Railay

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As always we choose to make our way to Krabi by public transport, yep it takes at least twice as long but saves us a fortune! The guest houses always give you what seems like a great price, and compared to a private taxi they are cheap, but if you compare that again to the public transport that the locals use it seems a right rip off! So after five hours on various buses and not knowing if we were on the right ones we eventually got to Ao Nang late afternoon, just before the storm! A pretty bad storm to, we were without power for hours and when we did venture out to grab some scran there were trees being chopped up and disposed of and signs that had fallen that would probably have killed someone if they'd been underneath! We laughed and joked about the glorious sunshine back home and knowing everyone would be BBQ ing!

Getting to Railay was easy, it's effectively an island embraced by limestone massifs that make getting there by road a no go, twenty minutes on a long tail boat for a small fee and we were climbing out onto West Railay beach. It's a spectacular place, and had the weather been better it really would have been breath-taking. We knew that this beach would be too an expense for us so we trundled off through the jungle on a ten minute walk to the East side. Eventually we found somewhere to stay, a rustic (!) timber hut in a scruffy garden high above the beach. It rained all afternoon and evening, we went for a cheap Indian which was a nice change and found a cool bar serving cheap beer and cocktails with a free pool table, we stayed here all night.

We woke up to a dismal but dry day and started our hike to Ton Sai beach. It really was a proper hike too and probably very unsafe after all the rain but it was a case of it being safer to carry on than attempt going back down the steep hill! It was a relief getting to Ton Sai, not much going on apart from plenty of crazies scaling the cliffs in their climbing gear. We saw a couple walking onto another track and presumed we'd taken the wrong route on the way and followed their path. Oh my, another hazardous trek to get back to our beach, this time holding onto rock faces with slight drops below and lots of scurrying up and down on hands and knees, not only was this a bit dangerous we were both in flip flops and I had a dress on! Ha! We got back, the sun appeared and we breathed a sigh of relief had a swim and then half an hour later the heavens opened and didn't stop for the next five hours! We decided we'd had enough of the weather and would leave in the morning so ventured out to book our boat to get over to the east coast. We knew the monsoon would kick in around now so we were prepared to move across, just sad we didn't get to see the islands further north; Ko Phayam, Ko Chang etc.

The only other attraction to see was 'cock cave'! Cock cave aka princess cave is located on Tham Phra Nang, phra nang means 'revered lady' and the local fisher folk believe this princess lives here and controls the fertility of the sea. To encourage large catches there are hundreds of wooden carved phalluses left as offerings! You've not seen anything like it, tons of ‘em in all colours shapes and sizes, some with three heads!!! It was random.
We packed our bags and had an early night; our boat was at 8 am.... not soon enough!!!

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