Island Fever to Mediterranean Dreams: How Valencia Became Our Koh Phangan Escape Plan I Part 1
After living for 13 years on Koh Phangan, it’s time for a change. Valencia seemed like a nice place to live online, but what is it like in person?
Welcome to Part 1 of my Valencia adventure! ✨ A word:
💧 Just a month ago, I was strolling through Valencia's sunlit streets, soaking in its vibrant energy and beauty — little did I know that only weeks later, those very streets would be flooded in a tragedy. I feel incredibly lucky to have left before the storm, but my heart aches for those who’ve had their lives turned upside down.
So, in solidarity with the city that welcomed me so warmly, I’m dedicating 50% of the profits from this post to help Valencia recover. By becoming an annual subscriber (for less than $1 a week!), you're not only supporting Girls' Guide to Living Abroad — you’re also giving back to this beautiful city and helping it heal. Let’s rally together and send some love to Valencia. ❤️
Part 1 I The Great Disconnect I Outgrowing Our Island Life
I've been miserable living on Koh Phangan for some time now. Don't get me wrong — many of the reasons I fell in love with the island remain the same: exquisite white sand beaches, warm sparkling tropical waters, and a relaxed pace of life. That was all I needed when I first came to the island on holiday when I was 21 — just under two decades ago. When my boyfriend (now husband) Fraser was offered a construction job there, we jumped at the chance and slipped into island life like a lime into a bottle of San Miguel Light.
Things were fun and exciting for the first few years. We were young, free, and “living the dream.” We had a great group of friends and a fun social life. Hopping from beach party to pool party with the tropical sun on your back and white sand between your toes — what more could you ask for in your late 20s?
But as we got older and started a family, that fun and fancy-free beach bliss began to feel like a postcard from a past life. I started to resent the island for many of the same reasons I’d wanted to move there in the first place: the relaxed pace of life started pissing me off when it meant constant internet outages interrupting my work calls and the postman never being able to find my home despite living in the same place for 8 years. The beaches began to bore me — sure, they're pretty and all, but when going to the beach is all there is to do, it gets old. Plus, many of our friends moved away to actually start their lives and the community we’d been a part of began to unravel.
When we first arrived, I had attempted to build community through initiatives like starting the Koh Phangan Business Association. But when it fizzled out after just two meetings, it chipped away at my spirit. I thrive on community and connection, and the island’s transient, uncommitted social scene left me feeling isolated and unfulfilled. I tried organising a few other community events, but when they, too, flopped due to lack of commitment, I lost my drive to try — or even participate in — anything further.
Friendships, which once kept me anchored to the island, started to feel one-sided. I’m a loyal friend who puts in a lot of effort, but over time, I began pulling back after being disappointed by people who didn’t reciprocate. After a painful “breakup” with my best friend, I realised it wasn’t me — it was the nature of the island, which often attracts people who are still wrapped up in their own trauma. This epiphany gave me clarity: I was bigger than this island, and my true community lay far beyond its shores.
And then the island began to change too. Once it re-opened after COVID, a torrent of new people flooded our shores — everyone wanting their own luxury seaview pool villa. Fraser, having been in the construction industry since the day we moved to the island, was perfectly positioned to step up to the plate and facilitated many of those builds — and our property development company Sand & Stone was born.
It would have been silly not to ride the wave. But the island had further lost its sheen when my pregnancy on Koh Phangan helped me understand that a huge part of my love for the island had been commensurate with my love for partying. And the island lost even more of its appeal through those sober lenses.
As I settled into Mommy life, the party lifestyle appealed to me less and less. I didn't want to be constantly hungover. I wanted to take my kid to the museum and the theatre and watch dance shows and go to the library. Koh Phangan didn't even have a bookstore.
But we were riding the wave. How could I complain? My career — a writer and content creator — was mobile. Fraser's was very much the opposite. And he was killing it. He was, as most CEOs are at the start, overworked and underpaid, but we could see it would pay off in the long-run. So I grinned and bore it as much as I could. (This doesn't mean I didn't still have the occasional I hate this stupid F****ing island meltdown.)
“I can suck it up for a few more years,” I'd sniffled to Fraser after one such meltdown, after he reminded me how guilty my island-life loathing comments made him feel. “But I need to know there's light at the end of the tunnel.”
I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d outgrown the island. I’d always imagined myself a successful author socialite in my late 30s, flitting between book launches to press events and TED Talks, punctuated by lively dinners and cocktail parties with professors and politicians. Island life, where I struggle to get normal people to commit to average activities, was really starting to feel like a gilded cage: a beautiful place where I was slowly wilting inside.
