Thailand Week 1

My trip to the Southern Andaman Coast of Thailand was wonderfully relaxing. Along with my LFC friends, my first destination was Krabi, known internationally for its amazing rockclimbing. And it’s true – the craggy, vertical rocks jut out from every beach and island, making the area spectacularly unique and beautiful, and also isolated. Even from beach to beach, one must take some form of water transportation, as the rocks make it generally impossible to travel from one area to the next by land.
We spent two nights in Krabi. The first day, we simply relaxed on the beach and ate a fantastic dinner that night. The next morning, I woke up really early to take advantage of some solitary beach time before my friends woke up. I went down to the beach, ate breakfast, read my book, and basked in the warm weather that I knew I would not be getting were I home in Canada. When everyone was awake, we rented two kayaks to go to an island far off in the distance that had been peeking our curiosity ever since our arrival. It was roughly a 1-hour trip – hard work, but fun, since we did not know what would lay ahead at the island which was our destination. And what lay ahead at Poda Beach was turquoise blue water, soft tan sand, and schools of multicoloured fish swimming all around us. The island wasn’t deserted as I would have liked – quite the contrary, there were tons of tour groups coming in and out via speedboats – but we were definitely the only ones that had made the journey by kayak!
On the way back we found out WHy no one else journed to Poda via kayak. The water at 4pm was a choppy as the afternoon storm which was brewing indicated it should be. At moments, I felt fear and panic creep into my shoulder blades, but since the other two I was paddling with were REALLY freaking out, I felt the need to be the calm one. We tried to make a zig-zag pattern back to our beach so that we could hit the waves perpendicularly, but this took nearly 3 times as long and left us vulnerable in the water longer than we would have liked. When we changed our strategy, we capsized twice. Finally, close to the shore of a beach two beaches over, a fishing boat passed and we flagged it down. We put our kayak in their boat and they kindly took us to our beach. Exhausted, defeated, and mildly embarassed, we thanked the crew monetarily, brought our kayak in, and sank into the seats of the restaurant for a “calm down” beer.
The next day we took an expensive speed boat 1.5 hours North to Phuket. Originally I didn’t want to go to Phuket, having heard how overly touristy and seedy it was, but I actually really enjoyed myself. We found a corner of Thailand’s largest island that was a bit more remote and relaxed than the rest of Phuket. I’m not going to tell you where it is, so that it remains that way for my next trip, haha! But truly, it was beautiful, with waves for body surfing and boogey-boarding, great restaurants, and beautiful hillside viewpoints. You can guess what I did for the next three days – acted the beach bum that I am. I read two books, got a great tan, and learned how to boogey board (OH MY GOD SOOOOO FUN!!!). I left hesitantly, and ONLY because I was on my way to Laos and wanted to have at least a week there. Otherwise, I might just have been able to stay there the rest of my vacation (and even then, would probably have had to be dragged back to Bangkok to start school!).