(Craziest looking plane I’ve seen… but it was cheap and got us from point A to point B!)
With a combination of Thai national holidays, we decided to head down south to a beach. Just to sum up, it was a nice change to get away from Bangkok… I think it’s the first time I had left Bangkok and traveled somewhere relatively far-ish in Thailand. The country surprises me everytime I get a chance to get out of the big city. And, did I need it! After too much time in Bangkok, or any big city for that matter, I get a little stir-crazy and need to get away to some place that is “not a city”. So after a quick look in our travel guides, Muriel and I decided to go down south for a few days to Trang, a province often by-passed by tourists who flock to Krabi or Satun (i.e. Tarutao island). And for something slightly different, we went on this package camping tour (which I usually would have skipped) to a secluded island off the coast of the province…
(Sunset on Pak Meng beach – the main beach along the coast of Trang where it is the jumping off point to many of Trang’s islands)
We signed up for the rock climbing package (maybe this http://www.laoliangresort.com/home.html) on Koh Laoliang island… I think I’m still sore from climbing all day. Ok, we might have only did 5 climbs, but we’re beginners and that was a lot! I realized that I’d rather go up in rock climbing than come down… which made it a little difficult when it was time to be lowered down. I don’t know how some people can just let go and grab on to a thin rope holding them up from letting gravity do its work.
(beach chairs, seafood, sunset, surf… life is good)
There were two highlights to the trip… one was on the first day when we visited Tham Le cave and rented a dingy that took us into a cavern of caves. The craziest thing we did was let the guides take us “under” the cave… this literally meant lying back in our boat as we navigated under the cave with stalactites inches, even centimeters from our face. There must have been less than one meter of clearance! The other highlight was taking a kayak and paddling 20 minutes in the Andaman Sea from Laoliang island to a secluded and deserted beach near where we were camping. The trip back to our island was a bit scary since the waves started to pick up and we were trying to paddle through 1 meter swells… probably not too scary for some, but we were in the open water alone with no one else crazy enough to try the trip. For more photos of this trip, check out my Facebook PhotoGallery
(The last day of our trip we visited Sa Morakot aka the Emerald Pool… we were pretty tired by then and were looking forward to getting home)