Krabi Part 2: Tiger Cave Temple and Railay

On a very humid day in Krabi, we decided that what we'd really like to do that day is climb a mountain during the hottest part of the day. Good choices.

So we headed 10 km outside of Krabi to the foot of Khao Phanom Bencha Mountain, where you're given fair warning by this sign:

And this guy:

I'm sure I'm being borderline sacrilegious to suggest this, but there must be something happy in that bottle he's got tucked into his left elbow. Look at the guy. He's a hot mess, with his robe all falling off and his giant feather and his sassy hat.

Anyway, despite all my better judgement that urged me to head back to town and get a massage, we set off up the mountain. And after 300 stairs we were gasping and drenched in sweat. By stair 700 my legs were shaking, and when I looked down at this:

I got a bit dizzy.

So I wimped out. Can you blame me? Some of the "stairs" looked like this:

More ladder than stairs, really. 

So I took photos from where I was, which was pretty sweet in itself:

Or at least I thought so, but according to the internet the view from the top looks like this:

Humph. In any case, I took it slow back down the mountain to wander around the temple complex. I watched some young nuns polish a Buddha image:

monitored thieving monkeys:

checked out a Chinese style temple dedicated to the Goddess of Compassion:

 and chilled out by this mountain-waterfall-turned-fountain until my fitter friends finished their fun:

who upon reaching the bottom confessed that they would have blown chunks once they reached the top except that you really shouldn't vomit on a holy place.  We always tried to be as culturally sensitive as possible.

The next day we opted for a more sedentary activity: visiting Railay Island, and lounging on the beach there. We grabbed a long-tail boat and headed out on the river into the bay:

 I don't really have that much to say about Railay, except that it was absolutely, stunningly beautiful.

and that floating effortlessly under these cliffs, looking up at the streaky watercolors and feeling the drip of the water that continues to create these rock formations was pretty close to divine. 

And that was a much better use of our time.

I got a bit sunburned, because that's what I do. And then this random thing sticks out in my mind for some reason. When we got back to Krabi that night I put on something sleeveless to avoid irritating my shoulders before we went down the river to eat at the night market. We were sitting there eating noodles or something when an old woman walked past our table wearing an intricately wrapped traditional Thai outfit.  I happened to look up and catch her eye as she passed, so even though my hands were occupied I bowed my head to her as we were taught to do in our training course. And she made a tutting sound with her tongue and rested one cool hand on my burned shoulder as she passed by.

Mothers are the same everywhere.

Next: Chiang Mai!

Krabi , Part 1

Expect some concentrated posting in the next week or so as I've suddenly realized that I’m about to depart on some serious travels without a laptop and that I've done a dismal job of catching this blog up even to the present. I've always worked better with a deadline anyway…

So, back to October (yikes): after our training in Phuket, we were told that we had less than a week before we had to be in Bangkok for two other training sessions.  Four days later we were told that the first training session was cancelled, so we ended up having much more time than we expected. At that point we lit out for Chiang Mai, which is where we wanted to be in the first place. But while we were under the impression that we only had five or six days to work with, some girlfriends and I went to Krabi, a town on the Andaman coast which is just a long-tail boat ride away from the most beautiful beaches in the country.

First, introductions! Below are my wonderful travel buddies. From left to right: Anne, Leah, Creepy Dude (not a travel buddy- more on him later), Roisin, and Kaleo. Anne and Leah are from small mountain towns in North Carolina and are hilarious and fantastic and are taking Vietnam or maybe Cambodia by storm as I type this. Roisin the redhead showed up on this blog before; she's from Donnegal, Ireland, and is sporting a bit of a black eye in this photo (always make sure your motorbike driver is sober, kids). Kaleo is from Hawaii and is rocking some ridiculously awesome braids she had done in Phuket, which lasted three weeks before we took them out in the middle of orientation in Bangkok and she accepted her certification looking like she had just been electrocuted. They're fantastic, and I miss them like crazy even though I saw all of them except Roisin two weeks ago. Great girls. 

Beautiful girls and slightly creepy dude

In Krabi we stayed in an incredibly wonderful, modern, streamlined hostel called Pak Up. 

Pak Up

Pak Up

 It was the first hostel I ever stayed at, and I’m afraid it’s ruined me for others.

It was sparkling clean, air-conditioned, and had laundry facilities. It was lovely. 

On our first evening there we wandered down to the river (Krabi is at the mouth of the Krabi river where it empties into Phangnga Bay) and were promptly coerced into taking a long-tail boat ride by this guy, who was very charming before we got on the boat and then pretty rude once we were on it:

Smirk.

Back to the adventures! Our dude showed us some interesting caves along the river in limestone formations like this one:

Truly beautiful. 

I didn't get such good photos seeing as the caves were quite dim, as caves tend to be.

But they were cool: some of them bore signs of very early habitation in the way of bones and cave paintings, which are now in a museum somewhere and have been reproduced in the campiest way possible. 

The caves also sheltered Japanese soldiers when Japan occupied Thailand at the beginning of the Second World War. The same artist in charge of reproducing the skeletal remains and wall paintings of early inhabitants also erected freaky statues of Japanese soldiers, so that when you're wandering around you'll occasionally stumble upon a waxy, dead-eyed manikin in the gloom. For unfathomable reasons, I didn't take any photos. 

We then headed downriver. Just being on the water at dusk was really lovely. 