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to paint myself as someone who’s crying and cringing her way through every moment of island life. Of course there were and continue to be many moments of happiness on Koh Phangan. My writers’ group is a pocket of sunshine I look forward to every week. And I do still have some friends left who I see on a semi-regular basis. I also count down the days between my next bi-annual visit to The Sanctuary — often with my writers' group — which has become my happy place on the island.
And I feel so blessed to get lots of hang time with my son. But frankly, between those moments, I spend a lot of time feeling alone. Fraser works a lot, though he makes a huge effort to spend as much time with us as possible.
And I just didn't and don't want to spend my life lonely anymore.
But rather than feeling sorry for myself about it (which I only do like, 50% of the time, I swear!), I have reframed my time on Koh Phangan as my “preparation for the real world” era. I’ve used this time to heal from past trauma, focus on my health, and shape myself into the person I’ve always wanted to be. I’ve thrown myself into wellness practices — yoga, meditation, herbal tea and supplements and healing treatments — so that when I finally get out of this jazzy jail, I’ll do so as the healthiest, most grounded and best version of myself.
But once we’re ready to finally escape, where would we go? That was the big question. Canada was never an option, even before I left 19 years ago. It’s not that I don’t love Canadians — they’re great — but life there feels too safe, too predictable. It lacks the edge I’ve always craved. And then there’s the weather. Cold, rainy, dreary days were never for me — they drag my mood down. I need the sun to feel alive. Sunshine lifts my spirit, and I’ve always known I needed to live somewhere warm and bright. For similar reasons, Scotland, where Fraser is from, was off the table. Both of us left our home countries because we knew we were destined for something greater. And we’re not ready to give up on that dream just yet.
During my pregnancy, I found a cute little town in Mexico — the country my parents had moved to around the same time I’d moved to Thailand — called Mérida. We loved the Mexican way of life and siesta and fiesta culture, and my mom living there and my family not far away in Canada certainly added to the appeal. It was a seaside town, not too big, safest city in Mexico, and affordable cost of living. We’d explored it as best we could during COVID — “walking” around it on Google Maps, me bingeing every YouTube and Tiktok I could find about it while Fraser researched the up-and-coming property market. It seemed perfect.
…Until we got there.
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Our relocation dreams were dashed pretty quickly, first of all, by comments from local Méridiens on the first video I posted on my socials as we were exploring the city and saying how excited we were to move there finally.
"We don't want you here."
"Stay in your home country."
"We can't afford to live in our own city because of gentrificators like you."
...that kinda thing. Not exactly a warm welcome.
Not to mention the fact that it just felt like a big crumbling concrete jungle. There was very little to do for kids beyond going to the mall. Traffic was insane — Mexican drivers are loco! It felt run down and dingy. And I didn't feel the sense of community I'd been searching for since I left Canada to find my place at 21.
After a month in Mérida, I returned to Koh Phangan with my head in my hands. We’d spent years plotting our escape — and now we were back to square one.
What would we do now?
It was around this same time that our little island boy Hudson — then just three years old — began expressing his distaste for the island, too. It caught us by surprise. We’d assumed we could be living in Bosnia for all he’d cared, so long as he had a decent school and soft plays and loving parents, until he was at least five. But at such a young age, he’d been exposed to the UK on our trips to visit Fraser’s family in Scotland, and now a metropolis in Mexico which — though I wasn’t a fan — had a heck of a lot more to amuse his little mind than Koh Phangan.
“Why do we have to live on Koh Phangan, Mommy?” He asked me one time upon return from a trip to the UK. I hesitated. I didn’t want to blame his daddy, but I couldn’t come up with any other reason we were still here.
“We just need to be here for daddy’s work for a little bit longer, baby. I promise we’re going somewhere better.”
And after he told me, “I want to go to a bigger school,” for the 267th time, I figured that, even though he was not long out of nappies, I couldn’t ignore it anymore. I didn't blame his school — it's the best on the island and it's a lovely place with gentle teachers and a strong child-led learning policy. But I had to respect that the kid wasn't happy, whether it was his friends leaving him out — something he often spoke of, “they won’t play with me,” was something I heard almost daily — or whether it was that he was keen to be at a school with older children. And I was not keen on the options for the following year, for reasons I’ll not get into due to this being a small island and not wanting to publicly slam anyone in the community.
