A well earned break(down)

We caught the overnight train from Bangkok to krabi-the train was a bit like something out of a Michael Palin adventure, but it was all good fun and suprisingly comfortable.

The train arrived in a Surat Thani at about 7.30 in the morning, so we thought we would get some breakfast before the second leg of the journey-a 3 hour bus ride to krabi. But as seems to be the Thai way, as soon as we got off the train everyone starts shouting at you, wanting to know where your going at to follow them. We tried to explain but all we got was 'no time, no time, bus leave now!' 'it's ok' we said, 'we catch a later bus, we need breakfast' but all we got was 'no no, no time, next bus not for 3 hour, come come, quickly hurry!' 'you take this bus then you change and get next bus!'

It's so difficult to know whether the person your speaking to is just trying to help you, or to con you into paying him to take you somewhere, and you never get a minute to think about what you want to do. We ended up getting on the bus, as some other people who were going to Krabi were also on it. As it turned out it was all fine and we were safely delivered to krabi 3 hours (and very hungry) later.

We were thinking of heading out to Kho Pii Pii, the setting for 'the beach' but as everyone we had met said it was terrible, and just a big booze up we decided to give it a miss, and instead Dawn got a tip off a guy to check out a place called Ton Sai.

It turned out to be a great tip as ton sai is a secluded beach on the mainland only accessible by long tail boat, which is really under developed (at the moment) and just a really chilled out little place with loads of bars made of bamboo and little bungalows to stay in, there are monkeys roming around in the wild, fire dancers on the beach at night and everyone just having a good laid back time.

It also seemed to be 'drinks o'clock' quite often, and the girls really got into a few Mai tais

We also took a snorkel trip for the day while Dawn went diving, which was pretty good, especially as it only cost us about 7 quid each, we went to a few different spots and saw loads of little fishies before stopping for lunch on a really beautiful beach. The only downside was on the way back the boat broke down. We were cruising along and the propeller came clean off the back of the boat, so the guy hade to call his dad out to tow us back home (it was just like the AA back home)

Our boat (minus propeller)


Getting a tow Thai style