The year, 2553, the place, Krabi

STATS: Day count=22; Current Illness count=2 (Not much left of my body to sunburn now. Dodgy stomach on a bus journey – I’ll spare you the details! Emma got stung by a sea urchin – most impressive injury so far! – and bitten by a fish); theft count=0; rip-off count=0; tourist screw-up count=0.7 (no change); Chris’ photo count=270; Emma’s photo count=7
I still haven’t lost those Project Manager instincts. I know when someone is trying to pull a fast one. Writing out a bus ticket with the date of travel filled in as 23/1/53 wasn’t going to get past me – I know how these foreign scams work, you know. Luckily, I have also long-since lost the rashness of youth (well, youth anyway) so I didn’t insist on finding a tourist policeman (yep, they have tourist police) there and then. Having researched this a little more thoroughly, it seems that Thailand works to the Buddhist calendar, which is 543 years ahead (or behind, depending how you look at it) of the Christian one (it starts when Buddha is received into Nirvana - the place, not the band – in 543 BC) – hence this year is 2553 BE (Buddhist Era).
Krabi is probably the most obviously touristy place we have stayed in so far, as many tourists stop here before heading off to one of the islands off the nearby (west) coast. But it doesn’t seem to be spoilt by this – it still comes across as a nice, small town where tourism is a big money-bringer, but the Thai people still just carry on doing their stuff and being nice to everyone. The night markets are still frequented by a lot of locals, even if there are also a lot of farangs (as us westerners are colloquially known) there too.
The bus trip here wasn’t too pleasant for me – obviously my tactic of trying any bit of local food that looked remotely vegetarian was going to catch up with me at some point! Luckily the journey was only 2 hours long, and the ‘illness’ was short lived. So we survived and no one else was any the wiser to the unpleasantness that could have occurred.
Hostel is great – even cleaner than the last place. There’s another great hostel down the road run by an American guy who seems to have a great attitude to running a hostel business. We’d stay there, but our room is a bit cleaner :-) We had a slightly drunken (on both sides) conversation with him the other night. He sold us a tour. I presume he was drunk, anyway. Maybe it was just a ploy! More on the tour later.
A quiet Sunday spent looking round the town, most of which was closed – it is Sunday after all. Another great night market – lots of interesting and inventive craft things on show – one stall had table lamps made out of cut up straws, another had little table ‘plants’ made from cleverly cut and painted old plastic drinks bottles (which is what the photo is of, in case it’s hard to make out!). And as always everyone is really nice and friendly. And VERY patriotic. We were in the bustling market at 6pm, when some music came over the speakers. Luckily we’d read about this in the guide book, but everyone stood up (obviously most were standing already) and stood very still while their national anthem was played. It was like something out of Dr Who – all were very respectfully quiet for a few minutes, then it finished and everyone carried on with their normal business. No drunken louts singing along and forgetting half the words as you would find in the UK. Respect – something I fear the West has lost and Asia seems to still manage to cultivate. I like it out here :-) But I digress into soapbox territory!
However, while the soapbox is already being used, I encourage everyone who may accidentally or deliberately be reading this to watch the film “The Cove”. We saw it last night, I know it is on DVD in the UK now (as I was going to buy it before coming out here but was a few days away from release). If you aren’t moved by it, you have no soul.
Soapbox put away… maybe only temporarily. Well, we are travelling, so I need to venture into meaningful thinking once in a while!
We actually succumbed to an organised tour today (Monday). It was highly recommended (by a drunk bloke…hmmm), and came pretty cheap, and wasn’t something we could arrange easily ourselves, so we went on a boat trip around four nearby islands. Great snorkelling, nice swimming and beaches (for those into that sort of thing), bit of a crowded boat (not overcrowded or anything, just a few too many people for our liking!). Not a bad trip in all, but not one we’d do twice. Emma managed to be nibbled (Emma is claiming it was an “attack”) by a 2” tropical fish – no big deal - but then got stung by a sea urchin (one of those things with really long spikes that you REALLY don’t want to step on) while snorkelling. She only touched it briefly – the water was shallow and she was struggling a bit with the snorkel and her foot just touched the top of this thing. Still managed to sting her foot in 4 places. First ‘proper’ injury of the journey so far! The best bit was when we got back to the boat, just to check with the guide that it wouldn’t be fatal or anything, he just smiled and said it would hurt for a few hours but then be ok. He then proceeded to “help it along” by bashing poor Em’s foot with a snorkel for a minute of two! Not sure how it actually helped, but the pain of being hit by a snorkel took her mind off the pain of being stung, so maybe that was the aim! A method I will have to remember for later.
A new day and a new moped to ride around. Shunning the organised tours to a few ‘local’ sites, we hired a moped instead. I encountered the first miserable and ‘couldn’t be arsed’ Thai so far at the nearby motorbike hire place, so went to a different one. Nice little moped – very girly and non-macho in the UK, but just one of the many thousands here, so my machismo was not dented by riding around on a 135cc automatic. It was actually good fun.
Visited a(nother) Buddhist temple – this time the Tiger Cave temple. No tigers, just a long, long, long climb up 1230 steep steps to reach the top of a mountain where there is a Buddhist shrine. I was too knackered to notice it for at least half an hour after climbing those steps! Worth it for the view, though. Down the same way, unfortunately – I thought a water slide down would have been a fantastic money-spinner for them. Em suggested a zip-wire, but from that height, I think braking may be a problem! Unfortunately without either of these great ideas in place, we had to walk back down the 1230 steps – easier then walking up them, but it was now midday and the heat added some additional challenge to the descent.
Since the Buddhist monks hadn’t thought of the great water slide or zip wire ideas, they had to make money other ways. Both Em & I were flattered to be asked to sign the visitors book in the temple itself when we walked in, and when they tied nice little cloth bracelets round our wrists too we really felt like travellers, accepted into the Buddhist ‘society’. Only when they then pointed at the “Donations” box and just said “Money” did we feel slightly less special. We were going to donate anyway, but being pointedly asked too does sort of reduce the inclination somewhat!
After a bit of riding around and taking it all in, we headed to a “hot spring waterfall”. Both the Tiger Cave Temple and the hot spring are on the standard itinerary for local tours, but having done them ourselves by bike we had to admit it was FAR better doing it independently – even if you tend to like tours. We did the temple in our own time, unhurried, able to have ice creams and watch the monkeys at the bottom afterwards. The hot springs consisted of a hot spring stream that then flowed into a river down a small waterfall with carved pools down the waterfall that you could just sit in, surrounded by natural hot water, and then plunge into the cooler river at the bottom. We arrived mid afternoon and after seeing a couple of coach loads of people going in, we thought we’d wait a bit, chilling out with an iced coffee outside. When all the tours had finished for the day, we went in and found it fairly quiet – at one point we had it all to ourselves – really nice. Riding back to town as the sun set was also great. So not only cheaper than the tours, much more relaxing. But maybe we are biased – as you will have guessed by now if you didn’t know already, we aren’t fans of organised tours anyway!
Tomorrow we head on out of this place to a place inland a bit – in a jungle national park (Khao Sok). We haven’t got anywhere booked up and a lot of the places are a bit expensive, so not sure how long we’ll stay there.