That’s it! My brain pinged one evening while I was pondering our future on the sofa after reading Hudson his books and switching off the light. I’ll find the perfect school for Hudson. I’ll find the best damn school for him I can, and then everything else will fall into place.
It was quite a thrill, Googling “Europe’s best Montessori schools” and seeing what popped up. I was looking for places that ticked 5 key boxes:
Warm and sunny
Affordable
Family-friendly community
Convenient proximity to our friends and family
Potential to one day call it “home” and mean it
And when I came across Valencia Montessori School’s website, I was swept away. The school seemed perfect. Hudson was already in a school that followed Montessori philosophy, so the pedagogy was a good fit. The school seemed gentle yet vibrant, and diverse. It had a huge team of teachers. It was an eco-school (whatever the heck that was).
My heart banged against my chest. Valencia… I liked the way the name rolled off my tongue. A lump formed in my throat as I began researching the city. I so badly wanted it to be perfect.
Photo after photo, blog post after video, I clicked through faster and faster.
Palm trees, sandy beaches, sunny weather in the high 20s-low 30s. A metropolis, but not too big — 800k. Less than 3 hours by plane to Scotland, and there was even a direct flight from Madrid to Guadalajara where my mom lives that was just 12 hours (days less than it takes us from Koh Phangan), and even less than that to my sisters and cousins in Canada. Plus we'd be closer to our other friends and family living in various parts of Europe.
Right. I thought. This is actually perfect.
But now I had to sell it to Fraser.
He'd been away for the weekend while I'd hatched the idea of Valencia. It wasn't my plan to pitch it to him straight away the night he got back.
But I wear my heart on my sleeve and as we sat on the sofa and I gnawed at my cuticles, he could tell there was something up. “Babe, what's going on, why are you acting weird?” He asked while we were catching up from his trip.
“Nothing… nothing,” I answered, tucking my hair behind my ear and taking a breath.
But he always knows. “Come on, spill.”
So I did. I told him how I couldn't handle Hudson's constant disappointment at life on the island. And how I was still really struggling with my own.
He nodded, being completely understanding. I'd picked my timing right.
“Look, to be honest, I’m starting to feel the same,” he admitted.
My eyebrows shot up. “Oh?” Until that very moment, he’d always maintained that he was perfectly happy on the island.
“Yeah, we’ve been here too long. It’s time for a change.”
My heart raced faster. “Really?”
He nodded.
I pounced. “OK so I’ve found the perfect Montessori school for Hudson, it’s in Valencia, Spain, which is so close to Scotland and our friends in Europe, and it’s warm and there’s a direct flight to my mom from Madrid and it’s surprisingly affordable and so beautiful!” The words came out faster than I could control them.
I held my breath and waited for his response.
He smiled. “That sounds amazing. Show me?”
A flood of emotions overcame me as I showed him the school’s website, followed by a Youtube video I’d watched several times about living in Valencia, followed by his go-to — the local property website.
“Wow babe. It seems perfect.”
I bit my lip. This could actually happen! I found the courage for the next sentence: “I want Hudson to start primary school at the same time as the rest of his class.”
“When’s that again?”
It was an American curriculum, which gave us an extra year over a British one, thankfully. “Six years old.”
Fraser did some quick maths in his head. “So that’s… next year?”
I had expected him to freak, but he was calm. I knew that the way the company was right now, he was required full-time on the ground on Koh Phangan. But he’d been so overly stressed, overworked, and a doctor had recently told him he had the blood pressure of an 80-year-old diabetic woman. He was waking up daily to 200+ Whatsapp work messages. We both knew things had to change. I had to get him out of here just as much as Hudson and I.
“Yes. It’s about a year and a half away.”
He nodded. I could see him running the numbers. Finally: “Let’s do it then.”
“Oh my god, really? Don’t you want to do more research?”
“Well, you’ve been researching, and this place looks great. Frankly babe, I don’t have the time or energy to research a whole new place to live. If you can handle that, I’ll work on getting the company to a place where I can manage it remotely.”
“Deal.”
And just like that, we were moving to Valencia.
But first, I’d have to go on a reconnaissance trip to check it out.
Stay tuned for Part II next week, when I go to Valencia and report back my first impressions!
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Your story lands hard. So much of my own journey parallels yours; by the end of this piece, I was rooting so hard for you to get out of there that my stomach hurt. I want to write a longer comment about kids, belonging, fit, loneliness, but I’ll spare everyone. Thanks for sharing.
Funny how a place can seem ‘perfect’ on paper but at the end of the day it comes down to bow a place feels. And, different places feel different at different phases in your life too.