet have the words for it, was that this was a goodbye disguised as a holiday.
Thailand has always existed for me in layers. There is the physical place, the heat that hits you like a friendly slap, the hot and sour tongue-tickle of mealtimes, and the beauty of long-tail boats bobbing under limestone karst.
Then there is my own history folded into it, my coming-of-age visits, trailing behind my father as he tried, unsuccessfully and somewhat romantically, to hold onto a scrap of beach before the developers arrived. And now there was to be a third layer: Watching my children encounter it for the first time, each from wildly different vantage points in their lives.
Mine is not a tidy family of similarly aged children in matching hats. I had Evie, three years old and feral with delight, Cillian, eight, oscillating between wide-eyed wonder and existential fatigue, and Kai, 21, his body present but his gaze often elsewhere.
My eldest is not my biological child. He came into my care in the most painful way imaginable, when my little sister, Tanya, left this world on a wing. Perhaps because of that, I have always held him a little tighter.
His paternal heritage is Thai. Although we know very little about that bough of his family tree, it felt important that he experience something tangible about this part of himself, so I had meticulously planned a five-week journey through some of the unpolished corners of Thailand, places my sister and I had once loved, while still maintaining a level of comfort. Because when 18 years separate your oldest from your youngest, nowhere is that more apparent than in an inadequately proportioned hotel room with limited wifi and a toddler who has decided sleep is for other people.
Our journey began on Koh Yao Yai. Despite being the third-largest island in Phang Nga Bay and only 15 minutes from Phuket by ferry, it remains blissfully underdeveloped. It felt like rolling the clock back 30 years, before the juggernaut of tourism arrived.
Here, the shoreline is still dotted with paddy fields tilled by water buffalo and working fishing villages where nets hang from shanty huts while locals wave as they dry fish in the sun.
We stayed at the locally owned Thiswan Beach Resort, where rooms start under €50 a night, yet ornate wooden interiors, multiple pools, and wonderfully attentive hosts make it feel far more luxurious than the price suggests. Evie immediately thrived, making friends with dogs, lizards, sand, and strangers with impartial enthusiasm. Cillian was more reticent but found his happy place behind a snorkel mask.
The island’s population is roughly 80% Muslim, meaning there are few bars and virtually no nightlife. Kai discovered the best way to explore its deserted beaches, mangroves, and mosques was by renting a moped, so he was largely lost to us for the first few days.
I quietly hoped he was having the kind of revelatory experience I had imagined for him, and promised myself I would wait patiently for him to tell me about it.
From there, we travelled on to Railay beach in Krabi by traditional long-tail boat.
In my memory, Krabi is loud and rebellious, a place where heady nights run into sunburnt mornings and friendships are formed over buckets of Sang Som rum. It hasn’t changed, so bringing my younger children there felt slightly reckless. It’s not very often you have to repeatedly say: “No, those are grown-up brownies.”
Cillian, however, crept out of his shell somewhere between the promises of rock-climbing adventures and house beats, with his holiday highlight being a trip to a Muay Thai fight with his big brother, an outing he returned from grinning ear to ear and covered in day-glow paint.
We stayed at the Railay Great View Resort, about a 20-minute walk from town. The steep climb to the cantilevered huts was worth it, lifting us above the beachfront chaos. Instead, there were troops of monkeys swinging through the trees and sleep serenaded by monsoon rain — a reminder of how naturally beautiful Krabi really is.
It was also the only place we knew held a possible thread of Kai’s history; his biological father was from here. I half-expected a long-lost grandparent to appear around a corner.
But watching Kai doze behind his sunglasses, stirred only by the sight of a tattoo shop or burger joint, it began to dawn on me that he wasn’t a younger version of me searching for something.
He was charting his own path now, one I wasn’t steering any more.
From Krabi, we headed inland to one of the most memorable stops on the trip: Elephant Hills near Khao Sok National Park, a vast wilderness home to one of the oldest rainforests on Earth. Its centrepiece is Cheow Lan Lake, a flooded valley of limestone karst formed by the same tectonic forces that shaped Halong Bay in Vietnam.
The tented safari camp, known for its ethical elephant sanctuary and sustainable tourism, has long been on my bucket list. It’s closer in spirit to an African safari than a Thai resort, with guided adventures and days shaped by the awe-inspiring surroundings.
In the jungle, age matters less, everyone is equally small and powerless against nature, you just have to roll with it.
We paddled canoes, trekked forest trails, avoided giant spiders, fed rescued elephants, held hands as we leapt into in the lake, laughed while fish nibbled our toes, and lay sleepless under canvas listening to the unfamiliar night-time chorus.
With little wifi and nowhere else to be, something changed. Phones were forgotten. We were in it together, a family team. When Kai reached back to help lift me from a boat one afternoon, I realised our roles had gently reversed. I wasn’t the one carrying him any more and, weirdly, under the jungle skies, that felt exactly right.
Our penultimate stop was Khao Lak, where, after nearly three weeks of boats, buses, and mosquito bites, I finally gave in and booked the easiest thing imaginable, a family resort.
We checked into The Sands by Katathani, a busy four-star sprawl of water slides, buffet queues, and a swim-up ice-cream bar. After the intensity of living out of a backpack, the children were ecstatic. I’ll admit I wasn’t immune to the charms of a drop-and-flop kids’ club and an uninterrupted hour with a book.
At first, I unfairly dismissed Khao Lak as ‘destination anywhere’. A long ribbon of beachside villages stretching along 25km of sand, connected by a busy highway and dotted with night markets, hotels, bars, and the occasional McDonald’s.
But walking those beaches tells another story. Vast empty plots still mark where resorts were washed away when the Indian Ocean tsunami struck in 2004, claiming thousands of lives here alone. Shells and fading photographs hang from palm trees as testament to the heavy history.
It was here, at the end of a lazy week, that Kai’s journey finally diverged from ours. One afternoon, over coconuts, I asked if he was disappointed not to have uncovered the family we thought might be here.
He shrugged. “My family isn’t lost,” he said. “It’s right here.”
And, with that, it felt like the trip had already given us what we came for.
The final leg of the journey brought the family, minus one, to Koh Yao Noi, the quieter, more polished neighbour of Koh Yao Yai. We stayed at Paradise Koh Yao, a secluded resort tucked into a private bay, the sort of place so picture perfect it borders on parody. White sand, turquoise water, hornbills gliding overhead on cue. Curated paradise.
Days drifted by in hammocks, cocktails at sunset, leaving plenty of time for reflection.
There is a particular kind of grief that comes with raising children well. If you’ve done your job properly, they leave — they should leave — yet nothing quite prepares you for the strange hollowness when they do.
I took comfort in watching my younger explorers, Evie chasing starfish through the shallows, her sun-browned face declaring that she had no intention of ever leaving Thailand. Cillian, meanwhile, had fully come into his own, haggling for souvenirs at the village stalls like a seasoned traveller.
And as I watched them, just starting out on the journeys that would eventually take them away from me, it struck me that perhaps this is what travel is really for. Not searching or escaping but recognising when you are home again.
Paradise, Koh Yao Noi, B&B from €120 per night.
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