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Claire & Steve's Excellent Adventure
So, after our adventure on the modern day slave ship we arrived in Khao Lak and headed straight for 'Phuket Divers' to book a trip out to the Surin and Similan Islands on a liveaboard boat for 4 days - the sales pitch worked a treat with the suggestion of seeing giant manta rays, sharks, enormous fish and the much sought after whale sharks. With the sale sorted we set out to look around Khao Lak which didn't take all that long as it is literally just one main road straight through the small town.
It's a very quiet place which still has some charm left to it thankfully although not sure how long this will last as there seems to be a lot of building work going on, with the inevitable "luxury resorts" starting to emerge. It's not recovered properly from the effects of the Tsunami and there is still a lot of debris and fallen trees down on the beach. The shortage of tourists is also obvious with most people just using Khao Lak as a stopping off point for diving or en route to Phuket. It's a real shame as the beach and town are both lovely and there's also the bonus of a national park and excellent snorkelling opportunities (am I selling it well enough for you to visit?). The small businesses are suffering though; the Thai lady in one of the shops said that before the Tsunami she had lots of customers but now there is nobody.
So, I guess we did our part for the economy by extending our stay several times in order to dive, dive and then dive some more! In between diving we did see Khao Lak, frequenting the very quiet beaches - one of which was completely deserted with no cafe or gift shop in sight. This is obviously the place we chose to build our house on in the future!
We drove round in a fair few circles on our motorbike looking for the waterfalls - we failed to find them but did come across a couple of elephants waiting for passengers for a trek through the forest which we declined due to having a flat tyre, so it was back to the shop for us.
After that we had pretty much seen Khao Lak - I did tell you it was a small town! The evenings not on the boat were spent either eating yummy, homemade cheeseburgers, drinking and dancing at the Happy Snapper or drinking and eating pork from a rather large pig on a spit at the Fisherman Bar until 4am. The pounds are just piling on!!!!
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