trip report: krabi province, part I

On the first part of this, our most ambitious trip, we engaged ourselves with an aquatic adventure. As such, I'm going to style this entry with a Team Zissou feel. Furthermore, the scope of our trip was so large that I have divided my recounting of the trip into three sections: the first deals with our aquatic adventure to Koh Phi Phi, the second deals with getting away from tourist Thailand with a giant waterfall and the nicest bar-owner in the world, and the third covers our arduous trek to see Buddha's Footprint and Tiger Cave Temple in the Krabi Province.

We stayed in bungalows, like always.

Tyler had diahrea.

This was our vessel: The Belafonte. It is equipped with a spa, snooker table, cutting room, and studio. Its powered by a diesel truck engine adapted for aquatic use with a hilariously long drive shaft attached to a propeller.

I can't remember our pilots name (I'm sure his nickname was one syllable and his given name was ten or more), but he was quite skilled with the longtail boat, occasionally steering with his feet, with his genitalia only inches away from open and spinning belts on the engine. (Again, my oft-uttered phrase of "that's Thailand's style" comes to my mind.)

To be honest, this part of the trip isn't very conducive to a good story. It lends itself far better to amazing pictures. "We hung out on a real nice beech" just doesn't sound great. But when you see that beech...

I guess it makes a little more of an impression. Needless to say, the beeches were amazing and the water really was "the most amazing shade of turquoise."

There were monkeys on the island (surprised? we weren't, there are monkeys EVERYWHERE here). However, it was a good experience because we finally got to see Brian with monkeys for the first time. This takes some explaining. I would say that, since I have been here, Brian has said the phrase "I just LOVE MONKEYS" about a thousand times. He had seen them in Thailand before we had, so we knew he was for real. However, while we were on the beech with the extremely angry and ill-tempered beech-monkeys that were constantly scaring us into the water, we asked Brian: "I thought you loved monkeys?!?" He replied "I do love monkeys, I just don't like to be AROUND them!"

I couldn't blame him! These were the meanest monkeys I have ever seen. The scary thing about monkeys is, they aren't afraid to just run after you and grab on to you. However, these monkeys got a taste of their own medicine, with hilarious results. You see, Thai people are pretty good with monkeys. Especially if they are used to saving dumb tourists from monkeys. A boatfull of such tourists came upon Monkey Bay (I wonder why they call it that?) while we were there on the beech, intermittently running into the water to get away from the furious monkeys. They ran their speedboat onto the beech, and proceeded to run to the bow to see all the monkeys on the beech. They got more than they bargained for when a large monkey ran straight up to the boat and jumped onto the bow. Its a funny thing watching a bunch of people looking down over the bow of a boat suddenly want to not be there and run to the back of the boat altogether. The driver, no doubt experienced with this sort of thing, ran to the front of the boat and proceeded to try to grab the monkey. The monkey narrowly escaped. Here's my point... most people are afraid of monkeys grabbing onto them. This guy just totally turned things around on these guys by sprinting up to a monkey and trying to grab him!!! What do you do if you get ahold of the monkey?!?!? I don't know what he would have done, but I'm pretty sure the monkey wouldn't want to find out. Also, this guy had the legs of an Olympic sprinter (I feel weird saying that, but you would have noticed too!). Anyway, the overall point is, monkeys appear, chaos ensues.

The only other really notable part of this trip was the visit to the beautiful Maya Bay (where "The Beach" was filmed). Koh Phi Phi Leh is a very nice place to see, and its just beautiful all over there. The snorkeling was very enjoyable, with extremely clear water and lots of fish (though sometimes they all seemed to be the same species!). There were those wonderful parrot fish that you can hear as they chomp coral and pointy-nosed fish and clown fish and all the great stuff that goes along with snorkeling. I put my dry-bag to use, as we had to jump off the boat, swim to a hole in the karst-wall of the island, where we trekked about 1/4 mile to Maya Bay proper.

I did have one interesting run-in with an interesting creature of the sea. In Maya Bay I spotted a sea-snake under the water. It was very interesting to watch, and had stripes. Nobody else wanted to get too close to it. It was a prudent decision on their part; this snake turned out to be the highly venomous Banded Sea Snake. The closest I got to it was about one foot. Luckily for me, they are not hostile in nature and I was not bitten. Still, this is a reminder of how dangerous the wild can be! If anyone knows a good resource for identifying hazardous animals for different of regions, please let me know!

ko chang trip report

Well, its far past time that I completed a few blogs, computer or no computer. I'll start with recounting our trip to Ko Chang (Ko, meaning Island, and Chang, meaning Elephant). Here is a map I made showing, in general, where Ko Chang is in relation to Bangkok. You can see it is in the most northeastern coastal part of Thailand, in the province of Trat. We decided Friday night that we were going to Ko Chang... that night. So, at around 9p we grabbed a taxi over to the bus terminal where we got tickets to the port where a ferry goes to Ko Chang. Our bus, a government-run bus, was very nice, and I would highly recommend the government buses over private buses (in my experience, the government bus was better). We went overnight to Trat. However, our bus dropped us off in Trat at 3a, and Trat is not the port that you go to Ko Chang from. In Trat, there were open-air truck taxis that we had to pay 50 baht (each) to, to go to what we thought was the port of Laem Ngop to get the ferry to Ko Chang. The trip was a somewhat sketchy ride in the back of a covered truck; and after I saw a sign (miraculously in Roman lettering) that said Laem Ngop "this-way," and we went... "not-that-way," I got very... very nervous. I opened my mouth to inform everyone that we weren't going where we thought we were going but Vanessa caught my eyes and shook her head, not wanting me to make the other girls freak out. So, I played out worst-case scenarios in my head for what seemed like an eternity, as I thought we were getting farther and farther from where we needed to go. Because it was 3:30a, and entirely dark outside, it made all hope of navigation obsolete, as if I could pretend to follow where we were on the curving roads to begin with. I started frantically looking at every passing road sign, 95% of which were in the Thai alphabet, and after about 40 minutes I started seeing pictures of boats, indicating a pier. I began to relax a little, and to my everlasting amazement, we actually got where we wanted to go. I still don't know why we didn't go the way of the sign, but I am thankful we arrived safely. I attribute our not being killed and robbed to the Austrian David being with us (I swear he is eight feet tall).

