From Sri Lanka we flew to Malaysia, back to mainland Asia to begin our slow progress overland to China. The main culprit of this slow progress was sitting on a Thai island for a month and a half.
Before doing that though we had to get there. We’d already seen Kuala Lumpur so the morning after arriving we headed North to Penang / George Town. We spent a few days there eating our way through the wide selection of excellent food and organising our Thai visas.We also checked out some of the Chinese architecture and temples in the area (Penang has had a huge Chinese population for the last few centuries)
Beaded shoes – each little bit of colour on the shoe is actually a tiny bead hand stitched onto the shoe – how they did it 100 years ago
Wedding inside a historical house – there were three wedding going on at the same time, it was a popular spot
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Detail above the entrance to a house
It was a nice place to hang out, especially so since our guesthouse owners/staff were lovely and kept feeding us every time we sat still. The day came to leave however and we jumped in a minibus for a long long day on the road. On the bus we met an Australian teacher who was living and working in Thailand, so we spent the bus ride learning his perspective on Thailand and Thai people.
We were on our way to China eventually but July/August isn’t a great time to visit there apparently (all the locals are on holiday and it’s really hot) so we spent a month and a half sitting still on the Thai island of Ko Pha Ngan. This gave us a chance to take a breath, get some travel energy back (we were sick of seeing temples) and get a bit of work done. Just before the island we stopped and spent two days in the “up and coming beach resort” (the locals said) of Khanom. It was a very quiet place with a nice beach, but unfortunately very shallow water. The place we stayed had a great setup right on the beach with hammocks and a bar.
Very relaxing
The area is home to pink Irrawaddy dolphins which you can sometimes see from the beach but we had no such luck and after a few days there we headed across to the island.
We spent 10 days on the West Coast of the island at the beach of Hat Yao, the water is very shallow in July, so not great for swimming unfortunately but the beach was nice for walking
the area was nice and relaxing and our hotel room up on the hill had a lovely view from the balcony
We also had these guys as neighbours (we looked up the snake on the Internet and don’t think he’s poisonous, but the armour plated grasshopper is still pretty scary)
After the taste of Hat Yao we moved across to Hat Thong Nai Pan Yai on the North East Coast for the start of ‘proper’ relaxation.
Here we rented a small house a minute’s walk from the beach and settled in for 40 days of not packing bags and having nowhere to be, it was amazing and we found it very difficult to leave.
The house had formerly been a restaurant and was basically one giant, high ceilinged room (10m X 10m)
with a giant kitchen attached
so we indulged in plenty of fried/scrambled eggs, pancakes(!), bacon (!!!), toast etc. As well as far too many iced instant coffees.
We dragged ourselves out of the house for afternoon swims and for meals in the surrounding restaurants, but otherwise spent a huge amount of time just sitting around enjoying the place and/or working (Kate – Uni thesis, Joel –classes from coursera.org).
There beach was a very relaxed place though there were a few bars there, here are some shots from a fire show on the beach one night
We had two neighbours, one was a group of Burmese who worked in the local restaurants, there seemed to be about 8 of them crammed into an area less than a quarter the size of our house (partially a reflection of their cramped conditions and partially a reflection of the silly size of our house). Our other neighbours were an English/Australian family (parents English, kids Australian, in accent anyway). Bizarrely their Australian home is just down the road from where Kate grew up, a long way to come for the same neighbours 🙂
As well as lovely relaxing beaches Ko Pha Ngan is famous as home of huge, all night Full Moon Parties on the beach at Hat Rin.
We managed to go to two of these while on the island, once from our West Coast setup and once from our North East hideaway, both times were awesome fun. Bars all up the beach pump out dance music for ten thousand or so revellers ‘til after the sun comes up. The beach is the dance floor so you simply wander up and down from ‘club’ to ‘club’, and stop wherever suits. A large chunk of the crowd is dressed in fluro colours and covered in fluro body paint making the whole scene very vivid. Less awesome are the few thousand people using the ocean as a urinal and then the few hundred who are drunk enough to swim in it anyway 🙂
No photos as it’s an easy way to lose your camera, but here’re some off the Internet
Underneath all those people is a beach and the darkness beyond is the ocean (photo from blogs.transparent.com)
Buckets! Each bucket comes with a mid-size bottle of rubbish local ‘vodka’/’rum’/’whiskey’ a can of red bull and/or coke and a bunch of straws. It’s a very quick way to start (and end) your night (photo from da.wikipedia.org)
View from Northern (quieter) end of the beach (photo from www.thebeachfrontclub.com)
We enjoyed our time there immensely and it was very difficult to leave, but it had to happen. We stuffed our life back into our bags, jumped on a ferry and head back out into the wide world of backpacking – next blog post will be Laos 🙂
World Meander 