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Published: August 23rd 2007
Night Train to Surat Thani
After a fun packed day in Bangkok, Saz visiting the dentist for a quick clean, and internet catch up on our blog (we’re behind as usual), we headed to the train station for our night train down south. Our ‘beds’ were not in compartments as we had expected, but either side down the length of a train carriage; the lower bunk separating to make two chairs, and the upper bunk stowed away until needed. The initial novelty wore off quickly and we found ourselves once again forever thankful for the wondrous invention of earplugs!
Arriving at 6am, we staggered blurry eyed to the bus depo where we boarded a coach to Phuket.
Phuket
Deciding to steer clear of the main tourist beaches we headed to
Kamala Beach and settled into an air-con room with all the extras for only 300 Baht, bargain! However we soon realised that our hotel was the only cheap place around. Out of season, half of the bars and restaurants were still closed, and the select few that were open catered for the higher budget of the nearby resort. We were reduced to buying snacks from 7Eleven
for lunch, and an inexpensive dinner at a road side restaurant, but the beach was beautiful and the view even better.
After a morning on the hotel sun-loungers, we checked out and caught a bus to the tourist crazy
Patong Beach… at least there would be cheap eats there! Finding reasonable accommodation proved difficult though, and after rejecting a few disgusting rooms, we settled on a very basic room for 450 Baht, but at least it had a bathroom and a window (some of the others looked more like prison cells).
On exploring the town it was hard to believe that we were on the same island as Kamala Beach… the place was swarming with European tourists, lady-boys, and row after row of bars and souvenir shops. Its more like Malaga than Thailand! On the spur of the moment we booked ourselves on a day’s diving trip for the following day, and found ourselves a great little restaurant on the beach front where we spent the evening eating authentic Thai food and playing UNO with Cherry, the lady-boy waitress.
Our
Diving Trip started the following morning at 8am, when we were picked up and drove to the southern
jetty. We ate breakfast while the boat made its way out to the reef in between Phuket and Ko Phi Phi, and then donned our wet suit and dive gear for the first dive at
King Cruiser Wreck.
The wreck is of a car ferry that sank in heavy storms back in 1997 and is still relatively new (i.e. sparsely covered in animal and plant life). The current was very strong, and at 32 metres there was little colour left to see, but the turtle hanging around the uncovered toilets, and large shoals of passing fish were an impressive sight.
Next to
Shark Point, a large coral wall covered in large fan corals and every kind of fish, and two large boulders. The dive site lived up to its name when we spotted a large Leopard Shark, but instead of swimming away the shark came over for a closer look and curiously swam around and around us… it was fantastic!
The last dive of the day was at
Ko Dok Mai a small rock island with a sheer cliff dropoff . The slight current made for a good drift dive along the wall, so we sat back
and enjoyed the view. We even ventured into one of the small caves in the wall, but they we too small to do anything more than swim in, turn around, and swim straight back out again. All in all it was a good day of diving, but it still pales in comparison to Borneo…we think everything will do!
Krabi
After having enough of Patong's over-tourism we headed to Krabi by bus. The bus was packed to capacity and Dave was made to sit in the aisle, while Saz made her way to the back to be surrounded by sacks of vegetables... only in Thailand 😊. We were dropped off outside of Krabi town and with the help of a local lady caught a sawngthaew (a pick up truck with benches in the back) to the downtown backpacker area. It rained all evening, so we spent the time on the internet and ringing home; a long overdue update with our parents.
Thanks once again to our friend Ken we had a
Kayaking trip of Krabi's caves booked through the American company Viator the following day. A tour in style... we were picked up from our hotel in
a comfortable minibus, and taken to the cave area. As it was low season we had the guide to ourselves, and only one other kayaking group was spotted as we paddled our way leisurely along the mangrove river and through the water filled caves. Two caves before a scrumptious lunch including the
Skull Cave, a large land bound cave with remnants of cave drawings. After lunch we visited the
Lagoon Cave before heading home... a large winding tunnel entrance enclosed on both sides by huge stalactites, stalagmites, and columns. This led into the huge lagoon with high cliff walls surrounding the large pool of water... capitvating in the monsoon time, so it must be beautiful when the water is crystal clear.