We arrived and had a horrifically low-safety-standard ride yet again; in true Thai fashion Brian and I held on to the back of another open-air truck-taxi as it careened down very steep roads, only to sputter as it struggled to climb the next hill. I swore we would have to push, but or trusty truck managed to hobble up every hill thrown at it. We stopped at Hat Kai Bae (Hat=beach), where we got 4 bungalows for the 8 of us on the adventure. We paid 300 baht a night for each bungalow. They didn't have AC, but they did have hot/cold water shower and fan and mosquito nets. Well, except Davids (more on that later).

Oh, I forgot to mention that for the Ko Chang trip, I was accompanied by: Vanessa, Brian, Jessica, Catherine, Tyler, David, and Sophia. We were later joined by Bruce, Phil, and Steve. We went there August 18th through August 20th. All of us are American, except Catherine who is from Canada, and David who hails from Austria. Here are three of the bungalows with (left to right): Vanessa (in the back), David, Brian, and Steve.

Here are the boys, with their trusty and loyal stray dog, standing statuesque.

I actually must say something about the dogs on this island. One interesting side-note of our trip was the unusual breed of dog found on the island. Thailand is full of stray dogs, most are a mutt thoroughly mixed over many generations and made up of every breed imaginable. Near our bungalows, there was an interesting product of this genetic fun. The dogs legs were short and bodies were long (much like a Deutsche-hound), but looked more like Corgy's. Most unusually, they had a mohawk-like ridge on their back, a sort of giant cow-lick slash guinea-pig like hair-do. I tried to come up with a sporty name for them and dubbed them "Razor Ridgebacks." They were very nice and enjoyed our company. You can see one such dog here loyally guarding our bungalow. They didn't get along very well with dog who "belonged" to the owners of the bungalow, whose name was (as explained by the bungalow owner):

Name Toopee.

(Toopee-not a Razor Ridgeback)

Well, plenty of other things happened on this trip. For instance, we came across this fun photo-op. insert-your-head cutout. But wait... it just... doesn't make any SENSE!?!? Here's Tyler in a birds neck:

Even just relaxing outside our bungalows was a very nice change from the overwhelming pollution and foul smells of Bangkok. Not to mention the view wasn't bad:

One morning we pretty much just lounged and drank the delicious energy drink m-150:

Then we admired the view some more. Wait a minute... :

David spotted an "Austrian" restaurant on the way in so we had to eat some wienerschnitzel! We were reminded that the majority of Thai's are fantastic hosts and hostesses!

Well, the real highlight of the trip was the waterfall. Yeah, thats right, we were on an island with waterfalls. There were elephants too, but we forewent the elephant trekking for another trip. We had a beautiful hike on our way, full of little views.

Then we got our first glimpse of the magnificant waterfall:

Now you... really can't get the scale from that. So here...

You may have even missed it in that one. Here it is again. Look close... yeah, thats a man, not a child.

You will also notice that there aren't any fences or anything. That isn't Thailand's style. If you want to be dumb and scamper over slick rocks to pointy rocks below, that's your choice here. I think that is one thing I like about this place. They assume people have a certain ammount of personal responsibility. We tried swimming to the mouth of the waterfall, but the current is insane and you can't possibly get up to where the water is pouring in. Fun!! We swam here for hours. If you want good photos, check Tyler's gallery at bottom.

Another nice thing that happened was one night we went swimming at night and bore witness to a great natural phenomenon. We were able to see glowing ocean flagellates that emit green sparks when disturbed by movement (IE: Our swimming). It was a very neat experience. I only wish we could have been even farther away from lights to witness the spectacle even better!

Oh, and there was a fire dancer. Neat.

Lastly, Tyler has been taking some great photos (okay, some of them have been slightly played with, but that doesn't stop them from being great), and I wanted to share them with you. Thanks Tyler!

The first is of the dogs riding the ferry with us.

Here's our sketchy bus/taxi to the pier. (Note: David is, by Tyler's reckoning, 12 or 13 feet tall.)

This is how we rode around the island (note low safety standards).

Is someone in trouble?

Great picture of one of the beautiful views on our hike. David in view.

Another great view on the hike:

I think this is possibly the best photo I have seen on this trip so far. Just breathtaking.

This water is 20 or 30 feet deep I think. Needless to say, David just rolled up his pant-legs and strolled through.

I think even an Olympian would have trouble reaching the mouth of the falls.

This is how we spent our mornings (its a tough life). Oh, Toopee is there too.

Relaxing on the beach.

Well, thats all I have for this one. Will post more later! It was a great trip!