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Saz and Dave's travels
Today we decided to follow Karen's advice (the girl we met the other night) and check out Railay beach. This involved us getting a tuk tuk to Ao Nang (where I bought some goggles and we got some crisps for lunch) and then a longtail boat over to Railay. The longtail boat was 60B each if the boat was full (6 people) or 300B for the whole boat if there were less than 6 people. There were 10 other people on the beach waiting to go so we were quoted the price of 60B each. However the other people were all a bit stupid getting in one boat, leaving me and Dave with a whole boat to ourselves and we all ended up paying the same price! Not that we minded though!
It took about 15 minutes to get to Railay - it was very quick as there were just 3 people on our boat allowing it to speed across the waves! The beach was really nice but it was quite cloudy when we arrived so we didn't see it in its full glory! This didn't bother us though as we prefer it when it's cloudy as you don't worry about getting sunburnt! We found a nice spot on the sand then went for a swim. I tried out my new goggles much to Dave's amusement and to my dissapointment as the water was really cloudy and I couldn't see any fish (must have been cloudy from yesterday's rain).
When we got out, the sun had come out at it's full heat which we could stand for about 10 minutes before it actually started to hurt our skin! It is so so hot sitting in the sun I have no idea how people lie on the beach all day! We moved to the shade of a tree where we chilled out for a while, me having a sleep and Dave reading (The Moonlit Cage - Dave says thanks Kate, it's a really good book!)
After some spring rolls for lunch we decided to pack up our stuff and go for a walk to East Railay on the opposite side of the peninsula (we were currently on West Railay beach), where there was supposed to be a cave. East Railay beach turned out to be not that nice as the tide had gone out leaving just sludgy mud, but the cave was fantastic! When we went in we were the only ones in there so it was deadly quiet. The path went quite far in and opened up into an enormous cavern with stalectites and stalecmites (I can never remember which is which!) lit up by orange lights. It was lovely and cool and quiet in there and we stayed for quite a while.
When we got out, we saw a sign for Ton Sai beach (2km) and decided to walk there and get a longtail back from there to Ao Nang instead of going back to West Railay. The walk to Ton Sai was pretty hard even though it was only 2km. The reason for this was that after about 15 minutes, the path cut sharply up at an almost vertical angle which wasn't great in flip flops! Thankfully the path was under the trees but it was still quite a climb leaving us sweating buckets and severely bitten by rainforest insects! On the way back down towards Ton Sai, we passed a load of seemingly derelict tourist bungalows that were falling down and decaying which gave the place a really eerie feel to it! The closer we got to Ton Sai the more these bungalows became inhabited even though they still looked incredibly basic! Right next to the beach there was a lot of new development going on with fancy new bungalows popping up. It seemed that in their rush to construct these new places the builders had forgotten to demolish and remove the old rotting houses.
Ton Sai beachm when we got there seemed nice and very quiet - probably because you can only get there by longtail boat! When we asked one of the boat drivers if we could go back to Ao Nang he said only when his boat was full and since he had 5 people including us this meant finding another recruit! We waited for almost an hour before 2 English guys turned up wanting to go to Ao Nang. By this time the tide had gone out loads and we had to walk for about 30 meters over very sharp rocks in knee-deep water to get to the boat.
We eventually got back to our bungalow at about 7pm after a bit of a wander around Ao Nang where we got some pinapple. We had tea back in Nopparat Thara at 'Hippies bar' where they had the football on and we both got some spaghetti bolognaise that was pretty nice and some really nice fruit shakes. Again back to the food - sorry!
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