We first visited Ancient Realm and Koh Lanta in 2009 when we spent 6 months travelling around SE Asia. This time we had been visiting Borneo (climbing Mount Kinabalu, jungle etc) so wanted to finish the trip with some relaxing beach time so thought where better, than what had been our favourite resort, on our favourite Thai island.

The resort has a perfect location at the bottom end of Klong Dao Beach - the small town of Saladan is just 5 minutes away on a motorbike taxi and you can walk to Long Beach the other way.

Everything which we'd loved about the resort on our first visit, was equally as good, if not better in some instances this time. Suki (who owns and runs the resort with Clint) is an absolute gem and nothing is too much trouble for her.

We had a beach front villa as before with a nice garden and hammock just metres from the beach. We'd spent Christmas/New Year at this time on other Thai islands and they can be very busy at this time but Koh Lanta still has a beach paradise feel - we used to walk all the way to the other end of the beach every morning and it was always really deserted.

Breakfast is included and very good, we also ate several meals in the hotel and were all excellent and very reasonably priced.

My husband had a couple of massages and I had a pedicure (much needed after climbing Mount Kinabalu) at the Ancient Realm Spa and we were both through out treatments were very good value and the setting was lovely.

My one criticism of this visit was the compulsory gala dinner that all guests had to pay for on Christmas Eve. I know that a lot of resorts put on a compulsory dinner for guests staying at Christmas/New Year which wasn't an issue. However the dinner was expensive for what it was (1500 BHT per person) and also as vegetarians there was hardly anything we could eat. The menu which we'd received early did have a large number of vegetarian dishes on it but for whatever reason they either failed to materialise on the night, or were meat substitutions of the dishes - eg egg fried rice contained chicken, vegetarian spring rolls were chicken spring rolls etc. If Ancient Realm are going to charge 1500 BHT for the dinner then I feel all guests should be adequately catered for - meat eaters were given a whole roasted chicken course before the buffet but when we explained to the waitress we didn't want chicken as we are vegetarians we weren't offered any alternative. I ended up feeling like I'd spent 1500 BHT and got one beer, a few chips and a bit of salad for the price!

However that one incident certainly didn't spoil our stay and I would recommend Ancient Realm to anyone wanting a little piece of beach paradise on Koh Lanta.