Krabi

Plan: Catch a bus from Sura Thani to Krabi, a coastal city. Then spend a relaxing night in Krabi while arranging travel details for the rest of the trip (tours, “must-see”s, etc.).

The bus drops you off a little ways outside of Krabi, so you have to leg it (10 minutes walking) into town in order to catch a taxi/jeepney thingy (song-thew) into the subjectively more interesting part of the city. Using our limited Thai and awesome vision navigation skills good karma we managed to get dropped off almost in front of our hostel, the Good Dream Guesthouse.

After dropping off our stuff, we opted to head to one of the tourist attractions in Krabi: The Tiger Temple. This structure is prefaced by way too many steps. Which we climbed.

The view from the top was amazing – 360 degrees of Krabi and the surrounding areas. I’d recommend it to any able-bodied person. We certainly passed a fair amount of quitters on our way up, but if you pace yourself, you won’t pass out until you reach the top! Don’t worry, the Monks will revive you. Or the monkeys.

At the temple, we had a rendezvous with Maggie, Katie, and Natalie. We headed back down the mountain after a fair amount of pictures, then took a way-too-tiny taxi (normal) back to our ‘hood. Our hostel was located right next to a tour agency, and had an in-house restaurant. Even though we had a mixture of Swiss, Canadian, and Americans in our group, the (white) hostel owner insisted on calling us The Americans. When we found that all the tours were full, he was really nice and helped us to arrange a private boat rental.

Post-dinner, we walked over to the nearby night market (found via the mural/map painted on the hostel wall) where we found the roti pancake (crepe) stands known to be popular in the south. You can customize the crap out of those things.