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Krabi Limestone
The beautiful limestone karst mountains in Ao Nang Krabi.High a top the mountain that overlooks tiger temple - where no less than 50 years ago the wild unforgiving jungle spanned as far as the eye could see, a young monk set out through the wilderness to seek the solace of the mountain - the villagers warned him that at dusk a deafening roar echoed out from a tremendous cave at the foot of the monstrous structure where a great and terrifying tiger sought refuge in his own lush and tropical empire that stretched as far as he could likely have imagined. With the warnings from the villagers aside the venerable monk led a group of wisdom seekers to the foot of this very mountain to seek refuge in the Sangha and the Dharma and as they reached the foot of the mighty rock a frightening orange flash went darting past and into the forest. Thus began the legend of Tiger Temple in Ao Nang, Krabi - not to be confused with the Tiger Temples where day package tourists pay exorbitant fees to to take a family photo with the either enlightened or drugged tigers - because there are no tigers to take a photograph with here, just the legend
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The mysterious blue pool, Ao nang Krabi of a mountain a temple and it's founders and did I mention The most awe inspiring view I have ever had the pleasure of taking in. 1,250 odd steps or so, and these are not small steps either but the kind of massive rises that seek to anchor your very soul if you do not remain vigilant. Of the number of tourists there, and for a tourist region of Thailand the number is welcomly low, those who choose to attempt the quest litter the stairs every hundred or so steps, asking if you've reached the top and if it's worth it, but if you look into their eyes you can tell that they are almost pleading for permission to give in, to turn around and say enough is enough. For those who make it however, including an Indian woman in high-heels! and her husband in button down shirt and trousers who encouraged us around 900, 'you can do it' while they barely broke a sweat, there are few things if any that I have seen in Thailand that I would ever think to compare. I had already decided in the spirit of the wild beauty of the place that I
would commit myself to take every stair of the journey in present mindedness, the past and future a thing of the past and the future and me and my breath and the journey up those winding stairs in the blistering heat - the air growing cooler amongst the mountain trees and breezier as we rose in elevation, by 800 steps the landscape already sprawling farther than the eye can see, to the mountains in one directions, thousands of acres of palm plantations in the other and the beautiful sea whose air brought life to your nostrils all these miles and miles away and we stopped to imagine the view the tiger must have had, when these forests were even wilder and lamented the fact that although still green trees and much better than thousands of hectares of beef graze land, some of the most diverse and miraculous forests on planet earth were being wiped out to produce massive quantities of palm oil for export and that the tigers - indeed perhaps even the souls of their ancestors had long been driven from their homeland.
By the time we reached the very top Tara and I were sucking in air
as the breeze dropped the temperature drastically and there was the most pure and enchanting of views, pagodas and statues of the Buddha, the faint scent of burning incense marking a mindful offering from the devoted, a woman sat meditating on a rock while at the highest point a female monk - in her pure white robes sat in perfect and harmonious meditation and I could really Feel what Buddhism is all about as my camera died after only a few photographs and Tara struggled to take photos that could never justify the pure brilliance of this sky-top world - though she could not hide the regret from her face that her large camera and lens and a tripod had not made the journey with us to this place where the Dharma flows through space with no words to necessitate or complicate it's being. It didn't matter anyways, to worry about a photograph would be to worry about that which can never exist - which of course we all do in our efforts to share beauty with our family and friends, with anyone who will have a look and listen, where someday we can look back with a smile a
reminisce upon, but it didn't matter because to experience this was a moment of true bliss, clear comprehension of my body mind and the world, and I stayed upon this mountain for quite sometime - it broke my heart to leave.
