Ao Nang

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When we left Malaysia it was a bit of a grim day, when we landed in Thailand it was baking hot, lush green trees, clear blue skies. Welcome to the land of Smiles!

We made the not that difficult decision to get a plush air conditioned taxi and sat back to enjoy the views on an interesting first introduction to the Thai style of driving. After a few Fernando Alonso stlye overtaking manouveres we were dropped off in a quaint little beach resort right outside the local McDonalds.

Ao Nang seemed to be a bit more family orientated than most places in Thailand so there was a lot of nice restaurants serving all kinds of food, we settled on pizza, why change the habit of a lifetime.

We went exploring down the beach which was surrounded by rock formations of all sizes growing out of the water, from behind the trees, in fact basically everywhere you looked. Very nice views they were, though it didn't take us long to stumble across an equally nice view, a cool beach bar. Not wanting to be rude to our hosts we pulled up a hammock and had the standard few Changs before heading back to our bungalow.

Ao Nang at night is pretty quiet but as it was our first night in Thailand we put our party faces on and sniffed out a smart bar called Chang Bar which seemed to be the usual haunt of the local folk. We had our first taste of Sam Sung(or whatever it's called, not really totally relevent) buckets and then spent the night showing the locals how we play pool in England. After about 3 hours i think a mixture of boredom and the Yhai rum kicked in and we got beat so ended up partying the night away with some Swedish lads who we keep bumping into since we got here. We ended up going to another club with a load of marine biologists who seemed like they were getting paid to snorkel each day. Nice work if you can get it!

The next day was spent nursing a stinking hangover really, it was the Kings birthday which was quite a big deal for the locals. There were photos of him dotted along the beach front and we got some free drinks which we enjoyed with a Thai singer who was doing covers on his casio keyboard. Had a lazy one after that, i think a little jet lag set in and we just went to the knock off DVD shop and got an early night seen as we had to be up bright and early the next day to catch a boat, which turned out to be a good decision as we were about to head to a little slice of paradise...

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