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Published: February 2nd 2007
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After Lanta we headed towards Krabi. The plan was to go there to do some cool sea-kayaking that I once saw in a travelling-show on tv. Since this mainly was organised from Ao Nang, a popular beach northwest of Krabi, that's where we headed.
I was still feeling quite bad after Lanta and the travelling wasn't a pleasure. Then of course the boat did not take us to Ao Nang but to a place north of it. I wasn't too keen on all the hustlers that always greet you when you get off any form of transport so we just walked right through them thinking that we could walk to central Ao Nang and find a place there. Wrong. So after a 15 minutes walk we decided to get a tuktuk.
Ao Nang is really just a street, horseshoe-shaped along the waterfront. It is mainly habited by Swedish tourists. It was hard to believe that there could be an even higher concentration of them than on Lanta but so was the case. During nighttime walking to a restaurant there was only Swedish spoken on the street.
Because of all the charter tourists, the prices were high. Very high.
We tried to find a room but they wanted double or triple what we were willing to pay. Eventually we found a nice big room behind a bigger place that would let us have it for five pounds a night. Great deal thinking of that a fridge was included. Luxury deluxe.
The first two days was mainly to get well. All the tourists were quite scary so I tried to stay out of their way.
We looked around for sea-kayaking and found a couple of places doing day-trips to three different locations for 1500 baht (22 pounds) each.
As the rugged travellers we are, the decision came to do it ourselves. And since Amie wanted to see cave-painting we headed to the most northern of the places you can kayak, a mangrove-river with famous caves. To get there we rented a motorbike. The drive was quite far and not be most pleasant, mainly due to roadworks and lorries overtaking. Stonechips really hurt on bare skin. It took us probably an hour to get there.
After a quick meal we rented a kayak and went out. They tried to get us to hire a guide, but hey,
how hard can it be to find a cave in a mangrove?
The kayak was a good one, much better than the one we had in Langkawi and it was really nice paddle down the river. Since we didn't go by a tour (they start at 8 in the morning, and we start at 13) we had the whole place to ourselves. After 10 minutes or so we came up to the first cave, a tunnelcave which you paddle through. Inside you have all these stalagmites and there was a good echo. Just after getting out you're not supposed to go any further, there was sticks put in the bottom of the river to mark that this was the end.
We headed back and then followed the river a bit longer. 5 more minutes and we came up to the next cave, the one with the paintings. So we tied the kayak to a tree and walked into the cave. It was a cool cave and you could understand why people would have used it back in the day. It was a good wind going through and quite steep to climb up to the paintings, of course on
the top wall. They were as you could expect of people and animals in many colours, red, brown and yellow.
We then headed back on the river. The current was quite strong against us and we had to paddle quite hard. I didn't really mind, I always felt in control and never thought that the current was too strong to take us away. However it was too early to go back so we entered a side-path of the river to see some more. There is mangrove-trees on both sides and we managed to see a kingsfisher and some cool crabs before we headed back. When we got out on the main river the current had stopped so it was quite easy to get back.
As the drive to the place had been quite bad we decided to go by smaller roads back. Bad mistake. Since I was driving Amie had to be the mapreader. Bad mistake. It was now getting dark as well. In good faith we started. After half an hour or so the road became smaller and smaller and soon just a dirttrack. Eventually the road stopped by a bigger road so we drove out on
that one. It was pitch black and no one to ask where to go. We drove a bit further and then decided to stop to reread the map we had. Thankfully a man from the only house around saw us stopping and walked to us. He didn't speak any English but said that Krabi was one way and Pha Nang was the other way. That was enough for us to know where to go and we headed to Krabi. We soon came out on the highway that we had travelled earlier in the day towards the kayaking. We had managed to go about 5 km in 45 minutes in our try on the smaller roads. So following the highway we managed to get back home.
And the next day we headed for Koh Pha Nang
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