Krabi

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If at first you don't succeed

Twelve hours on a bus is too long! Needs must and everything, but really no more pleeeeeease!!

We arrived at Krabi bus terminal at around six in the morning and were greeted by taxi men vying for our business. They’d of got it too if we hadn’t have been so completely brain dead from our never ending bus journey. We pushed past them and got a seat inside to compose ourselves before venturing onto our guesthouse.

Note to any fellow travelers to Krabi stopping at the bus terminal. Be warned the taxi driver touts are extreme examples of how to loss friends and alienate people. They hassle and annoy you to a level which will have you wanting to pull their teeth out with pliers! The be all and end all is, they won’t take you into town for anything less than 50 - 100 baht per person if not more. We walked away with them laughing at us, but we only needed to walk a few metres before flagging down a passing singshure and for the lift into town we were charged 20 baht each. And from what we noticed that was still 10 baht more than the locals paid. But still at least it wasn’t day light robbery.

We found a nice place to stay in K’s Guesthouse. It took a while to get a smile out of the women there, but then as if by magic she started to smile on our second day. Which was nice.

We weren’t in Krabi long just a couple of days, but we made use of our time and really enjoyed exploring the surrounding beaches, Islands and great street food served up every night down by the jetty.

Being Monsoon season on the Andaman coast we weren’t expecting the weather to be too good, so we opted to not stay on any of the surrounding Islands (Phuket, Phi Phi, Ko Lanta) and just explore them from our base on the mainland. We did a Four Island Tour, which turned out to be very cool. We met some nice people and our tour guide reminded me of Danny so I had fun sharing some banter with him. You can see from the photos the Islands that we visited. The sun broke through and the clouds cleared and we had a lovely afternoon swimming and snorkeling in the turquoise waters.

The next day too the weather was fine so we hired a bike and we drove along the coastline towards Phuket and stopped off at Gastropod fossil!! Cool name hey?? It’s a beach where at low tide the water reveals thousands of fossils encased in the stone rock pools. Then after all that excitement we stopped off at the Tsunami Memorial Park where we strolled around the raised walk platform, looked at the sculptures and contemplated the events that occurred not even three year previous. (Note to add on the photo of the golden hand sculpture. As you come to the end of the walkway you are presented with a poignate view out to sea of Phi Phi in the distance, one of the worst hit Islands.

We spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing on Ao Nang Beach, which was deserted and for a couple of hours we had the beach to ourselves.

And that rounded off Thailand in the best way possible. Tomorrow we’d be catching a blinking BUS again! This time we were off to Penang Island off the North West coast of Malaysia.

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Photos

Arriving at Princess Beach
Voted one of the top ten beaches in the world

Phanang Cave Fertility Shrine
that's an aweful lot of offerings. Ann Summers must have a sale on!!

Gastropodfossil......
Funny name, yet facinating!

Comments

[Mike&Claire]

I haven't corrected you for a while
Not that I know the correct spelling (although that wouldn't bother you eh hedge ;-) ), but stalagtites hold tight to the ceiling, and stalagmites might make it up there so infact they are stalagtites in you photo...tadaaaa. Other than that, looks lovely out there, can't believe you'll be back in 5 days....look forward to seeing you Saturday. weather finally getting warmer over here..hurrah MCKRxxxx