Satani Bat Bi: Railay Beach

First of all - we've surpassed 1000 page views!  Inconceivable...when I started this blog it was just to keep family and friends updated on our whereabouts (we're still alive!) and trips (we're having fun!) but now Google analytics tell me that people are getting referred to this site from all sorts of places. Oh, internets, there you go again.

So - on to the trip!

The month of June saw Spouse and I both taking on additional responsibilities at work and late hours.  We work hard - and play hard.  Fourth of July weekend we headed out of town to Railay beach for sun, sand, surf, rock climbing, and relaxing.  From Bangkok's main airport, it's a quick hour and twenty minutes south to Krabi.  Since we couldn't leave work earlier, Spouse wisely arranged a hotel transfer from the airport for an extra $40.  This meant on arrival at Krabi airport, a van picked us up and drove 45 minutes to the water, where we were greeted by a longtail boat. At this point it was pitch black and if we had not arranged something in advance, I doubt there would've been a single boat available to take us.  Another 30 minutes to the Railay East beach - we hopped off into the water and then a golf cart (really??) picked us up and drove us across the isthumus to Railay West were our hotel was located.

The Sand Sea Resort is great - right on the beach, breakfast included, comfy rooms with kind staff.  We  woke up Saturday morning and walked up down our beach.  It was incredibly beautiful, and traveling off-season is definitely the way to go.  Costs are down 30-50%, there are still enough people to chat with others, and other activities like rock climbing and sea kayaking are still available.    It rained once the weekend we were there, and it was just for an hour in the morning - no problem.

When the tide goes out, these tiny crabs pull little balls of sand out of their burrows and arrange them in the most beautiful fashion:

They were all up and down the beach!

Looking down West Railay's beach:

Low season = open beach!

Close-ups of the shell-adorned rocks:

Sun protection matters:

Ribbit:

After a day of beach-walking and hiking, we took on rock-climbing the next day.  We met our guide and walked a little ways to an open space by the water, between two cliffs.

Whoa, it's a long way up. What are we doing??

Some way more experienced climbers than us joined, and started lead climbing - which means scaling the wall with no rope above them, and weaving the rope they carry into pre-set metal hooks in the rock face.  This sets up the course for the folks following.

Two of the pros chat and a climber stretches.  In this sandy spot, the ropes are kept on the mats.

Absolutely gorgeous spot to try climbing:

Husband is awesome and charging up the first climb, a 5 meter one:

Yours truly, starting climb #2, a 12 meter one.

As I'm trying to figure out the next toehold up, note the guy way above me - doing a THIRTY-FIVE meter climb. Whoa, maybe next time!

Absolutely amazing experience - it was pretty challenging and definitely something I want to try again.

Rock-climbing really takes it out of you...afterward I felt like these cats and just wanted to curl up and take a nap.

After lunch and a rest, we made the ill-fated decision to go sea-kayaking.  I've been before and it was really fun, and it just looked like a nice little outing.  Unfortunately our sea kayaks were those rickety red things below.  We headed out to sea, and unbeknownst to us our boat began taking on water.  Rounding an outcropping to the next beach, we made one sharp paddle, the boat couldn't take it anymore, and dumped us in the water.  Thankfully we were just in swimsuits and Spouse had wisely convinced me to leave the camera on shore.  We crawled back in the boat, only to have that episode repeat itself a few times.  After the third spill, we just grabbed ahold of the boat and swam in to shore.

We dumped the water from the boat, which took about three minutes to drain from the quarter sized spout.  We'd been out for about an hour now and the joy of sea kayaking had kind of gone out the window.  Just wanting to head home, we steered our boat back out and tried to take a shortcut back home.  Turns out the tide had gone out too far, and we got stuck on the coral a foot under the surface.  Okay, so we had to take the long way around.  Still, by the time we got there the water had also gone out quite aways.  To make a very long and painful story short, we were too far out to try another path, but had gotten wedged in an area with so much coral that Husband GOT OUT OF THE KAYAK and started walking on the coral to make the boat lighter so we could get further out to sea and actually paddle.  Not the most genius move, but pretty gallant.

