The few days we had in Bangkok were spent eating yogurt and swallowing Imodium pills-- I won't get into details but apparently I wasn't fully recovered from food poisoning (or could I have got it again?). The important thing was to get to the beach for Valentine's Day. Next stop, Krabi!
We take a cab from our Bangkok hotel to DMK airport. (BKK is the big international airport, and DMK is great for snagging cheap domestic flights). Ian is full of facts and tells me on the way that DMK is the oldest airport in Thailand, built in 1914. Somehow knowing I'm flying out of the oldest airport makes me nervous. I hate flying. I read the news too much. I text Aleye details for my funeral (there will be strippers).
We fly Thai Lion Air, who's motto is "We MAKE People Fly"... seems a bit aggressive to me. They confiscate my weapon (electric fly swatter) and I nearly cry.
The flight is smooth and the airline magazine is riddled with hilarious bad translations:
We make it to the Krabi airport and take a bus to Ao Nang. Nothing transportation-wise is dedicated to a schedule. Busses, boats, and the like, wait until they've reached max capacity before leaving. Of course, the max capacity number that is posted is treated like a loose suggestion. We wait until the bus is full and then some, and once there are people filling the aisle we head out.
On the bus I ask Ian what he wants for Valentine's Day, giving a flirty leg rub and a wink. He says an electric fly swatter.
In Ao Nang we scour the beach markets for his gift. On the lucky 100th try, we find one! We're not trying to mess around here-- we got Dengue Fever in 2011 and I dare say it's worse than food poisoning. It was worth the hunt and $5.
Time to celebrate Valentine's Day! Though we're not on the beach yet, we're starving and we sit for a late VDay lunch. I order Pad Thai and Ian gets fried rice with chicken and pineapple. Meal comes: Ian has no chicken and my pad thai noodles aren't cooked. In fact, the server sees me trying to rip a noodle apart and feels so bad she takes the pad thai off the check. Can I stress that this NEVER happens in Thailand? They don't have the customer is always right type of attitude and they rarely modify a meal to your taste. We shared Ian's rice until the last bite, where we found a black hair. Minor strike-out.
Ok, to the pier! We buy our longtail boat tickets to the beach of Ton Sai where we're staying. (We wait an hour until at least ten other people buy tickets, because again, they don't transport people, they herd them.) Actually, it's called a pier but it's just where boats pick you up. There is no actual pier, and to get on the boats you have to walk into the water and climb up the side ladder. We walk out to the boat and the water is so warm and magical that you forget you're dragging your bags through it. The ride is 100 baht a person ($3) and is probably the most romantic part of our day.
Land, ho! Ton Sai is a beautiful little beach around the corner from the super-popular Rai Leh beach. We're staying at the "Chillout Bar and Bungalows", a spot a little more expensive than accommodations surrounding ($22usd/night) but has a great courtyard known for circus tricks and daily fire shows. On this tiny beach, it's the place to be.
We're greeted by cool-guy Aun who shows us to our room. He drips Thai swagger and I get the feeling he creeps on single travelers. He jokingly takes us to a demolished outdoor shower and tells us that's our room. HA-HA! Then he brings us to our real place and says "Make your home, come down and smoke bamboo weed." I knew he was cool.
Our room is a hut on a raised platform. It's super cute but really dark inside, and most of the space is taken up by the bed with a mosquito net around it. The baseboards are unsteady and there are some with one-inch gaps in between. You're never fully inside in the jungle. The electricity is only on from 6pm to 2am, which means no fan just yet. But it's 95 degreessssss.
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| Rustic, Yeah? |
There's one shelf and I claim it for my clothes. The rest of the stuff goes on the ground. Our home is made. What was step 2 again?
Layers of bug repellant and spf 50 are applied, and we head down to the chill out area. There's a slackline set up so Ian jumps on. He unluckily cuts his big toe on a rock, and goes back to our hut to rinse it with Listerene. He comes back and we walk the small beach town. Almost every bar is a Marley bar where we're offered joints and "happy cookies" and "magic mushroom milkshakes". We have a drink here and there and head back to our place for dinner.
We start to notice something: EVERYONE here is ripped. Like, actually ripped. Hunks, hot bods, and sexy all around. Is this Temptation Island or a gay beach? We see a Hercules-like 65 year old with a long shaggy white beard and the most pronounced six pack I've ever seen; we call him "Hot God".
It doesn't take long to realize this is the beach for the uber-athletes. First and foremost, it's a rock climber's paradise-- the limestone caves and cliffs are ideal for climbing, and people come from all over the world come to climb the courses here. You can take beginner lessons or buy week-long trekking/climbing packages. "Deep Water Soloing (DWS)", where you pretty much defy gravity and climb upside-down not using any ropes, is also a huge draw. Every night at at sunset we see acro-yoga that rivals Cirque du Soleil. Above us, you can hear hoots and hollers from base jumpers, deploying their parachutes right over our dinner.
Me Deep-Water Soloing
Wowza. Turned on by the beauty surrounding us and the "happy cookie" starting to kick in, we head back to our room to consummate the holiday. First we jump in the shower to get off all the sunscreen. The shower has a bunch of mosquitos floating around and the ground is filled with ginormous jungle ants surrounding the spot Ian rinsed his cut with Listerene. I frantic-splash water on me and go into the main room, leaving Ian to battle the intruders.
I remember I have an open bag of dried bananas in my backpack on the floor, so I move the bag so not to attract bugs. I pick it up and put it on the shelf with my clothes just in time to see a three-inch long cockroach crawl out. IANNNNNNNNN! Forget the ants, we have a bigger problem here.
We're both naked and Ian's new task is to get rid of the roach milling about my clothes. He has the fly zapper, but, come on. He grabs the bag from atop my clothes and throws it on the ground and smashes it with the racket a few times. Deemed safe, he hands the bag to me and starts to look in my clothes.
(Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, there was only one working light in the room, that only kind of worked. It worked the way that lights in scary movies flicker right before a murder. It really set the scene for what happened next.)
While I was looking at my beautiful clothes, scared that any second a big roach would come crawling out, I felt something on my neck. I gasp, but then I realized I was just standing underneath a clothesline that had our towel on it. OMG, phew, just the towel. I relax enough to see the three-inch roach crawl out of the bag, down my hand, and run the length of my leg. I screamed a scream that Ian says is only appropriate if I'm being murdered by a doll. The roach ran through the floorboards. Problem solved?
The ants were still in the bathroom and it was looking like a battle we couldn't win. We used the Listerene in lieu of brushing and called it a night. We try to close the curtains and they fall down. We are epically failing.
Happy ValenTIE Day!
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