krabi – a review

Posted at 19 Aug 3:20 pm. 0 comments

Nopparat Thara beach

Ao Nang was, in essence, very hot (did I mention that already?) and rather more expensive than I expected, but they weren’t kidding about the beaches of pristine white sand, picturesque limestone islands and clear blue-green seas.

The heat was probably even a plus given that no fever could survive the amount of sweating it induced; mine certainly didn’t. Beginning the afternoon we touched down in Krabi, Sexybum and I ran the gamut of flu symptoms: fever, chills, body ache, headache, dizziness, sore throat, coughing and sneezing. The worst of it wore off in two days, which was ample time to appreciate the care my amazing boyfriend was giving me while feeling very under the weather himself.

Things which were good to consume:

• Grilled chicken drumsticks from roadside stalls.
• Pancakes from roadside stalls.
• Any food from Jamali’s, which is cheap and tasty… and a roadside stall. It’s situated by the road, round the corner from Ao Nang beach, next to a stall which sells drinks at night.
• Coconuts, and anything in a coconut. Coconut shakes? Yum. Coconut coolers? Wonderful. If they put pig’s blood in a coconut I’d probably drink it too.
• Alcohol in buckets.

Alcohol in buckets. No, I still haven’t gotten over it.

Usually the list of edible local goodies is longer, eg. Hanoi where mouth-watering delights await around every corner, literally. This time, due to where we were we simply couldn’t find any local dives, we couldn’t get around that easily or we just weren’t up to looking. We did discover a no-no though: bottled alcohol made locally. Our last two nights there we celebrated with bottles of Thailand-made Bacardi Breezers and Espy cocktails. The following mornings we woke up with headaches and aching eyes. The local alcohol is seriously dodgy.

A brilliant warning.  Also notable is the blue tsunami-exit-that-way sign above it. I’d have assumed “RUN AWAY FROM THE GREAT BIG WAVE!” was only common sense.

I normally micro-plan everything, but this time I didn’t even know where I’d be sleeping that night. Given that unpreparedness and our health we had a really good time, but I’d go back again because for those exact same reasons we didn’t cover as much as I’d have liked to. We slummed it a bit but for the most part rolled with the mainstream tourist crowd – it seemed inevitable. Everywhere we went the streets were swarmed with Caucasian tourists, which meant that local traders used to conversion rates about 40-60 times higher than their own currency were naturally going to hike their prices up.

Conversely, we saw some of these tourists haggle over already cheap items, or things that were non-negotiable – bus fare, for instance. Proving once again that common sense is a rare commodity all over the world.

I leave you with a photo of a fighter’s legs looking cool.

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