He rejoins the kayak and we have one final corner to round until we can paddle back into our home bay.  Of course we tip over two times more and just resign ourselves to the fact that there is no open, coral-free way to get back in.  Holding the kayak and two paddles, we stumbled into the bay on an agonizing walk of what felt like an hour, cutting up our feet.  As the waves broke when they rolled in, they also took it upon themselves to push us over and fall on more stabbing coral on our back and hands and knees.

See those two people in the bottom right of this photo? Yeah, that's basically what we felt like upon finally making it back. Just collapsing on the shore.  Oh well, you win some, you lose some.

We soaked in the hotel's pool to recover a bit and then took a nap, before capping off the weekend with a random Muay Thai boxing fight!

I don't know if Railay ended up being the relaxing weekend we were looking for, but it was definitely worth it.  We'll be back - just no sea kayaking!

Satani Bat Bi: Kaeng Krachan National Park

Late May we took advantage of a long four-day weekend to drive south. Yes, DRIVE.  This blog post documents our first road trip in Thailand!  Our goal was Kaeng Krachan National Park, about a 2-3 hour drive south of Bangkok.  It's located west and inland of the popular beach town of Hua Hin, and close to the border with Burma.

Courtesy of Google Image Search

So let's start with departing Bangkok.  Like any good metropolitan area, Bangkok has its share of freeways, all jumbled together and intersecting and carrying fish north and bamboo south.

An overview of freeways at night:

Courtesy Google Image Search

Our journey began mid-morning on a Friday, and assisted by Google Maps app on the ole' smartphone, we made it fairly unscathed to the freeway on ramp.  Pull up the tollbooth, I roll down my window (as our steering wheel is on the left side of the car in a right-side-of-the-car-steering-wheel-country), pay the nice man the 45 baht toll, and off we go!  We merge onto the freeway - so far so good.  We change lanes, preparing to merge from a (relatively) north-south freeway to a (relatively) east-west freeway.  Merge successful!  Now up and over the bridge crossing the Chao Phraya River...success!  The lanes narrow, and wind between homes a bit closer.  ONE more transition to 35 South and we'll be good at least an hour.  We approach the interchange.  35 South comes off to the left. 35 North to the right. So we follow the road to the left....ONLY to find out that it tricks us and the left lane flies up and over and curves to the right, while the right lane flies down and low and veers to the left.  It actually felt like someone set up the system to trick us. Okay, no fear - we'll just find the next exit, get off the freeway and hop back on in the right direction.  No exits in sight, but we pull a u-turn at the next tollbooth area. Take two - here we go.  Except we soon discover that approaching from this direction, the only option is to follow the freeway left BACK INTO THE CITY instead of STRAIGHT like we wanted.   Fast forward another hour (since we apparently got on Thailand's version of the no-exit Whitehurst freeway), and we again pay same tollbooth attendant to enter the freeway.  This time we actually make all the illogical but correct turns and transitions and are on our way.

I must complement Partner for being a fantastic driver and remaining cool under pressure during this adventure.  Well done, Sir.

On our way down, we saw quite a spread of life.

Trucks were decorated in bright colors:

Fresh salt was sold on the side of the road (yes, we stopped to purchase actual sea salt for the bargain price of 30 baht ($1USD) per giant bag):

Weird bags of stuff were crammed into other cars (seriously, what is this?):

When we arrived at Kaeng Krachan and came up around the last hill, this gorgeous site greeted us:

We settled into our adorable cabin for the night, and minus a few geckos loudly looking for a mate, the forest noises lulled us to sleep.

We went exploring around the lake the next morning, in hopes of finding one of the talked-up waterfall trails.  Starting near the lake, we saw mountains:

Bags of shells:

And more bags of shells....??

Proof of national park puppies:

Running all over:

Birds soaring high:

And the lake at dawn:

The remnants of a once-really-neat tree:

And the bird reminding us again to stay away from its nest:

The pups:

Leaving the lake, we passed a few other critters, including this goat who'd claimed an old house:

Back at the cabin, Husband cooked up a delish breakfast using a tank of propane he'd brought back from an up-country trip.  For some reason, the tank came up with a burner on the top, so it held a small frying pan quite nicely and he cooked up eggs and toast. Well done.

Breakfast with a view - cheesy eggs with mustard...so good!

Cooking was interrupted to get this visitor out of the Chef's hair (but not before I took a picture!):

Yum!

