30th Sept 2012
Get on a bus to Khao Lak, a small town on the west coast, it's more touristy than where we have come from, but then it is right on the beach. Agoda have come up trumps again, we have booked 2 nights in the Suwan Palm Resort, a really nice hotel with a pool and a minute’s walk from the beach. We never would have found it ourselves, as it was a good 15 minute walk from the main road and carrying our rucksacks, we would have found a room a lot sooner. Our room in the Suwan is the largest to date, has a massive balcony and a sea view. We did wonder if we were shown the wrong room, we have only paid 12.50p a night for this room, with it's fancy 'fan-folded' towels, seemed to be worth so much more!
We get our smelly clothes laundered, (if you read the last blog, you will remember how wet & smelly everything got, I have even had to scrub my trainers as they still stink!).
We swim every day and also hire a bike for 2 days. (4.00p a day!) We can't believe we haven't hired a bike sooner. (Matt says, if I say it one more time, he may have to push me off the back!), he has full bike license and a bike back home, which I don't like going on, but here, it just seems so different and less scary, for some reason.
The area we are in was hit by the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. We go to the memorial monument, a sculpture of 3 thin, stainless steel posts, welded together at the top, it was so nondescript, we almost rode past it!
We go to a market in the evening (4-8), there are all the usual clothes stall and some amazing food stalls, The barbecued corn in the cob with sweet chilli sauce and the banana & nutella pancakes were fab!
We do a small hike to some waterfalls, it is really hot and the water really cold! We decide not to get into the pool at the bottom of the first one, but wade through it, to the other side and walk up to the higher level falls. It was worth the effort of scrambling up and down tree roots and rocks, apart from collecting a leech along the way, which fortunately Matt spotted on my tee-shirt, it was a great walk!
Most of the waterfalls belong to National Parks, so there is an entrance fee of 100B (2.00p), we get to one and we only have a 1000B note, they have no change and neither does the café, so we have to miss it out. We thought this was pretty mean of them not to let us in. Matt asks a couple of tourists if they have change, they don’t, but he offers to pay for us. We decline his offer and move on.
At our next waterfall stop, the same couple turn up. They are German and we get chatting to them. The guy is a Land Rover freak like Matt, so we spend a good 20 minutes chatting to them. He gives us the address of a friend of theirs in Chang Mai and has told us to get in touch with him.
Koh Lak is a pretty chilled place to be, not an awful lot going on, other than the beach and waterfalls. We stay for four nights and then decide to move onto Surat Thani, a transit town to the islands off the west coast - Koh Samui and Koh Tao!