A great day trip... thanks Ken!
Ko Phi Phi
As we had decided against staying on Ko Phi Phi (the beautiful Islands made famous by the film 'The Beach'), we realised that a day trip was a must. On the evening following the kayak trip we booked ourselves on a speedboat trip, and the next day we set off to see 'the beach'. As we sped through the water we passed
Chicken Island (so named because
of the large rock resembling a chicken's head and neck), before stopping a short time on
Bamboo Island. Next to a snorkelling spot out as sea, where the water became a mass of colour as the fish were encouraged into a feeding frenzy by our temping bread... yummy!
We docked on
Phi Phi Don (the larger of the two Islands) for lunch, before heading over the
Phi Phi Leh and the famous Maya Bay, a.k.a 'the beach', for 1 hour swimming and exploring the Island. It was just as beautiful as it is in the film, and the glorious sunshine made the water glitter a fabulous turquoise blue... paradise!
The boat stopped for a second snorkelling point just outside Viking Cave, and we spotted a large Ray amongst the multitude of stripey blue and yellow fish, before speading back towards Krabi in a failed attempt to beat the oncoming rainstorm.
Ko Phangan
The next morning we caught a bus to Surat Thani, where we were dropped off at a bar on the outskirts of town. Slightly confused, we were led to a guy sat in front of a big poster proclaiming
Nothing in life is free.
Not exactly a sign
to boost one’s confidence! After waiting around for a couple of hours with this guy refusing to give us anything to suggest we had already paid for our onward connection, we were pleasantly surprised that there was indeed a bus to take us the rest of the way, and that they didn’t demand more money from us!
A few hours on the ferry had us dock into Thong Sala on Ko Phangan, where we caught a sawngthaew to
Had Yao, a quieter side of the island than the renowned party centre of Had Rin. Things weren’t as easy as we had hoped in finding a place to sleep though, as it took us four attempts to find a set of bungalows that wasn’t already full. We ended up at the imaginatively named
Had Yao Bungalows, which seemed to be decent enough, especially since we landed ourselves a nice private bungalow for just 250 baht. Deserving a chilled afternoon following the day’s travel, we set ourselves up on our veranda swinging in our hammock, and whittled the night away with a walk along the beach.
The fragile peace of the next morning was shattered when an almighty crash resounded
throughout the bungalow complex, emanating from our bathroom. By casually leaning on it while cleaning her teeth, Saz had found out that the sinks in these bungalows were neither fastened to the wall nor supported from underneath, but rather delicately balanced on a pair of short brackets. Thankfully escaping any injury except a small shard of china in one of her toes, we moved bungalow and refused to meet the owners demand of paying the whole cost of the damages. Fair enough it wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t leant on, but nor would it if it had been attached by more than a drainage tube! Having negotiated to pay just half the value of the sink, we thought it wise to have lunch in a place where they wouldn't add any ‘additional ingredients’ and made it all the way next door to
Apache.
Following a remarkable massaman curry (which became our favourite dish), we settled down on their floor mats and put on a dvd called ‘The Terminal’ to pass some hours. Toward the end we got chatting to a French Canadian called Etienne, before deciding that it would be a shame to waste the sunshine now it
had finally broken through the rainclouds. Lounging on the beach reading our books was nicely followed by dinner and a return to Apache for another dvd, this time a terrible one called ‘The Plague’, and more chit-chat with Etienne, his girlfriend Joanie, and a Norwegian called Peter.
