Português
English
We arrive in the city of Krabi and went straight to Ao Nang beach. A pleasant beach, full of hotels, bars and restaurants. The beach is crowded with boats that, frequently, offer to take you to an island or interesting beach. We strongly recommend the 4-island tour. It is one day in a long-tail boat island hopping (Poda Island, Chicken Island, Tup island and Phranang cave). The boat trip is slow, what makes it an enjoyable trip so one can calmly observe the nature, rocks, sea, and other boats… Everything, without having the idea of being in a hush to arrive somewhere.
The Krabi region of is well known by rock climbers and divers. It is surrounded by rocks for climbing and waters for diving. Here it is the famous Koh Phi Phi, the island where it was filmed the movie “The Beach” with Leonardo DiCaprio. We benefit from that going to the Phi Phi area for diving. We had been diving for 2 day (4 immersions) in a place called Maya Bay and Koh Bida Nok. The visibility was great and water the 28 or 29o Celsius, wonderful. We saw many kinds of fish, moray, anemone, turtle, and sea star. Shark, of this time, unfortunately not. The 2-hour trip to the dive site was very pleasant. The boat was comfortable and we could enjoy the journey to appreciate the beauty of the rocky islands in the region.
After 4 days in Ao Nang, we went back to Krabi to check out the town. Actually, there was not much to see. There was a pleasant atmosphere, but there was no sea as Ao Nang. So we decided to do the “James Bond Island Tour”. We went on a minibus to a pier in Phnag Nga province. There we took a boat to go the Koh Ping Gan passing through mangrove florets. The island disappointed us. It was so small, and the rock, Khao Tapoo or James Bond Island, even smaller. By the photos I had seen I thought it would be a lot bigger. It was like Mona Lisa in the Louvre Museum, a lot smaller than the expected. The small island got famous because there is was made a part of the James Bond movie “The Man with the Golden Gun”, from 1974. We stayed 30 minutes on the island, what it was fair enough since there was not much to see, only stands selling handcraft.
On our way back we stopped for lunch on Koh Panyee (Panyee Island), a floating fishing village. The inhabitants are the majority Muslims (more than 90% of Thai people are Buddhist) and, according to our guide, they came as refugees from Indonesia more than a century ago. After lunch we had time to walk around the village. We liked more Panyee than James Bond Island; it had character despite the tourism.
Going back to Krabi we stopped to visit a temple in a cave, Wat Tham Suwan khuha. Inside there was a declining golden Buddha. By the cave’s entrance there was many monkey. It was fun to spend some time observing them. Our last stop was the Thanboke Khoranee National Park, we were tired and there was still two hours to get to Krabi. Our trip was coming to an end and we decided “no more tours”, from now on it was time to relax a bit.
The dives
Sponsors:
[…] Krabi – Ao Nang – Phang Nga […]