It was time to return to the mainland after our somewhat soggy sojurn on Koh Yao Noi, so we caught yet another songthaew down to the pier, where we were able to spend a bit more time inspecting the art than we had on the way in.
Yep, that’s some birds and a crustacean, all right, although not even the largest crustacean sculpture in the past three days for us. The birds are hornbills, and while we did see some ACTUAL hornbills on our walks around the island, the pictures turned out too blurry to post.
Our ferry arrived and deposited us in Ao Nang, the beach town we had departed from two days prior. We didn’t have a flight to catch until that evening, so we had all day to explore the town.
The only problem? Ao Nang is awful.
Have you been to Virginia Beach? It’s that with Pad Thai and longtails. If you haven’t been to Virginia Beach, imagine Ao Nang, but without the Pad Thai and longtails. Hope that helps.
We didn’t take many PICTURES of how awful it was, because why would you, but it’s basically a giant beach tourist trap. So we decamped to a coffee shops to have smoothies and maybe get some quality internet time in.
While Leigh had some actual serious internetting to do, I wandered off in search of a geocache, so we could tick the box for the province, and push our “most distant cache found from home” number above 7500 mi.
This involved walking past about a billion tourist oriented pad Thai places, t-shirt shops, cannabis bars, massage parlors, and t-shirt shops. But at the end of this walk, I arrived at the Monkey Trail. This is a trail (with monkeys) that eventually leads to the nearby Railay Beach.
I only needed to walk about a quarter mile along it to get to the cache. Or should I say UP it?
Honestly, despite the gaps in the stairs, it still would have been fine, except for all the people clogging the path because they WEREN’T up to the gaps in the stairs. Or were attempting this barefoot. Or were just generally being idiots.
Oh, and there were definitely monkeys.
Thing is, these monkeys made me hate people that much more. I watched half of a couple line up a shot on their partner without telling them that this was going on behind them:
That backpack was fully zipped when the monkey started.
At any rate, we did at least manage to find some recommendations for one or two places to eat that weren’t tourist traps, and by luck, one of them was just a block from the coffee shop where I had left Leigh.
We was NOT expecting another high point meal in this awful place, but we definitely got one.
Whole fried fish with spicy mango salad, stir fried pako fern, and two dipping sauces. I don’t remember what the red one was, because we were too busy restraining ourselves from ordering shots of the green one. I looked it up later, and it’s called Nam Jim Talay. Definitely a banger. (The restaurant is called “Family Thaifood and Seafood” if you find yourself in Ao Nang, hopefully waiting for transport out.)
At this point it was after lunch, our flight wasn’t until early evening, and we wanted nothing more than to get the hell out of town. But it turns out all those tourist counters ARE good for something, because we walked up to the nearest one and asked if she could hook us up with a driver for the rest of the day.
Yep. 1000 baht (40 bucks Canadian) and they were there in five minutes.
The driver brought us to Tiger Cave temple, a beautiful temple at the base of a hill which is the starting point for 1,260 stairs to a shrine at the TOP of a hill.
With just enough time to make it to the top and back, we started walking.
For the record, 1,260 is a LOT of stairs.
About 200 stairs up we hit The Monkey Zone. I mean, it was just a zone with some monkeys in it, but The Monkey Zone sounds more dramatic. One of said monkeys punished one of our fellow climbers for his inattention (he was talking on his phone) by stealing a whole ass bottle of coconut water out of his bag.
The views got more and more spectacular as we climbed. At the same time, we got older and older.
But with just about ten minutes to spare before we HAD to start back down, we reached the top!
Worth it.
After an all too brief sojourn at the top, we turned around and staggered back down to the bottom of the hill. One more monkey picture, and it was time to fly to our last stop in Thailand, Chiang Mai!
We landed in Chiang Mai fairly late, and after dropping our stuff at our hotel, headed out to see what was still open that could feed us. We found a good Chinese noodle joint, scarfed down some noodles, and headed back to our hotel to crash.