This routine of reading, eating, talking and watching dvds was how we were to spend our next six days, a well deserved rest from our 8 months of travelling. Beside Saz cracking on with her TEFL course and the odd trip back to Thong Sala for supplies, this routine only altered to allow for the following anomalies:
The Stolen Credit Card Saz checked her email in Thong Sala one afternoon to learn that her credit card had been stolen. The bank did not think it strange that a credit card that had not been used before had its £3,000 limit maxed out in a two-day shopping spree in Bangkok, but thankfully Saz's mum was keeping an eye on statements and noticed that this was a bit out of the ordinary! We are not quite sure how someone got hold of it out of her money-belt, but our two best guesses
were on two occasions she had the belt in her rucksack, once in a New Siam Hotel in Bangkok, or once on the night-train to Surat Thani when we were sleeping. In the end we sent a fax to Nationwide authorising Sue to pursue the theft and fraud on our behalf, but it wasn’t too long before we found out that they did not like Saz’s signature on the fax and ignored it. One headache we’ll have to sort out when we get back!
Mission 'Inebriation Practice': Full Moon Rehearsal Not wanting to pass out within an hour at the upcoming full-moon party (considering our last big session was in Vietnam, it could be possible!) we thought a bit of drinking practice might be worthwhile. First off was the requisite lining of the belly, which we did remarkably well at a beachfront seafood bbq with our newfound Irish friends Colin and Sandra; a feast of shark, barracuda and all-you-can-eat salad. Suitably prepared, we watched a dodgy 70s film called ‘Target’ (worth seeing just for the line “I know you don’t like me, but that’s just the way my mumma made me”) before hitting the thai ‘whiskey’ and coke
on Colin’s veranda. Entertained by Etienne and his guitar covers of whatever song we named, it wasn’t long before we stumbled down to the beach where we remained until 2am.
Dave Slings His Hook With Saz tackling her TEFL work, Dave took the opportunity to jump aboard a Thai longtail boat and head out for some sea fishing with Etienne and Joanie. As might have been expected there was only one fishing rod between the three of us and the 'captain', but the rest of us tried our luck with hand-reels while the rod was shared around (after a certain amount of insistence that we use the rod some of the time, since we were paying the guy!) Dave's fishing 'expertise' had him land 3 'beauties'; unfortunately one of these beauties was slightly on the smaller side, and another was not an eating fish. But since Etienne and Joanie caught nothing, and the captain only caught one eating fish himself, it was a smiling Dave that returned to the bungalow, even though it was with a dodgy vest tan...
Full Moon Party Following a scorching day in the sun on the beach (and a mission to
a 'nearby' waterfall which we never quite reached), we started our warm up session on our veranda with
the gang The colourful buckets that were to be our drinking vessels of choice for the night followed us into our taxi, along with Peter, to
Had Rin where we attempted to learn some coarse Irish drinking song from Colin and Sandra. Upon arrival, it took us all of 2 minutes to lose Colin and Sandra amongst the 10 - 20,000 people on the beach when we arrived, though they had bumped into some old college friends so at least they weren't alone! Hanging on to Etienne, Joanie and Peter, we wandered along the length of the beach amongst fire-twirlers, jugglers and drunkards, before heading back inland to join the trend and smother ourselves in illuminous body paint. We're not quite sure how much whiskey, coke and red-bull we drank from those buckets, but it was enough for Saz to convince a guy Sam that he really should keep his valuables in a safer place, for Dave to need a 2am feed, and for Etienne and Joanie to pass out once we got ourselves back to
the beach despite the thumping House music assaulting their ear-drums. It was 4am when we left, Dave thinking that Saz might need a bed rather than wait for the sunrise... for some reason she still can't quite remember the ride home... 😊
Transfer to Bangkok
Unlike Etienne and Joanie, we had decided that we shouldn't try and travel the 18 hours back up to Bangkok the day after the full-moon party. Good move! When it came to the journey we were fully recovered, though as usual sleeping on the night-bus was near impossible; as had happened before, we ended up paying for a room at 5am just to catch a few hours needed sleep! Then, courtesy of Ken, we met our airport transfer guy who was to take us the first stretch of the way to Delhi...
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