From the Islands to the Jungle

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After missing a flight to the south due to a case of 'thai whiskey', Danielle and I caught a flight later in the night to Bangkok, where we slept in an airport hostel on the hardest beds I have experienced in my life. At least it was a bunkbed, so all is forgiven. The next morning we woke up very early and got on a plane to Krabi, where we then caught a longtail boat to Ton Sai. We got to Ton Sai pretty early, which was good because the island was pretty booked up and it was hard to find a place to sleep. We ended up in a bungalow at the top of the hill with nothing past our place but jungle. Ton Sai is a small beach area with only a few dirt roads, only a few motorized vehicles, which are mainly running supplies and deliveries back and forth across the small area, with bunglaows mostly cented on the main path which sits just a little up from the beach. There are also bunglows perced on a hillside up a trail, and our was at the top. From there it is about a half hour walk to the next area on the peninsula or Railay beach. We loved our place. It was among the cheapest, and we woke up every morning to monkeys howling and birds chirping. It was amazing and very peaceful. We decided to hunker down on Ton Sai for 4 days. We swam, hiked, relaxed, drank, ate, and got somewhat tan.

At some point we got an itch for dancing and some more action, and decided to head over to the other coast and head to Ko Phangnan. The bus ride was eventful, taking a few hours more than it was supposed to and we ended up missing the last bus to the pier to catch the last boat of the night by about 5 mins. We decided to pay a ton of money and get a taxi out there. This turned out to be a disaster. We got scammed. We ended up being thrown out on the side of a road a ways out of town. The driver and his friend started yelling at us to get out and grabbed our bags and tried to pull them out with us. We were a bit freaked out and not really sure what was happening. When we got out we discovered the bus that we had missed sitting in front of the taxi. The bus driver took our bags and put them on the bus and gave us a ride to the pier where we caught the last boat to Ko Phangnan. Pretty upsetting that we got scammed, but I suppose it was bound to happen at some point.

We met some really nice people on the ferry, one guy from Palo Alto, CA, and another from Canada. We ended up spending the next 4 days with them drinking, swimming, laying on the beach, and having a really awesome time. We even drank out of buckets. Something in the redbull made us rockstars. We outlived all the younger 20 year-olds each and every night on the dance floor. Pathetic in some respects, but we really had so much fun it didn't really matter. We stayed at this place on top of a cliff, which I stayed at when I was there 3 years before. It was called the sea breeze, and the bungalows were clean, cheap, great views, and a pool. It was amazing. We spent every night after the bars swimming til early morning in the pool. We also went to a "half-moon" party, which was horrible. It was a party in the forest full of young florecent -clad and body painted white people dancing to really horrible techno. It was like spring break in the forest. Danielle was over-taken with how sad and pathetic the whole experience was and left early. Even the buckets couldn't save her night. I gave in and went with it and danced and met people and stayed for a few more hours past her. Not an experience I would repeat or recommend, but in some ways I am happy to have seen it.

The next day we left the island after our few hours of sleep and headed to Khao Sok National Park, a rainforest said to be more diverse and older than the amazon. It was only a short 2 hours bus ride from Surat Thani via a mini-bus. We were so tired and happy we had bought a ticket ahead of time, because we could not have navigated this alone. We took a bus from the pier to Surat Thani, and a lady picked us up in her truck and took us to the spot to catch our mini-bus. Unlike our previous ride to Surat Thani, we arrived in Khao Sok about 2 hours before we had been quoted. Pretty amazing for Thailand time. We spent 2 days and three nights in Khao Sok. The first day there we took a tour to Chiao Lan resevoir, held back by the infamous Ratchaprapha Dam, built in 1982 to supply hydroelectric power for southern Thailand. The amount of people and species displaced by the dam is a tragic story I will not get into, but I wrote a report on it when I was in college. Anyway, the tour was amazing. We took a long-tail boat along the length of the resevoir, we swam, we ate at a floating village, we kayaked, we hiked in the rain, and even visited a cave. The limestone peaks jutting out of the water were beautiful and made me want to climb them. All-in-all it was well worth the money and a forgiveable adventure into modern tourism. The following day we took a hike to a series of waterfalls, except the waterfalls were really just the river turning over some rocks. Pretty underwhelming and slightly frightening, as I ended up with a leach in my ankle and what we think was a king cobra snake passing in front of us on the trail chasing something. That was incredibly frightening. We aren't cut out for jungle trekking.

We left Khao Sok for Bangkok via a bus to the airport in Surat Thani. We arrived in Bangkok and had a day and half to hang out and say goodbye before Danielle left to go back to San Francisco. We went to a few markets, visited China town, stumbled on some other horrible tourist spots, and ended up dancing at a pretty good dance club near our hostel. So sad to bid Danielle goodbye and venture out on my own. I cried on the way to the train station. She went to the airport and I took the night train to Chiang Mai, which I will write about in my next post.

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