Krabi (Thailand)

...taken on our trip to Krabi (Ao Nang). Read more about our stay in Bangkok and Hua Hin in seperate review. If you have any questions or comments please get in touch on gardkarlsen@hotmail.com.

Summary
This is a travelogue that will give information about the trip that my wife, Nikki, and I had to Thailand in the periode from 11th of September until the 28th of September. On our trip we first spent a few days in Bangkok before ...
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Going to Krabi
On Monday 16th we went to Krabi. We had already booked tickets at home and the price is about 70 € per person one-way. Travelling from one place to another in the middle of the day automatically reduces your day to basically nothing. So I prefer going early in the morning or late at night. Our flight was about 4 p.m. Anyway; we had three options of going to the airport. 1: Hotel “limousine” was 700 bath which is ... more

This page contains a travelogue taken on our trip to Krabi (Ao Nang). Read more about our stay in Bangkok and Hua Hin in seperate review. If you have any questions or comments please get in touch on gardkarlsen@hotmail.com.

Summary
This is a travelogue that will give information about the trip that my wife, Nikki, and I had to Thailand in the periode from 11th of September until the 28th of September. On our trip we first spent a few days in Bangkok before we flew down to Ao Nang beach outside Krabi. Then we flew back to Bangkok and took the bus to Hua Hin before ending up in Bangkok again. For the first time we travelled together with some friends of us. Their names are Olav and Allis and their daughter Tonje.

For the first time I also travelled with a digital camera by the way. This summer I bought a Canon Powershot S30 and together with two 128 Compact Flash memory chips and a laptop I could take as many pictures as I wanted each day. I hope of course that this will lead to better pictures…there should be a few that are good because I took more than 400 pictures during our stay :-)

Prelude
I have had a fear for quite some time. That I once will grow too old to seek new “adventures” and that I will rather go back to places that I have been before because it is “easier” and not so much of a challenge. So going back to Thailand seemed not to be a good idea since we have been here before (see seperate travelogue for the trip we had in 1998) but we found out that Thailand still has a lot to offer and we decided to go to places in Thailand which we hadn’t visited before. And for the first time we also agreed to travel with some friends of ours and it was a bit exciting to see how that would turn out.

After a few days in Bangkok we went to Krabi:

Going to Krabi
On Monday 16th we went to Krabi. We had already booked tickets at home and the price is about 70 € per person one-way. Travelling from one place to another in the middle of the day automatically reduces your day to basically nothing. So I prefer going early in the morning or late at night. Our flight was about 4 p.m. Anyway; we had three options of going to the airport. 1: Hotel “limousine” was 700 bath which is too expensive. 2 option was a fixed price taxi and that was 350 baht including the express way charges. And the 3rd option was a meter-taxi. We chose the latter and the price in the end was 230 baht (160 for the taxi and 70 for the toll station).

The flight to Krabi was nice and short (just over an hour) and the airport here is quite small. As I mentioned earlier we booked a hotel through www.hotelthailand.com and when we booked the hotel we went for a summer special (stay 4 nights, pay for three nights and free transportation from the airport). The only problem was that no one came to pick us up at the airport. When we book this package on the internet we clicked on a link where it said something like “Summer package” so we took it for granted that this is what we got. But it turned out that we should have specified this in the remarks field when booking and that seems a bit odd to me. But we grabbed a taxi, drove for 30 minutes to get to the hotel and then we got in touch with www.hotelthailand.com and things were sorted out.

We had chosen to stay at Golden Beach hotel which is located on Ao Nang beach outside Krabi. The hotel has both regular hotel rooms and bungalows. We chose to stay in a bungalow and that was very nice. We had only a few meters to the pool and the beach is only a few yards away as the hotel is more or less located on the beach. Being in a bungalow you get a bit closer to the nature. We had geckos all over the place (even one inside), frogs, ants and so on. And let’s not forget the mosquitoes by the way :-) I recommend that repellent is brought along because we got quite a few bites during our stay. The summer package deal gave us the room for about 2400 baht per night.

On the first day we just played around in the pool with Olav, Allis and Tonje (who went down to Krabi before us) and we took a walk along Ao Nang beach. The place looked like a construction yard by the way because they were building a new pavement along all the restaurants and bars on the beach. The work was scheduled to be finished in October but my impression was that they were behind schedule. But I’m sure that it will look very nice in the end.

I’m pretty pale even if I have been outside quite a lot during the summer in Norway. So I managed to get sunburn on the very first day in Krabi even if it was cloudy and raining. So I guess this is just a warning: remember to bring along some sun cream and put it on before you jump into the pool :-)

We decided to rent a car one-day and we just asked the in reception. After a couple of hours Budget brought a nice Honda Civic to us for 2000 baht for a day. Driving around Krabi was not to bad even if they drive on the “wrong” side of the road. I guess the main point is to try to drive like the locals. At one point we were going to slow and the cars behind us very eager to get past us. We drove of to find some hot springs but that turned out to not be that easy. Olav, Allis and Nikki read the map while I tried to keep the vehicle under control. When we were getting closer to the hot springs we started asking locals and we were sent in all sorts of directions. But we found it in the end and we were more or less alone here. They have built concrete pathways in the jungle and in the end you find the hot springs were you can take a little bath. Once again it seems like they are doing lots of construction work so I’m sure the place will change quite a lot in the future.

