Post card style views in Ao Nang Krabi...

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When we first arrived at our 'hotel' in 'Krabi' we thought we'd been dropped off at the wrong place. We had booked the place through a large firm and been shown some brief pics of it by a fat welsh tour operator called Steve. We wern't really bothered where we were staying as long is it was in the town centre of Krabi. So when we arrived in the middle of nowhere and asked how far it was to Krabi we were told 35km away. Not exactly what we asked for! However, we did meet up with our Irish friends again and made the most of it. We later found out that the reason we were in that hotel is because Steve owned the bloody hotel and was making a few quid on the side! I use the term hotel very loosly here, and by that i mean it was a group of 3 bungalows and there were 2 rooms per bungalow. Just great! We had already booked a tour with Steve as well, however, that didn't disappoint at all!


We went round 4 beautiful islands and snorkelled around 3 of them. The views were unbelievable as you can see from the pictures! There were so many fish you had to move them out of the way when you were snorkelling, and they would just swim around you waste when you wee stood in the shallows. We also saw a jelly fish which was perfectly round and slightly bigger than a basket ball. It was floating just beneath the surface getting swarmed by multicoloured fish trying to eat it. Although we saw lots of fish the visability wasn't very good so we moved on to the beach at chicken island for dinner. It is called chicken island because the shape has a vague resemblance to the head of a chicken as you may or may not be able to see.


We had a curry in a take away polystyrene tray for dinner! Just like after a night out in England... apart from we were on the beach and our green curry had a fried egg on top of it! After lunch me and Ross took off to 'circum-navigate the island' as he put it. This was a suprisingly good feeling to do some proper swimming against the currents, as exercise on our travels so far has been virtually non-existant.


For the rest of the day we swam and gazed out over the beautiful islands surrounding Thailand. I don't think theres any need to explain why we just sat back and enjoyed the views. And if there is, i'll let the many photos of our 4 island tour answer that question...


After getting back to our bugalow and been greeted by our friendly dog called John (who was also a female dog and pregnant), we sat around the lake/pond and had a few beers with a welsh guy called Dave who ran the place. Premsuably he was some relation to Steve and was not at first very popular with any of the 4 of us but he seemed like a nice enough guy (although he was someone who didn't want to do anything with his life but sit around and talk to the 4 customers a week he got - his words not mine!). Dave soon got talking about his travels and he explained that he didn't have a permanent VISA in Thailand and had to head over to Malaysia and back every 15 days to be legally allowed in the country. This was the reason why he hadn't been here when we arrived and the only one there to show us around was John.

Later that night we went to the night market and wondered around all the stalls and found a wide variety of things yet to try, including....doughnuts stuffed with pork, beef, chicken, fish, custard or Jam....spiced sparrows....fish chips (which were like prawn crackers but with fish not prawns)....barbequed liver on a stick...soup in a plastic bag, barbequed eggs, among other wierd and wonderful concoctions. I passed on most of the truly wierd stuff but treated myself to some 'soup in a bag with fish chips' which i got for around 40p.

The next day we went to Au Nang and spent the day wondering around the town and chatting to the locals. We told about 20 tailors that there was no chance i was going to buy a suit and we spent a few hours dodging the rain by going from bar to bar. We spoke to a Thai girl called Tuk in a bar where we stayed for few beers and helped her bring the customers in.

The next morning we caught the boat from Au Nang to Koh Phi Phi to start the next leg of our travels....

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