The climb up Tiger Temple mountain - where I was also trained to make the giant gong sing it's enchanting and vibrant harmony which can captivate an entire sanctuary - was the culmination to a week of perfectly calm and smooth waters in a place that is indeed becoming over-run by tourism and over-development, and yet I would still recommend it in that paradox of wanting to share something amazing while simultaneously contributing to it's demise both with my own presence and by encouraging the presence of ever more seekers of the wonder that is still very present here. Only a day or so before we had piled three of us on a motorbike and taken the most brilliant roads through mountainous jungle to the hot waterfall (nam tok rohn) and the emerald pool and blue pools, about 80 kilometers one way from Ao Nang when all was said and done - and during Songkhran no less where
even winding through jungle roads you suddenly see a break in the trees and hear the jubilant cries of the Thai people young and old, singing and dancing while music blasts in the background and they dance right out in front of your bike, slowing you to a stop while they rub colorful pastes onto your face while pouring buckets of water down your back - children as young as three whose faces could light up the darkest of caverns to drunk teens who dance like professionals to the most ridiculous of music and full grown adults who giggle with the same pureness of heart as the children at their feet. No matter how many times you're stopped or where you need to be, there is no denying the spirit of Songkhran. When we arrived at the "hot springs" that you see the signs for we realized something was up when we saw a big paved parking lot, building, and pictures of modern concrete pools reminiscent of an outdoor bathhouse but the man who greeted us at the door had the kindest of hearts and after snapping a photo for his website, we explained that we had been looking for
something in the middle of the forest, with gigantic and natural free-flowing streams of the near scalding water, and he informed us that this indeed was not the place, and bless his heart directed us how we could find the nam tok rohn that we desired and he shook my hand and thanked us so much for having visited him and was not put out in the least. On the way out a driver sat in the back of his truck waiting for his passengers, drinking whiskey barely disguised inside of Thai Red Bull bottles and asked that I come to sit and drink with him but I told him we had to be on the move and he smiled but I saw the tinge of sadness in his eye and mourned privately for a moment. When we reached the real 'hot springs' it was indeed surrounded by nature but god damn did this natural setting include a shit-ton of tourists or but we paid the three to five dollar entry fee and headed into the forest, the gigantic green canopy over our heads a reminder of where we were and serving as a fine backdrop and then there was
the mighty, muddy, dirty creek with plenty of Thai's splashing around and it sure didn't look too hot and Tara looked down and said 'aren't these supposed to be hot springs' and so I jumped in to find out and wow what a rush that water was cold! We'd been had, or so we thought, but I swam down just a bit and noticed a small waterfall was flowing into the creek and there were many Thai's lounging in the pools of the different levels of the falls so I took a swim over and felt the water warming markedly until I reached one of the rocks, which I leaned against and felt a radiating heat which - after balling over 80 k on a motorbike, soaked from head to toe by Songkhran revelers, which chilled us to the core - felt pretty damn good and so I called Tara and her mother to come join and we lounged around in the pools of a hot waterfall in the middle of the forests of Southern Thailand, I say.
By the time we finished at the hot springs we were exhausted from the long haul out which included plenty of
wrong turns and stopping for directions, temperature changes from sizzling to freezing, and walking with wet feet, we were exhausted but had come all this way and the "emerald pool" was only another 20 km or so away and so how could we not? and we piled onto the bike and drove off into those wild Southern hills. We arrived freezing cold, covered like some great Hindu statue in festival season with bright colors and soaked to the core at the emerald pool and once again saw more than our fair share of vans, vans, vans full of package tourists and plenty of Thai's too and another $6 admission and we tried to present our work permits for the same discount you get at a national park (the 'Thai price' of $1) but the camo' clad guards did not give damn about our documentation and so we paid the full 'farang' price times three and headed up to see what the emerald pool was all about and on the way we saw a sign for a 'blue pool' too and I thought hmmm, maybe we'll get a chance to swing up and see that too. Well, the emerald pool was
a big disappointment, barely emerald in the increasingly grey and darkening skies and plenty of little kids, jumping and screaming and splashing so we jumped in for a minute to warm up and then jumped out, debating weather we should head up to the blue pool to try and get bit of value from our $6 or cut our losses and bail out but Tara and I took the walk out the slippery and degrading broken wood-plank walkway and the number of tourists wound down to just a trickle and soon we were surrounded by forest that didn't open up until we reached the majestic blue pool and regal it was indeed. With no lighting, additives, or anything other than some natural process going on in that small isolated lagoon an almost glowing azure pool sat, bright as phosphorescent lighting despite the gloomy skies and plenty of no swimming signs so we knew something was up here but who knows what, and as I started to record a light rain trickled down throwing tiny ripples across the pool's calm surface and it was positively magical and the $6 suddenly felt like not too big a deal. Back upon the bikes
we nearly maxed out trying to beat both the inevitable setting of the sun and the impending rain clouds - we accomplished neither and drove home along black roads and a sudden downpour which not only left us chilled to our very souls but actually whipped and lashed our faces in the devastating wind with such fury that I imagined it might actually tear away some flesh, but onwards we crept anyways until finally reaching the sanctuary of our hotel.