A home on the water

It was restful and pleasant until our peevish friend steered us into a gloomy, thick mangrove swamp, which made me pretty nervous as I suddenly realized that absolutely no one knew where we were.

Good feelings gone. 

 Happily we emerged from the mangrove without encountering any human traffickers to a lovely floating fishing village.

From there we watched the sun sink before being delivered back to Krabi. 

It made for a pretty good first evening, slightly jerky guy notwithstanding.

Next: I don't climb a mountain.

Cheap Eats, Post #1

So I only said that writing short posts rather than novellas might help me get more done. There was absolutely no guarantee there. So while I'm starting things that I don't complete in a timely manner, let's start a new series! Here's the first of what I'm sure will be many, many posts (possibly hundreds!) on meals bought for under, oh I don't know, $2 American. 

Noodle soup with fishballs! Actually really, really good. Garlicky and savory and delicious. 

35 Thai Baht, which comes out to $1.14. Chopsticks level required: intermediate to advanced. The noodles are slippery. 

And even though in future these posts will probably just be one or two photos, here are some bonus photos of the lunches available for sale in my school's canteen. To be honest I don't really remember the pricing, so I've estimated. I definitely never spent more than 50 Baht, though. 

50 Thai Baht, $1.63.Congress, take note: frozen pizza is not a vegetable. Vegetables are vegetables.  

The lunch pictured above was my favorite: stir fried vegetables and chicken over rice with a wedge of omelet and a chicken tender. Finish with pineapple and green mango for dessert.  

But there were other options, like noodle soup with sliced pork:

40 Thai Baht, $1.31. Broth is added when you buy it so it doesn't get cold. 

Unlike in the States, the kids have a lot of options (although it's admittedly mostly some variation on meat and/ or vegetables over rice and/ or noodles). The canteen is lined with about 15 stations like the one pictured below.

For some of us, though, some options were more enticing than others. 

Not big on mollusks for lunch. Pretty shells, though. 

It has been brought to my attention...

...that I might get more done on this blog if I didn't insist on writing novellas for each post. So here is the first of hopefully many short posts, which will probably consist of no more than a photo or two and a pithy remark.

Here's something else I saw at the Big Buddha:

What does that sign at the bottom say?

Come on, people.  

I'm sure it doesn't escape anyone that this sign is only in English.
Sigh.

Let's Leave Phuket

 …but first we have to do a little teaching and make a trip to the Big Buddha.

We visited a few schools for the teaching practice required by our certification program. It was a bit of a joke, because we only taught for less than 30 minutes a day to a class of between 6 and 20 kids.  I currently teach about 5 hours a day to classes of at least 50 students, and use almost none of what I was taught in certification.

But never mind! The kids were adorable. We taught for the first three days in a Muslim school on the untouristy side of Phuket.

Roisin giving Thai children a Donegal accent

How cute are they??

  It was a lot of fun, and quite cool for a change because it rained the whole time. The school was small and very old, and surrounded by jungle.

Pouring. 

On the Thursday of that week we went to a sort of juvenile detention center, which I have no photos of because cameras were forbidden. The teens we met there weren’t so much hardened criminals as they were kids driven to minor crimes by desperate circumstances. They had next to no English, and seemed discouraged by our lesson since we had been told to prepare for their age level (older teenagers) rather than their ability. They were just sad high school kids, and even though the place wasn't horribly jail-like, they definitely wanted to go home.The whole visit was pretty distressing. 

On Friday, we went to the Football Youth Home.

 The Football Youth Home was founded and financed by one Henrik Lorenz, a German businessman and long-time footballer who settled in Hong Kong for 40 years and who died in 2006. 

Good guy. 

Anyway, he apparently came to Thailand, presumably saw kids playing soccer and kids in bad situations, and decided to do something.

 Here’s the website, in case anyone wants to visit or volunteer or donate: http://home.exetel.com.au/katjahouse/Thailand_html/index.html

These kids had incredible English from travelling all over the place playing soccer. 

There was also a class of little kids upstairs.

And we got a tour of the building, which had dorm rooms where each boy had his medals and belongings.

...is it creepy that I took a photo of a little boy's bed? It wasn't until I wrote this caption. 

It was a nice place, run by kind people. After we finished teaching the boys presented us with roses made from palm leaves. Cute.

Sometime in the mix of all this, we made a trip to the Big Buddha, which is exactly what it sounds like. Remember we saw it in the wake of the boat in the first post of any substance on this blog?

As promised, it’s big.

...although none of my photos provide any context for how big. Just take my word for it. 

Before you climb up to see it up close, you pass through a sort of hall with informative (I assume, they're in Thai) displays on the building of the Buddha:

requests to donate and to not feed the monkeys:

Happy animals (you'll always find happy animals in sacred places here):

Mai Pen Rai. 

And monks, blessing visitors:

I got blessed, which involved a monk sprinkling me with water, smacking me on the head with a water soaked broom-type thing, and tying a lanyard around my wrist, all the time muttering in Thai.

Climbing up the steps to the Big Buddha, we found that much of it actually wasn’t finished yet.

You can buy a marble tablet, scrawl something personal on it, and they’ll eventually use it in constructing the exterior of the Buddha. Right now the tiles are just piled up, waiting to be cemented on there, but it’s a sweet statement about the universal and internal nature of the Buddha spirit. Or something.

The views were the real attraction, even though it was overcast. Very cool.

Next! We leave Phuket for Krabi, where we take a long-tailed boat ride with a questionable character and climb 1,237 steps to the top of a mountain. Some of us do, anyway.