The other route I like to walk is on the roads behind my house which run parallel to a river and lead to a pretty fantastically green landscape of limestone cliffs and rubber trees. Here is the photo tour...
Total number of squashed frogs on a 1 hour walk: 8
That small row of buildings is Anuban Phang-nga, the school where I work.
The road that runs behind Anuban is empty except for some barbed wire squares that hold various livestock. The houses that dot this backyard area are sparse but they coagulate around the river. Some of them appear to be simple family homes and small children are usually running around outside dousing each other with water bottles.
Others are fancier and seem to function as coffee houses or karaoke bars. Karaoke is huge here and the only karaoke bar I've attended was a windowless cube on the side of the road a little bit past the main part of town and the experience was...interesting. That is to say, karaoke (for me) has always been sort of a "let's all forget our tone-deafness and sing those songs we used to love in middle school" experience. In Thailand, karaoke is an art form. They are good at singing and they sing long, slow, intense ballads in Thai and if you try to sing a Backstreet or Eagles song, you are ocularly booed off the stage.
Right next to this strange marble-square-courtyarded house is the river. And the river is really quite breathtaking. When there is no rain the previous day, the river is shallow and the water flows over the stones of the river's bottom in the most perfectly meditative way (as in "I could stand here and watch the water flow over these stones until the sun goes down").
The road on the other side of the bridge that traverses this river runs along the base of the cliffs. The intensities and varieties of "green" are astounding. See below picture:
This is one of the many rubber trees that populate the province of Phang-nga. They are planted in perfectly symmetrical rows that extend as far as the eye can see over fields that dot that cliffs and roadside land. The effect is spectacular and on misty mornings the fog is trapped within the endless rows of trunks.
Now onto the other 'hood...Phang-nga Province. About an hour away from Phang-nga is a little place called Bangsak. The drive to Bangsak is largely a trip over winding roads that cut through the spectacular landscape. This is an example of the roadside vistas...
Side note: The sky in Phang-nga has been particularly surreal as of late. Here is the view I got while walking back from Genius one afternoon...
And here is the view from the road on the way to Bangsak. The beams of light are celestial and mythical and it really makes you think that Zeus could very well be up there behind the clouds shining a flashlight onto the mortal world.
The town of Khao Lak is on the way to Bangsak. Khao Lak is super touristy but the plus side of the tattooed and sunburnt population that it tends to attract is that these people also, apparently, like the same kind of food that I tend to crave. The exception to that is the McDonald's in Khao Lak which is always heavily populated and serves (me) the sole purpose of providing iced coffee with real milk. They also serve something horrifyingly green that they call "apple juice."
My two favorite food haunts of Khao Lak are the Deli-Butcher, run by an awesome Irish couple named Richard and Trish who provide percolated coffee, jazz music, homemade cheese, and hilarious stories of their time in Thailand, and The Rusty Pelican, a Mexican restaurant run by an ex-SoCal dude (which is truly the best way to describe him) named Mo.
This past weekend a couple of us stopped by Mo's for his burritos and mojitos/Fat Mexicans (a tequila shot with Tabasco sauce). After gorging on some burritos (pretty sure I ate mine in less than 5 minutes), we ordered a bowl of incredible mussels cooked in white wine and butter (two things that I haven't enjoyed since arriving in Thailand). And they were turquoise.
Bangsak is about 20 minutes past Khao Lak and the plan for Friday afternoon (no work because of a Buddhist holiday) was to meet up with some friends on the Bangsak Beach and go swimming/build a bonfire. We arrived as the sun was beginning to set and after a cloudless day the effect was incredible. I really am obsessed with the sky here (as Steve and anyone with whom I've had a conversation about the sky will attest). I think it has to do with growing up in a city and never really spending serious amounts of time in a place where I the sky was something that ended at the horizon and not at the roof of a building.
But I think you will agree that that cloud is perfectly placed. How could I not take a gazillion pictures?
(Caption: Steve entering the ocean.) Bangsak Beach has remained untouched by the tourists who flock to Khao Lak (for the most part) so on most days there are only one or two other people in the water.
The beginning of the bonfire. For the past few months, a movie has been filming on the Bangsak Beach (starring Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor) about the 2004 tsunami which destroyed pretty much all of Bangsak. The replicated damage of the tsunami is right on the beach (kind of disconcerting) but the various wooden objects that the production crew left behind made for great bonfire-starting material.
Once the sun was below the water line (ie. it was too dark to take more pictures), my friend Leise and I headed into town to pick up some Thai take out. As we walked back down the beach, bags of khao paht gai (fried rice with chicken) and curried vegetables in hand, we saw the enormous cloud of fire rising from the beach and realized the bonfire had finally ignited.
The next day, everyone woke up early to head out to the Similan Islands for our day of snorkeling. Leise planned a day-long adventure for a group of about 11 of us and it started at 7:45 on Saturday morning. After being herded into a minivan and taken to a "briefing room" (which was a wall-less atrium with picnic tables), we listened to a 10 minute presentation about the day's plan (the guide mimed "snorkel" and "hike" approximately three times in the space of five minutes...I counted) while dousing ourselves with high SPF sunblock. We gathered our snorkeling materials and headed to the motorboat that would serve as our tour bus/boat for the rest of the day. The ride to the Similan Islands (one of the top ten diving spots in the world and ergo an ideal place to do some snorkeling) was about an hour. For some reason, our group decided to sit in the very very very front of the boat with me sitting at the crux of the V of the bow. Needless to say, I spent the majority of the ride clutching on for dear life while also trying to convince myself that I didn't need to pee because the bathroom was a very treacherous leap from my seat. Once we got to the Similan Islands and I stepped onto solid ground (in other words, I literally hurled myself from the boat onto the sand), I forgot all about the ride.
This picture needs an explanation. The lady on the right is of a certain type of tourist who takes it upon herself to be photographed in a bikini while posing in rather salacious ways on and around the various boat decks/rocks/sand dunes/waves/beach swing sets of Thailand. This is a phenomenon that I've noted since getting here in August. If she was going to pose, I figured I'd snap a shot too. The man in the background is her boyfriend and he got vehemently macho when his gf needed help from Steve to cross the rocks. He walked over (while clutching onto the boulder) and literally puffed his chest out.
The day's trip included stops at five of the nine islands of which the Similan Islands consist. Two of them also involved short hikes through the jungle to less populated beaches. The snorkeling itself was unbelievable. As you can see from this picture, the clarity of the water was astounding and it greatly facilitated optimal fish stalking. Our guide informed us that we might see a sea turtle but not to get our hopes up because they don't like being followed so they usually swim away quickly. I was content with spending hours gazing at metallic rainbow fish (just like in the book) and swimming through schools of fish (it was the ultimate Nemo experience). But then I saw a group of people all swimming in one direction and I figured I would follow them. By the time I made it over (rough current + awesome fish = slow movement on my part), they were all shouting about seeing a sea turtle!!!!!!!!! Which I had missed. I was pretty upset because I've never seen one in the wild but then I saw Steve jet off in the opposite direction of the crowd. I decided to follow him and when I put my snorkel mask underwater I saw him swimming along the bottom of the ocean floor right next to the giant sea turtle.
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