An hour on the bus, up hill and down dale brought us to Manora Garden, a B&B set in a small rubber plantation, just outside Phang Nga, complete wi5 monkeys in the rafters!
We borrowed a scooter, much to Chris’s delight and my trepidation, to go 2,800kms … oops 2.5kms … up the road to the local waterfall and nature trail. It was busy with minibuses full of tourists, paddling in the waterfall, so we tried to escape and head for the trail, but I found the stepping stones over the river too scary to contemplate so we retraced our steps. Chris says it was worth it just for the scooter ride!
The main reason we are here is so we can spend my birthday on a boat round the western side of Ao Phang Nga, the huge bay protected by Phuket from the Andaman Sea. Despite being to far away from friends and family, it was lovely to receive so many birthday greetings as well as a gift from Gerard and Nui at Manora.
We were warned that boat trips in the bay are hardly solitary experiences, as all the tourists want to see the same bits, so I was expecting it to be busy, so I certainly wasn’t expecting a longtail boat to ourselves complete with picnic. The other surprise was how vast the bay is and apart for a few ‘hotspots’ we felt we had the bay to ourselves.
We boarded our boat at am ramshackle dock and were off.
The highlight for us was our visit to Ko Hong, which contains hongs which translate from Thai as rooms and are lagoons hidden inside the limestone. We were taken by kayak into the tunnels, glimpsing one lagoon beyond our reach, but were able to enter another. Whilst there were other people kayaking too, we still enjoyed the experience, had a joke with our boatman and posed for photos!
We also stopped at Ko Tapu or Nail Rock, famous as Scaramanga’s hideaway in The Man with the Golden Gun, and now more commonly referred to as James Bond Island. We could have landed to get the iconic photo of the rock from the other side, but decided not to brave the crowds.
Other stops took us to cave filled with stalactites and stalagmites and a lagoon at the end, and another with very colourful formations.
We also passed some 3,000 year old cave paintings, now exposed on the outside of a cliff and rocks apparently resembling a poodle dog, but we are really struggling to see the similarity!
For lunch we stopped at an island with its own private beach where we swam, ate a delicious fried rice lunch followed with bananas, played on the swing and took pics till it was time to go … idyllic!
Our return took us to Ko Panyi, a Muslim village built on stilts around a rock that supports the mosque, which has apparently grown from descendants of two seafaring families from Java. The reality is that many of the large boats stop here for lunch so it has become a huge tourist bazaar and we couldn’t believe that enough tourists would visit to ever be able to seriously deplete their stock!
The ride back was exhilarating and we were covered in spray as we headed back to Phanh Nga, tired and happy.
Tomorrow we take the bus to Krabi to meet up with a very important person!
Off Travelling Together 