On the way back we stopped at a food market and walked around for a while. It was amazing to see all that was on display here. I like to cook at home and this was the place for me. Big piles of curry paste and all the ingredients that you need to make a good Indian or Thai meal. I don’t think that that many tourists stop by this market because a lot of the people seemed curious when we turned up there with our blond hair. People in Thailand are very friendly and I read in a book that children have a very important place in the Thai lifestyle. This time we traveled with a Tonje who is only 3 years old and we noticed how fond the Thai’s are when it comes to children. People kept asking hername, trying to hug and cuddle and so on.

Most people associate Krabi with beautiful beaches. I have to say that the Ao Nang beach itself is not a great beach and we only tried to swim there once. When we got into the water the seabed felt kinda muddy and it felt like we were bitten by something. Quite spooky actually. But one day we took the boat out to Phra Nang beach which is located about 10-15 minutes away. This is quite a nice beach and the only “problem” was the people that were walking back and forth trying to sell us stuff. We also stopped by West Railey beach on the way to Phra Nang and that also looked very nice. And from Ao Nang/Phra Nang you can also look over to the white beach located on Koh Poda so I don’t think that you will have trouble finding a nice beach if you go to Krabi.

Ao Nang beach was not as big as I thought. Yes, there are quite a few hotels there at the moment but it is still a pretty quiet place. We went out one night and most places started closing at about 10.30. Along the beach you’ll find both restaurants and bars and there are also a couple of places where you can get access to the Internet if you need to check the mail.

One of the real highlights of this vacation came one evening when we were going out to eat. We were trying to find a place to eat and this one guy came over to me and asked me if he could ask me a question. I said “sure” and then he started talking Norwegian and he asked me if I was Norwegian. I confirmed this and then he asked me if my name was Gard. This was really surprising and I said yes once again. It turned out that he had been on my homepage and he had seen pictures and he recognized me from that. That is quite amazing if you ask me. I travel half around the world and then I get recognized because one guy has been on my homepage. Quite amazing.

Another trip I can recommend in the Krabi area is a trip to Wat Tham Sua or Tiger Cave temple. We took a taxi to this place one day (400 baht each way) and it is located about 3 km north of Krabi town. We started by climbing to the top of the mountain, which has a pagoda, a sitting Buddha and Buddha’s footprint. To get to the top you have to climb about 1200 steps. It was kinda funny to see how tiny these steps were to start with but all of a sudden we had steps that were 40-50 high and pretty narrow. This means that the steps were pretty steep in some places. But it was a great trip anyway and the view from the top is very nice. Ok, I have to admit that it was great to get down again and buy some ice cold Coke from the nuns that run the mini mart at the bottom of the steps. We also stopped by the Tiger Cave temple of course and we got some blessing from a monk there. The munk seemed to be interested in talking to us but his English was not that good so it was hard to understand him.

We stayed at Ao Nang from Monday 16th until Sunday 22nd. The day before we left we went on an organized trip called James Bond Discovery. The cost of this tour was 1600 baht per person and we were picked up at the hotel at 8 am. First we had to drive quite a while to get to the Phang Nga bay (about 1 ½ hours from Ao Nang). When we got there we got on board in a long tail boat and first of all we went out to a place to go paddling. The Phang Nga area is pretty spectacular because stack of limestone stick out of the water everywhere. And when we went paddling we really got close. We even went into one of these stacks and it was beautiful.

After this we were transported over to another tourist attraction in this area: James Bond Island. I guess this is one of the most well know landscapes in the world and it was made popular by the movie “The man with the Golden Gun”. The island itself was not worth more that the 30 minutes we stopped there but it was cool to have been there :-) We had lunch at Panyi, which is a Muslim village where all the houses are built on stilts in the water. We walked around just a little bit after lunch but they were trying to sell all sorts of stuff to s and they were pretty pushy.

The last leg of this tour was a trip to a camp where they had some elephants. It is always fascinating to get close to these big animals and we even got to ride them and see a show. But it is also a bit sad to see these animals in captivity. I’m not expert on elephants so it is hard to say if they were being treated well or not. I hope of course that they are taken well care of. Well, this three in one tour was nice but it was a long day and we were only back at the hotel at about 5 p.m.

Ao Nang was a pretty nice place and we had a good time there. Unfortunately the weather was not all that great while we were there but I don’t think that it stopped us from having a good time. And even if it rains it is still 30 degrees so at least it doesn’t prevent you from going into the pool :-)  

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