Day 26

Krabi

I woke at about 4am, still on the side of a ship. Surprisingly it was actually quite a cosy sleep, the ambience of the ocean breeze and sounds sends you to sleep quite nicely. If only I had more than 4 hours of sleep though. We hop off the ferry and wait for our transfer to the van office, where we wait a bit longer before eventually boarding a van around 6.30. The van wasn't too bad and I may have slept a bit but I can't super remember.

We eventually land in Ao Nang at 9ish and after checking the longboat schedule, we find some real food for breakfast having had nothing but snacks for the last 12 hours. A stacked plate of chicken fried rice filled me up and I was ready to go. We brush our teeth in the public loo and get our small bags ready and go to find a place to rent a scooter. Dropping our bags off at the scooter place, we rent 2 Honda Scoopy's and we head off to the Tiger Cave Temple.

This drive was fairly fun, driving past the huge limestone cliffs and caves, until we reaches a traffic diversion that Google wasn't aware of. Using my expert navigation (I selected another route on Google Maps), we got past and arrived at the bottom of the Tiger Cave Temple. The main attraction was a giant gold Buddha statue at the top of 1260 stairs up a mountain. I was quite looking forward to powering up them. Then disaster struck. I started to feel by back getting wetter and wetter. I hadn't screwed on my bottles lid properly and it had leaked into my bag. Not too much had leaked but it had gone directly over my portable charger and earphones. Disaster aside, we pushed onwards, passing sweaty and out of breath visitors. Sweat and suncream dripped down my whole body and I was pushing my lungs to their limits but eventually we got to the top in about 24 minutes, averaging just under 1 step a second - not quite beating the fastest known time of 9 minutes.

The top had somewhat disappointing views but was still nice nonetheless, but my lack of sleep was starting to catch up with me. We chill for a while, before we head down. I opt for the quick and somewhat risky gallop, making it down in maybe 5 or 10 minutes with only my knees suffering the consequences. After watching some monkeys for a little while, Alfie makes it down and we head to check out some caves further along. A nice circular nature trail through the jungle lead us past some monk's huts, some small caves and some massive trees.

We head back to the main square and get some Thai tea and then try and get some food before leaving but the food hadn't even started cooking for 15 minutes. Whilst waiting I spent some time watching the monkeys mess about with stolen food - including one of them drinking out of a coke can as if they were straight out of an advert.

We then make the very not fun journey to the Emerald Pool, an hour drive with most of it on a terrifying dual carriage way. Eventually we arrived and it was time to quickly pay our parking and get there before it shut. We hastily make our way down the 1km trail and arrive at a very Emerald coloured pool filled with kids. It's as if every local takes their kid to the Emerlad Pool instead of a swimming pool. We quickly check out the Blue Pool, a very blue natural hot spring with no swimming allowed, with temperatures between 40 and 50 degrees. The Emerald Pool was just downstream from this hotspring, so we head back and go for a quick dip before quickly making our exit, with no time to grab lunch as we needed to drive an hour and a half back, return our bikes and grab a boat to Tonsai before 7pm otherwise we were stuck on Ao Nang.

Cue the most anxious riding of my life, not because of safety but because of time, seeing the ETA slowly creep up as we hit more and more traffic. Luckily we get back and our deposits were returned with enough time for us to board a longtail boat to Tonsai. Sweaty, thirsty, and hungry, we tread through the water with everything we own on our backs and get on the boat. 15 minutes later, with the sun fully set we land on the rocky low tide of Tonsai beach. It felt as if we had landed on the beaches of Dunkirk, having to wade through water avoiding the rocks digging into our feet before we finally made it to shore. Our journey was not over yet though. With Google telling us to follow a non existent road up to our resort, we went off road until we hit an imposing concrete wall with seemingly no way over (unless you're Google in which case walk straight through). In one direction there was no luck, and having spotted some fallen trees we had a backup option to scale the wall with. Heading back on ourselves we eventually find a ladder staircase that went up and over. Giving immense Berlin Wall vibes we climbed over and found our resort before checking in.

We check in and go for a quick swim under the stars, surrounded by no one but couples in this seemingly romantic resort . Quenching our thirst, we buy some ice cold water from the shop (literally it was a frozen block of ice) and head to a restaurant for some surprisingly reasonably priced food. Alfie, having missed lunch, decided on 2 mains, a burger (spelt berger) and chips as well as a Thai dish. His eyes proved bigger than his stomach as he gave up halfway through his 2nd dish, claiming nomatter how much he ate it didn't go down.

We head back for a shower and shave (this time much faster than my 1st attempt), then head to bed where I had a very puzzling conversation with Alfie sleep talking about "Queen Dough" whatever that means.Read more