Really hot and grumpy in Railay

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Railay is a really beautiful place and a rock-climbing enthusiast’s paradise...However for myself and Matt, apart from it’s natural beauty, we didn’t really enjoy the place. Railay is located on the Southern Peninsula of the Krabi province in Thailand. We had heard from people along the way on our travels that it is an amazing place and it really is in some ways, but not really for backpackers. I guess it didn’t help that we were both incredibly grumpy the day we got there for some reason - I hadn’t felt well for a few days and Matt was just having an off day not that I have many “on” days to be fair.

We left Koh Lanta on a morning ferry and arrived after about two hours of smooth sailing to Railay. As the ferry came to a stand still, we could see in the distance a beautiful white sand beach with a backdrop of trees and very high cliffs either side of it. The first obstacle or challenge was the fact that the ferry actually came to a standstill a good 500m from shore ... we were going to be unloading into little longtail boats and then heading to shore on them. After several dicey minutes of massive swaying as 12 people and their massive backpacks struggled to make the transfer from ferry to longtail, we’d somehow managed to complete the manoeuvre without capsizing the boat, result. We headed for the shore and landed on the beautiful (soft, white) beach of West Railay, with honeymoon-esque beach bungalow resorts - well out of our price range. So we headed inland to cross the peninsula and head for East Railay which is (supposedly) much cheaper and backpackery.

Heading across the peninsula is (at most) a 10 minute walk, you soon leave the posh resorts behind and end up in the no-mans-land area of scrub land and sewage smells (and monkeys!) before re-emerging on the East side of Railay. It’s cheaper this side because the beach is rubbish, in fact it’s not even a beach it’s a mangrove - so there’s lots of trees growing out of the sea, which looks quite cool but means there’s no sand and the water’s filthy from the soil. It’s LOOKS really cool, but it’s not the kind of place you’d want to sunbathe (especially as the tide is out for most of the day, leaving a big soily mess).

It was barely 11am when we’d arrived, but it was scorching hot and we had to traipse around fully backpacked-up for a good hour looking for accommodation - air conditioning was around 1500baht a night (well out of our price range) and fan accommodation was either full or scabby as anything (and still around 900 baht a night). No wonder we weren’t in good moods. Eventually we found somewhere (the first place we’d visited earlier, sods law) and booked into a fan room at YaYa with cold (and I do mean COLD) water for 700 baht a night, the cheapest we could find, and still twice the price of places in Northern Thailand. It also had a really rubbish fan that didn’t cool us at all while we were in the room, and loads of little ants in the bathroom. Thankfully they didn’t make it into the bedroom. Oh and the other thing was that every now and then, the whole room filled with the smell of sewage.

We tried to go on a walk up to the viewpoint, but having gone in flip-flops we got there to find that it was literally a scramble up a rock face (with a rope to hold onto on the way down as it was so steep). Vowing to go back the next day we scooted off to the beach instead and went for a dip on the nice posh side of the peninsula. The water was probably the warmest we’ve been in coz the bay was so shallow, I now agree with the bath water analogy ... once you’ve popped your body out of the water you immediately want to get back in to get warm again, beautiful. Our sea frolicking was cut short when the waves in the bay managed to make Cate feel sea-sick, delicate little thing. Yeah I don’t know what was going on with that but I certainly did feel sea sick after a while - the waves weren’t high but they were strong and kneeling on the sand in the water caused me to be pushed forward and pulled back loads. So I got out and sat in the sun on the sand instead.

As Cate mentioned in the Koh Lanta blog, she hadn’t had a nice, tasty meal for a long time and was beginning to get to her wits end. Craving some fish and chips she thought her luck was in when 4 or 5 restaurants on the posh beachside all had fish and chips on the menu. I was given the choice of which one to go to (great, no pressure) (this is not true, I had made the decision to go to the other restaurant and Matt decided he’d override it to stay at this one) and Cate awaited her food with a strange optimism (when will we learn, Thai restaurants don’t make Western food like you want it?)

When the food arrived I really thought she was going to break out into floods of tears, a small thin piece of fish that had been breadcrumbed and shallow fried (much healthier, but not what Cate wanted) and crinkle-cut chips; which in Cate’s mind is a cardinal sin, she really hates crinkle-cut chips and it’s all they serve over here. Oh, and I’d ordered what I thought would be a bowl of stir-fried chicken pieces in a chilli sauce, only to receive a small basket of KFC style chicken pieces, bugger.

After a particularly poor night’s sleep (a crappy little fan in an oven of a room really wasn’t much help) we woke up and went to check our emails. We’d been in contact with a dive centre in Koh Tao to try to get some information about medical requirements to do our Open Water diving course, because we’ve both got inhalers we’d have to tick a box on the medical form that would prevent us doing the course without having a proper medical examination and sign-off from a hyperbaric doctor first. Responses from dive centres varied from telling us that we’d be signed up without any medical checks (which is completely wrong, and makes you worry about the safety of the place) to saying we’d need a quick check-up in Koh Tao and finally a couple of places echoed what the guys on Phi Phi had said; we’d need to go to Phuket or Koh Samui to get a proper thorough medical done. Being the dull, by-the-book kind of people that we are, we thought that we’d better get properly examined so we had to schedule an unexpected stop on Koh Samui into our plans.

We got a hospital appointment booked (despite a few initial lost-in-translation problems; they originally thought that I was calling them up to ask them to book a diving course on my behalf) and booked ourselves on a mammoth journey from Railay to Koh Samui which would take from 2pm until 6am the following day, brutal (the one positive part of this journey being that it gave Cate lots of different modes of transport for her lists!)Always look on the bright side hey?

We picked up our bags from the guesthouse at 2pm and made our way to the pick-up point at Bamboo Bar. Now, bearing in mind that we had to get onto a longtail boat from the ferry to get onto the shore at Railay West side, when we got to the East side where we were leaving from, and saw that the tide was out so the mangrove wasn’t flooded, we wouldn’t what we would be asked to do. Well first we had to carry our backpacks for about 200metres across the damp soil, then when we got to the sea, we had to wade through the knee deep water for about 50metres to get to the boat, and climb into it. It’s very difficult to walk in wavy water with flip flops and a backpack but we managed it. We were taken by longtail boat to a pier where we had a short walk to the place we had to wait for a tuk-tuk to take us to a cafe/travel agents to wait for our coach that would take us to a travel agents at Surrathani where we could have dinner and wait for a tuk-tuk to take us to the pier where we would be able to get onto our night ferry. It was just like that, one mode of transport after the next and many hours. The final tuktuk was an amusing ride as two of the ‘super-men’ as the tuk-tuk driver called them had to stand at the end/back of the tuk-tuk, holding on for dear life. All of our luggage was precariously balanced on top of the tuk-tuk, and the driver took no prisoners when taking turns onto other roads.

The ferry was cool - the cabin was big and had a layer of thin mattresses at either side of the boat, with numbers above them and we were assigned a number that we could sleep on. So we settled ourselves down for our first overnight boat journey of our trip after discussing the fact that neither of us could see life jackets anywhere and boats had sunk before on return journeys from Koh Phangnan on full moons before...it was the night before a full moon but it wasn’t anywhere near overcrowded so we relaxed and eventually fell asleep.

Matt and Cate xx

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Photos

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Railay up ahead!

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The mangrove beach, not exactly sunbathing-central

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Fancy a relaxing stroll up to the viewpoint? Didn't realise we'd need to wear climbing shoes!

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The mangrove with the tide in