So on with the hiking - we headed to kilometer marker 26 (or 17?) and started to follow a dirt path up this hill:

The first of a bajillion butterflies we'd encounter over the weekend:

Pineapples growing:

Our trail soon sadly ended.  We headed back down, and decided to check out the nearby mountain, Khao Panoen Thung.  The highest peaks of the mountain touch into Burma.

At some points, the cell connection cut out and Google Maps wasn't available.  We moseyed around quite a bit, and pulled into this great coffee shop for some caffeine and directions.

We met Khun Nok, proprietor of the shop.  Khun is the respectful title for both men and women in Thailand, and all Thais have a short nickname in addition to their formal name.  Nok means bird in Thai, so her name roughly translated to Ms. Bird.  The mountain is so steep, that after a certain point, you must have a four-wheel drive vehicle and you can only access the road at set times.  9am-11am vehicles can only go up, 11am-1pm vehicles can only drive down, and so on.  We'd arrived at 11:30, so we wandered around the coffee shop and yard before we could head up the mountain.

Caffeine full and ready to go, we continued on our way to get in position by 1pm.  Technically I think we were in the national park the whole time, but there was a separate fee for accessing the mountain (presumably, to maintain the roads).  On our way up, the butterflies were absolutely everywhere:

We drove for awhile seeing no one, then caught a site of another truck ahead:

Signs like this cropped up every few miles, alerting us to the possible presence of a new animals - elephants and monkeys also had their own signs:

We waited around a rest area just before the road became a one-way and timed operation.  Lunch took forever and we were getting a bit antsy.  Finally it was 1:30pm and time to head up the road.  We had to make it to the top by 3pm.  No problem, we thought.  We weren't very far up before this fella caught our eye:

I'd worked with monkeys in the past, but never before seen one in the wild like this.  Granted, there are monkeys in downtown Kuala Lumpur I wrote about previously, but those are city monkeys. Kind of like pigeons. These are REAL monkeys. Wild, unpredictable, shy monkeys!

Our car is awesome - after an hour on straight inclines, we pulled over to give the engine a wee rest.  It's got fantastic grip and torque (and alot of heart), but a four-cylinder engine isn't a fair match for the six- and eight-cylinder engine trucks tearing up the road.

On the next bout upward, we started to notice several cars pulled over on the road, which was barely wide enough for one car to pass.  Well, they've got to be looking at something interesting! I hopped out and with enough gesturing, I realized we'd come across the infamous bird watchers. They spent hours camped out in bird blinds just to watch birds.  Admirable and a bit odd at the same time.  Anyway, they kindly showed me a bird they'd been tracking and the fellow stayed still long enough for me to get a photo:

With five minutes to spare we arrived at the mountain's top ranger station.  The next session to head down wouldn't start for two more hours, so we parked the car to walk around the area.  First time was by an area with picnic benches.  Again, a cluster of bird watchers had their 9000x zoom lens trained on the hill opposite us - see below:

A beautiful lush hill, but not much to see, right?  Oh contraire.  Again, a friendly bird watcher urged me to take a peek in the zoom lens and...WOW!! Hornbills!  There were three in one tree (if you look in the photo above, they were in the tree slightly right of center that is pure exposed tree trunk):

I still can't believe this photo I took through their zoom lens actually sort-of came out.

Bird watchers are an odd breed, but you've got to admit their patience is incredible.  To spot these birds from all the way across the ravine...wow.

Spirits are everywhere in Thailand, and these trees are no exception.  Trees are wrapped in temple areas, and also in forests.

Still had an hour to go before we could drive back down the mountain.  Husband suggests we take a hike.  Great idea!  It is beautiful and there are amazing trees and foliage.  And then we come to the end of the trail, wrapped up in a tight cul-de-sac.  Hmm, how pleasant. Let's sit on the bench.  We're enjoying the silence, when SWISH.  Did you hear that? SWISH, SWISH. We look around and it quickly becomes apparent that a troop of monkeys are positioning themselves to surround us.  Sure they may have been friendly and curious, but again, I'm familiar with how some monkeys operate and I feel no need to stick around and find out their intentions.

Before fleeing back the way we came, I caught this one:

Trail O'Monkeys:

My kind of bird watching.  Huge and by the side of the road.

The closest we got to seeing elephants on this trip...but they're there!

Pretty excellent park sign:

That's all for this trip - but the national park bug has bitten and we'll definitely be making more trips in the future!