When in rains in South-East Asia the magnitude is awe-inspiring, though just as quickly as a furious storm has rolled in it soon vanishes behind the hills. The next day found us with pristine skies which serve as the perfect backdrop for a long-boat ride through the coastal waters of the Andaman Sea where jagged limestone karst explode out of the water driving straight toward the sky. These rocky towers are covered with tropical greenery which makes for some of the most stunning of all views, on par with the more well known Koh Phi Phi, Phuket or Halong Bay Vietnam, but at least to my eyes not yet as over-run with tourism and development. The science behind it
all is limestone which is heavily soluble and thus weathers away quite easily creating the other-worldly views. After a beautiful day of snorkeling, swimming and canoeing among the pristine water-jungles, Tara, Diana and I headed for a small beach a few kilometers down the coast. Once again the bright blue sky and the emerald green mountains surrounded by the marvelous sparkling sea becomes almost too much for anyone to process, to sit still and just focus on understanding the beauty that surrounds you, and suddenly you are grasped by the insatiable desire to reach for the camera, to struggle for that perfect shot in a vain attempt to capture that which is completely unattainable even via the most modern of technology. Phra Nang beach is littered with long-tail boats which create the quintessential view of South East Asian beaches, a connection that I didn't even make until a few days later, as I noticed the cover to our 'Rough Guides South East Asia" book shared a nearly identical photo as the one I snapped on that very same beach. Some of the boats had little restaurants where they produced food not to be scoffed at considering the size of their
kitchen, and then in the background of it all a tremendous karst mountain a few hundred meters off shore that Tara and I swam to, exhausted ourselves and then tried to climb onto some sharp rocks which tore up our feet, just to have Diana snap a few photos from the beach that didn't even come out. The beach also has a little cave shrine dedicated to fertility and I felt a little ashamed of our lack of sensitivity as Tara posed for a quick picture next to the hundreds of brightly painted penis statues of all shapes and sizes, then turned around to see the Thai women who stood in deep and sincere prayer in front of these shrines for better luck with a fertility problem, a very real devotion to the image of the penis that even includes a vast array of penis necklaces available throughout Thailand, some with tigers or monkeys mounted upon them for extra potency perhaps. After about an hour I suggested that maybe our day at the beach would turn into a half day at the beach which fell upon deaf ears until two hours later when our heads began to spin with the
intensity of the heat, even the 85 degree F ocean could no longer cool us off. We headed back by long-tail boat where the 7 year old boy at the front of the boat reprimanded me as I moved from side to side in an attempt to soak in a little bit more of that magical sea before my departure from South Thailand.
As spectacular as our trip through Ao Nang had been, I can not help but close off with a short recount of how the whole trip got started, which includes cheap booze, pick-up trucks full of screaming, water bucket yielding revelers and a reggae bar with a DJ from Catalonia, a DJ from Phuket, an American teacher and an Australian traveler. On the first day of Songkran Tara and I took to the streets where we hopped from drink-special bar to drink-special bar in an increasingly endless row of bars with plenty of drink specials. By bar number one Tara and I were a drenched disaster, covered with all colors of baby-powder paste and of course engulfed in the desperate struggle to see whether we or our enemies could get more water on the other, setting
Tiger Temple
The view after about 250 of the 1,250 steps at Tiger Temple aside completely the fact that every last one of us was already hopelessly soaked to the core. Every bar, every truck and seemingly even the town itself had it's own soundtrack playing and people danced and sang and clapped in the streets - dogs were in on the action, police, Thais, foreigners, it didn't matter - we kept coming back to that age old question of 'wow, can you only imagine if something like this could happen in The States?' and the sad realization we always come back to that, no we can't imagine it, but how much more pure all of our souls would be if only we could. That night when Tara went home I went to meet the DJ from Catalonia - DJ Bartes from Kalymistic who just so happened to have occupied the seat next to me on the bus to Ao Nang, depriving me of sleep because I simply couldn't dig enough of everything he had to say about roots reggae and dance-hall music. That night in Ao Nang, we sat down for some beers on the side-walk in front of the bar and DJ booth, with the Phuket DJ and a few other passers-by
and I knew I didn't have long because I couldn't keep throwing out the 100 baht / $3 for each bottle of beer, and just like that an Australian tourist named Matt shows up and pretty soon he had an arm around everybody, telling wild stories about his life back home and throwing round cash for round after round of drinks, talking that real big talk as one would have it and it was the realist and most perfect addition to add to our group. And he didn't just buy for the 4 of us but shots of vodka for the Polish guys who passed through and stouts for an English guy that swang by and offering beers to the strange kids from Burma who we played pool with and endless loaves of delicious garlic bread - and not the kind of guy you hang out with just because he's buying drinks - he told us he had the equivalent of something like $600 in Thai baht and he didn't feel like stopping at the money exchange the next day so it had to go, go, go - but the kind of guy who you only wish had a few
more nights to dig, a downright riot. We capped the night off when I took him up to the red light district to serve as translator and set him up with a girl and it didn't take long till the girl he had his eye on was sitting in the chair next to him - though a bit was lost in translation when she kept saying 30 minutes to me and I had to keep telling her I don't know about all that. In the end it was all good though and with my work finished I grabbed a late night kabob and headed back to the guesthouse.
