After 2 days in Bangkok seeing gilded palaces and temples, waiting for our Vietnamese visas to process and attempting to avoid the hordes of touts on Khao San Rd where we mistakenly spent a night, it was time to leave the big city.
We left the heavy backpack filled with climbing gear with Mark’s friend [...]
Entries from January 2010
January 31, 2010
Slow train to Aranyaprathet
January 31, 2010
Like so much chattle & freedom isn’t free (but it’s cheap and has good snorkelling)
We made it to Ko Tao on the night ‘ferry’. Sort of like a Chinatown bus the cargo boats to the gulf islands load cargo and people onto the triple decks. Thankfully it was only French, German and Danish farang backpackers like us that we slept next to and not chickens or goats on the [...]
January 22, 2010
Cricket and other creepy crawlies
We left Tonsai today for Krabi Town and air con. Yesterday was so hot that even the Thai ladies with the food stands at the south end of Tonsai beach were complaining. We brought something with us though, a large scary spider who hitched a ride in Mark’s backpack. We thought we had [...]
January 22, 2010
Mai pen rai e.g. ‘No shirt, no shoes, no problem’
We had a nice long post introducing Thailand and the climbing here at Tonsai and the Phra Nang peninsula but then our Wordpress app decided to eat it so we’re trying again.
Traveling to Tonsai Beach from Malaysian Pulau Langkawi was about as epic as the sixteen hour trans-Artic flight we took from EWR > [...]
January 18, 2010
Arguments against rolling suitcases while traveling in Thailand
Although technically on the Phra Nang peninsula, Tonsai and Railey beaches are in effect islands, cut off from the mainland by the huge limestone karst formations that make this such a good place for climbing. Electricity is powered by generators and food and drink are twice as expensive (though that’s still cheap by western [...]
January 11, 2010
Cruising geopark Langkawi
We may be putting up a number of posts at once; we’re writing them as we go but our wireless access for actually uploading is sporadic. Some hostels have had it; the public buses on Penang had it; our last post went up from the KFC in Kuah, the main ferry port on Langkawi. [...]
January 9, 2010
Sugar and spice and everything nice
Malaysians love their sugar and their condensed milk. Sometimes the results are delicious, as with cendol, the improbably good concoction of shaved ice, red bean, coconut, strange gelatinous noodles and of course condensed milk. Other times less so, like when you order a carrot juice and it comes out as carrot flavored condensed milk. [...]
January 8, 2010
Jungle cool but the sun burns so
Yesterday we took the local 101 bus up the coast of Penang this morning to the national park on the island’s northern peninsula. The temperatures were pleasant in the morning and walking on the thick wet jungle track seemed to keep the temps down. It was about 4km to the aptly named monkey beach where [...]
