Thailand Honeymoon - Paresa, "Heaven of all Heavens"

Good Morning! I hope you a nice Mother’s Day Weekend! I, unfortunately, did not get to spend the weekend with my mom, but we did have a long FaceTime chat about wedding photos and leaky refrigerators… Walter and I had our first major home owner’s issue this weekend when our ice maker line got a hole and water leaked through our kitchen floor damaging the basement ceiling below… Thanks to my dad’s guidance we were able to fix the leak and are hoping the ceiling won’t be too much trouble to fix. Major crisis averted. We just celebrated 1 year in our house on May 1st, so we are considering ourselves pretty lucky that this was our first real house incident! Anyway, you are not here to hear about leaking refrigerators, so I will get into the fun stuff with another Thailand post!

The first stop on our honeymoon was to Phuket. There are a whole bunch of islands in the south of Thailand and Phuket is the largest one. It is island paradise! Compared with Chiang Mai, Phuket was much more expensive, but it was still very affordable and we were able to stay at a 5 star resort for a reasonable price. The name of the resort we stayed at was Paresa, but the staff more affectionetly refers to it as “the heaven of all heavens”. The whole resort is built into the side of a cliff that over looks the Andaman Sea. Our suite had it’s own infinity pool and the view was amazing to watch the sunset from!

When we arrived we quickly found out it was the Thai New Year, which they call Songkran, it is celebrated April 13th-15th. It is basically a country wide water fight! According to a magazine I read, Chang Puak, “the roots of this festival are spiritual, with water dousing representing a purification ritual to wash away evil spirits in anticipation of the Thai New Year”. But these days it is largely celebrated by water gun fight! We went down to Patong, a city in Phuket, for the celebration and there were people everywhere! Most armed with a water gun dousing everyone that walks by. It was definitely an experience we will never forget!

Other than celebrating Songkran, while in Phuket we took a Thai cooking class (more about that another day) and did mostly beach activities! We did a day excursion where we took a long tail boat out snorkeling. We saw tons of colorful fish, including star fish! We then spent the afternoon on a beautiful private island.

Since our resort was cliffside we were not right on the beach, so we spent one day down the street at Kamala Beach! We went jet skiing and got massages on the beach! It was a perfect day mixed with relaxation and adventure!

Second to the elephants, my favorite part of Thailand was the food! Everything we ate was delicious and I can’t talk about Phuket and Paresa without talking about their amazing complimentary breakfast! Breakfast is not my favorite, but this breakfast was so good it could turn the most anti-breakfast people into breakfast lovers. When we got to breakfast the first morning and they not only had a wide selection of breakfast foods, but also a full Thai menu I was in heaven. They had a large buffet that included Thai and Western foods and we also got to order off the menu! The menu had traditional breakfast options like Scrambled Eggs and Eggs Benedict and it also had typical Thai dishes like Pad Thai, Pad See Ew and Thai Omelets. Breakfast beverages also included unlimited coffee, fresh squeezed juices and sparkling wine!

This was our view at breakfast every morning 🙂

Walter had some sort of Pad Thai almost every day we were in Thailand!

Everyone who worked at Paresa made us feel so welcome and were always going out of their way to make our stay the best it could possibly be. They call their staff “angels” and we are pretty sure 1 specific angel is assigned to each set of guests. Well, if this is true then Nop, pictured below, was our angel and he and Walter became good friends during our stay #makesfriendseverywherewego.