This is the blog/travel journal for Chris & Joanne Reilly from Glasgow, Scotland. After quitting our jobs and selling our house, we plan to travel around the globe for the next year.

Saturday, January 14, 2006

Life's a Beach

After reaching Krabi we still had several hours before we would eventually reach our beach destination of Hat Ton Sai and we headed to the pier to get a boat. We were told that we would have to wait until we had at least 8 people or pay the full boat price and after an hour only one other person turned up so we decided to cut our losses and head for the “local bus”. It was in fact a converted truck with benches in the back and a luggage rack on the top so after dumping our bags we were off on a harem scarem ride for 45 minutes to Ao Nang. Once there we jumped straight on a long tail boat and were taken to our final destination. It was now about 5 o’clock and we still had to find accommodation.

We started to look from the beach upwards, but everything was full as we slowly worked our way up the steep hill. One place had a room but the price was extortionate, supply and demand market dictating the price obviously. A kind woman offered for us to dump our bags whilst we looked so I stayed with the bags as Chris went on a quick tour of the resort trying to find us accommodation. We eventually found somewhere which was a bit more expensive than we anticipated, but it was a nice bungalow with en-suite and we put up our mosquito net since we were in the middle of the rainforest.

We then headed down to the beach to catch the last few rays of sun and watch the sunset. We were also both rather hungry as we’d eaten very little during our travelling that day. We managed to find a table right at the beach in the restaurant, saw the sun slowly go behind the hill and a nice hazy glow settled around us. Our Thai food was great although the waiters didn’t have a clue and gave our food to other tables and brought us food that we hadn’t ordered so we weren’t really surprised that when we came to pay that the bill it was more than double what it should have been. We had expected the resort to be fairly busy but at 8pm it seemed fairly quiet so we headed back to chill in our bungalow.

The following morning after our breakfast we headed to the far side of the beach which took us all of about 5 minutes to stroll across and we settled ourselves down on the sand in between 2 rock climbing schools. Most of the people doing this were fit and fairly supple and we enviously sat and watched them scaling the face of the rocks and dangling by one hand or foot. We did feel a bit guilty of all the strenuous effort going on around us as we lay back and dozed on the beach.


As the sun lit up the beach I decided it was time for a dip in the sea, but unlike the beach in Penang this beach had lots of rocks and plenty of other fishy creatures there. There were sea cucumbers (huge long black things which do look like a cucumber), plenty of holes from which we saw a lobster like creature pushing the sand out of (Chris almost sat on one) and several fish floating around looking for some toes to nibble. Needless to say I didn’t spend that long in the water. We played with the straw ball that we bought some time ago in Laos and after 2 minutes trying to play keepy up we decided a volleyball type game might be more in store for me.

It was rather hot work in the sun and around 2 o’clock we decided to head to the shade and have some lunch. On our way back up to the hotel through the rainforest we saw several huge spiders with enormous webs between two trees sitting patiently waiting for their next victim. We also saw a huge family of wild monkeys which were being fed by the ladies from an “authentic” massage parlour. The monkeys roam around this part of Krabi and come here every couple of weeks, the parents were obviously taking the children out for a weekend jaunt. After watching their antics for a bit we headed back.


That night we ate in a rather bizarre place which took forever to bring food and met up with two guys from Sunderland (well Chris was certainly put straight by them after he called them “Newccastle United Supporters” – they were deeply offended). It was another quiet night on the beach and we headed to a reggae bar afterwards for our final beer of the night – unfortunately the music was the same 80’s/90’s crap reggae by the likes of Aswad and UB40 that we have come to associate with most of these bars in SE Asia.

Our plan the following day was to head over to Hat Rai Leh beach (pronounce Hat Reilly) which seemed to be a short walk over the hill from where we were and apparently there was a beautiful sandy beach there. So we headed up through the rainforest forgetting about the pesky mosquitoes, when we stopped to decide which track to take I suddenly had about 4 huge things sitting on my leg with a couple of them managing to draw blood. So we quickly brushed of the nasty things before running up the hill to get as far away from them as possible. These mosquitoes were huge and are probably the biggest I’ve seen on our trip. It was also quite an effort to get up over the hill and definitely not as easy as the boatmen had said the day before, when he was going to drop us off at the neighbouring beach.

When we arrived at the beach it was just as everyone had promised with the blonde sand and perfect clear water. We were scorched after about an hour and decided to head round to another beach which was also recommended called Perang. When we got there, we saw (we think) the same troupe of monkeys who entertained all the beach goers with their antics. They were being given plenty of food and seemed to live in the rocks above the beach.


This was another gorgeous beach and we headed for some shade in amongst many others by the huge rock caves. I bought some Pad Thai noodles off of a beach vendor which were delicious and later we walked across the beach before heading back to Rai Leh. We decided to see whether the tide was out rather than walk back through the forest and fortunately it was. This meant we could walk across the sand and rocks from Rai Leh to our beach avoiding the pools of sea cucumbers and crabs as we went.


Since we had caught a bit of sun we decided that we’d head back to Penang the next day to break up our trip to Kuala Lumpur. That night we ate in the same restaurant as the first night and I got a rather spicy Green curry with prawns, beef and chicken whilst Chris had the same only with a Red Curry. Afterwards we chilled on deckchairs in a bar with a beer and a cocktail staring at the stars and watching the guys doing their fire dancing. We’d seen a girl practising this with tennis balls on strings (the balls being the flames) but she kept on hitting herself and managed to whack her face with them. Fortunately, for her, she wasn’t practising with the real thing!


That night I was up most of the night due to the food being dodgy and Chris suffered briefly the next morning so we decided to make a dash for Malaysia. We started off at 9am in the morning for another boat/bus ride. It took us about almost 13 hours with two long uncomfortable minibuses and one rather rude driver to eventually arrive back in Penang.

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