Arie Goes to Thailand: Day One

I finished work on Monday, and needed a break, so I decided to spend a couple of weeks traveling around Southeast Asia. Our building manager arranged a taxi for us at 6:45am (ow), and off to the airport via some weird back-road shortcut. The vacation started with a three day beach vacation in Thailand.

Phnom Penh's airport is very, very nice--it's small, but brand new and very fancy. Nice stores, coffee shops, wi-fi. How does a country as poor as Cambodia have a brand-new airport? Probably the $25 that you have to pay to get on a plane there--the highest departure tax in the world. There are cute signs all over the airport reminding you that your tax pays for the airport, but the way this country works, probably a lot of the money goes into someone's pocket.

We flew AirAsia, a budget carrier run out of Malaysia. Left on time and landed on time, and I guess that's what you want. They sell (non-alcoholic) drinks and have a no-outside-food-or-drinks policy, which strikes me as a little cheap--especially since people dehydrate easily on planes and they charge for water. Two guys in the row in front of us almost got into a fistfight.

Flying over the Cambodia/Thailand border is very illustrative of the difference in wealth between the two countries. Cambodia is flooded rice paddies and dirt roads, but Thailand is neatly manicured and irrigated fields and highways.

We landed at the new Bangkok airport, Suvarnabhumi. Didn't get to see too much of it though, our connecting flight to Krabi left in 50 minutes. We sped through Thai immigration and customs (it's nice that Thailand doesn't require Americans to buy visas), and got to the checkout desk exactly one minute after check-in closed. They checked us in anyway, gave us the wrong boarding passes (sorry about that, Dale Bolton and Euon Williams), and we ran to the gate and got the bus that took us to our plane. (Sidenote: This new airport can't be that well-designed if we have to bus to planes.) The second flight was much the same as the first, except instead of a fistfight, we got to watch an elderly Thai couple that was clearly on their first flight ever. Their (mid-40s) son had to get them in and out of their seatbelts, put their stuff in the overhead bins, etc. Cute.

Krabi is a little beach-town on the western coast of southern Thailand, just off the Andaman Sea. The airport is small, and we got right through it and to the van that drove us to the beach. This was my first real exposure to Thailand, and it was nice to be in a fairly developed country after so long in Cambodia. Nice roads (with more than one lane in each direction!), street signs, traffic lights, all that stuff we take for granted in the developed world. They drive on the left, which is a little disorienting. We also saw a 7-11 and a McDonald's, the first we'd seen in months.

The van dropped us off at Ao Nang, which is a little beach a few miles from Krabi. From there, we took a longtail boat to Railay Beach. A longtail boat is just a big canoe with benches and an awning, in the back is a motor attached to a long pipe, and at the end of the pipe is a propeller (hence the name). It's very manueverable because of the long pipe, but it's also loud and stinky. There's no dock, so we had to take off our shoes and wade to the boat--and hold the luggage up out of the water.

There aren't good roads around Krabi, so everyone takes longtail boats to get from one beach to another. There are five or six boats and boatmen hanging around at each beach, constantly soliciting business, and they leave when they have a boatfull (or you can pay them extra if you're in a hurry). The ride was nice because it was our first glimpse of Krabi's bay, which is truly an amazing sight. I have heard that Krabi is considered one of the five most beautiful places on Earth by whomever considers these things, and after seeing it, I'm not surprised. Clear blue skies and clean sand beaches are fine, lots of places have those--but Krabi also has karst formations, which are exceptionally beautiful. Karst is formed when acidic rainwater eats through limestone. Over a few million years, the acid eats the limestone into breathtaking shapes. The bay is full of giant karst rocks that rise out of nowhere, tower a hundred feet up, and loom over the bay. There are beautiful limestone caves, dripping stalactites, and all sorts of other gorgeous natural structures.

We stayed at the Sand Sea Resort, a midrange place on Railay ("RYE-lay") Beach. It's expensive enough that the other guests were mostly families and relatively affluent couples rather than backpackers--in fact, we saw a rather steady stream of backpackers enter the lobby, find out the rates, and leave. I think there are cheap guesthouses on some of the other beaches, but not Railay. But it's one of the cheapest places--we were surrounded by much more expensive places. There were a few curious things about it--for one, the restaurant doesn't serve alcohol (and there's none in the minibar at the room). Combined with the employees wearing headscarves, I think maybe it's run by religious Muslims. The alcohol isn't a big deal, there are restaurants with full bars on either side of the resort, but it's curious.

More of a big deal is the utterly atrocious service. At our first meal, it took us more than 30 minutes of hand-waving, gestures, and requests to get the bill. Great food, though (and no pork on the menu, of course). Another issue was our room--generally fine, but the wardrobe smelled so bad that we couldn't use it (or even open it). Euw.

Straight to the beach. Railay Beach is basically one giant tidal plain, and it was high tide, so we could walk more than a hundred feet out and still only be up to our waists. The water was very warm, but there were some little stingy things in there, so we didn't stay in long. Some time in the pool, and then we walked around the beach a bit. One end is blocked by karst, but the karst pile on the other side has a sort of tunnel through it, and there was a fairly steady stream of people climbing over the rocks to get from one beach to another without using the longtail boats.

The longtail boats are a convenient way to get from beach to beach, I guess, and it's kind of cool to be somewhere that can only be reached by boat, but it's annoying to have them around all the time. They're loud enough to disrupt the tranquility of the beach, they pollute quite a bit (not just the exhaust--the water around them glistens with oil), and the drivers stand around smoking while they try to solicit customers. Could do without that.

One interesting thing about Railay Beach is the crabs that live there. These guys live in little holes in the tidal plane, and when the tide goes out, they come out and comb through the sand looking for tasty treats that were left by the water. They have to search quite a bit of sand to find a meal, and to keep themselves organized, they roll the sand into little balls after they've searched it. So when the tide goes out, the entire beach suddenly erupts with tiny crabs that spend the afternoon rolling little sand balls. By 5pm or so, the beach is blanketed in them. The crabs don't disturb anyone, they all run underground when you come near, but it's impossible to walk around without crushing the little balls. Fortunately, I don't think the crabs care, the sand balls are just the remains of their meals.

Had dinner at the resort, delicious again, and slightly better service. A beautiful sunset (Railay West is also known as "Sunset Beach", Railay East is "Sunrise"--it's on a peninsula, so it gets a beautiful ocean view of both sides). The boatmen were playing soccer on the beach. We went to sleep early.

Continue to day two, which has some cool kayaking bits.