Krabi, Southern Thailand

March 15.16, 2009

Flew out of Bangkok, on a cheap flight with Air Asia, to the town of Krabi on the southern coast of Thailand. This was one of the areas where the tsunami hit a few years ago but whatever damage there was wasn’t apparent to us.

Stayed in Krabi one night just as a stopover. Our real destination were the islands in the Andaman Sea, Ko Lanta in particular.

The next morning we were picked up at our guesthouse by a guy driving a pickup. We hopped in the back and, with a few other folks picked up along the way, headed for the ferry. At the ferry terminal I saw pictures of a big air conditioned boat and thought “Great”. Unfortunately, that boat must have been out of service for the day as they crammed us on a couple of old narrow boats that felt like we were riding a school bus across the waves. Only two and a half hours to Ko Lanta. (No bathroom on board but the window next to me looked big enough to lean out)

Fortunately, since I hate big swells, the sea was calm. It must stay that way often as our boats couldn’t have survived anything bigger then a metre high wave. (We found out later that those boats only ran for part of the year anyway).

On the way to Ko Lanta we had to make a couple of drop offs at some smaller islands. There is no jetty or pier or anything for these. A couple of Thai long boats show up (long boats that have a long movable propeller attached to the engine that is both propeller and rudder) and they get kinda of close to the boat and you make a jump for it. Your luggage is thrown in the long boats general direction and you are off. I was hoping we were going to get a pier and eventually we did.