With the near perfection of our trip, I would be remiss if I didn't end with what didn't go as planned, the kind of waves that are always there to stir you up a bit, remind you that travel is not that easy, and that shit just isn't always going to go as you have planned. When we found out that there was no direct bus to Penang, Malaysia, our next stop, we were met with the realization that we would have to do a quick stop in Hat Yai Thailand,
down in the very bottom southern provinces of Thailand that border with Malaysia, where the State Department has urged Americans not to travel and where the ethnic and religious similarities of much of the population to those of bordering Malaysia have led to sporadic acts of terrorism and violence in attempts to gain autonomy or an outright break from Thailand. When we arrived in Hat Yai we stopped a ways from the bus station and our driver tried to pass us into the custody of a Chinese Tour operator who told us all the buses to Penang were full and me knowing this scam from a mile away pretty much called him a liar to his face in Thai and he slammed the door and gestured the driver to get us out of there, shaking his arms as if we couldn't be out of his sight fast enough. Well wouldn't you know that we got there and all of the vans were full, and we walked down the mournful street, agonizingly frustrated, sore and tired and had tour operator after tour operator lift our spirits with a phone call, only to inform us no buses, vans or anything until tomorrow.
Now we had to go find a hotel in this dreadful city and the drab, dirty and dilapidated room that our $12 bought us did nothing to lift our spirits. After wallowing for a good long while staring straight up at the concrete ceiling with the creaky fan, creak, creak creak... we decided that we needed to get out, and wondered how strange and alien this dangerous mutt of a city would be. At first it didn't look promising and the sky threatened rain, but we turned to find a little market street reminiscent of those we see in Thailand. Tara ordered a salad in Thai and the woman and some customers nearby absolutely beamed that we spoke Thai and they welcomed us to Hat Yai with that timeless smile and were overjoyed to find that we were teachers and thanked us for coming to visit her city - us now realizing that this was in fact the Thailand we were used to - and all that fuss about nothing. As we wandered we soon found a beautiful and very posh downtown center with shopping malls and all sorts of beautiful restaurants and bars - which we couldn't afford but
it was much better than bombed out buildings and shifty characters peering out from dark alleyways. We stopped in a small British style pub with flat screen TVs showing American sports highlights and ate tacos, pizza and drank a few brewskies. By the end of it all we were convinced that Hat Yai is a great old city after all and the next morning we were on our bus to Georgetown on a clear blue sky day, the entire looming feelings that had engulfed our minds the previous day only now understood to be as ridiculous as they had been. We effortlessly crossed the border into Malaysia and minus the head-scarved immigration officer, never would have known we left Thailand and soon were driving across a enormous span of bridge connecting mainland Malaysia to the 'Pearl of the Orient' and we couldn't have been more glad, not just because once again calm seas stretched ahead, but because we were coming to realize that when traveling you are never going to stop the waves, but with time, experience and a calm mind maybe you can learn how to surf - or something like that!
www.youtube.co m/watch?v=sRbSrqEzXUQ&list=FLHlW09zlo_KJXl9zHtgc1Zg&index=3
And if you
have a moment, check out the track above from my man Johny Youngblood from Virginia, now part of the hip-hop scene in Prague, Czech Republic nd trying to make a name for himself and making music the right way - we met in Ao nang and he is a great guy, I hope I can send a listen or two his way. BECAUSE TRAVELBLOG IS NOT ALLOWING THE LINK, YOU HAVE TO COPY AND PASTE INTO YOUR BROWSER, THEN DELETE THE SPACE BETWEEN THE CO AND THE M IN '.COM' PEACE!
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Home and Away
Bob Carlsen
You write to longest sentences I have ever read...
but I find it quite poetic and stream of consciousness appropriate for the subject matter. Are you done teaching in Thailand or just taking a trip while school is out?