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| Ao Nang Beach Peace |
Hat Yai Central Hotel provided me with 2 nights of comfortable stay for 520 baht a night. The hotel is tired but functional providing me with a clean, firm bed, air conditioning, tv, refrigerator, ensuite bathroom, free wi-fi in the lobby area, no breakfast (noodle and rice food outlets abound in the immediate vicinity) for this price.
A tuk tuk to the bus station is about 40 baht. Several tuk tuk’s are forever hovering at the entrance the Hat Yai Central Hotel.
Arrival at the Hat Yai bus station by 9.20am gave me several options on a bus to Krabi. I opted for the 9.50am departure and paid 169 baht for what was forecast to be a 4-5 hour coach ride to Krabi. The coach was clean, air conditioned and adequately roomy for my large size. Comfortably roomy for the Thai size.
I asked the young ticket master on the coach to ‘tell me when we were in Krabi and I should alight from the coach’ which he appeared to understand.
It worked out ok… he summoned me pretty much when I was thinking I needed to get off (a little like I always awake to wait for the alarm clock to sound). What followed was one of those akward ten minutes when you look for a way forward and nothing immediately appears. You subject yourself to a mixture of do-gooders and opportunists plus a few village idiots who just openly gawk with an open mouth and rotten crooked teeth. The village idiots are the only ones you can easily identify.
After listening to some alarming facts about how far away and inconvenient a trip to Ao Nang from Krabi was going to be I decided to follow my nose. I’d seen a couple of buses head down a nearby side road and noticed a bus station sign pointing that way also.
My luck was in… less than ten minutes walking brought me to the Krabi bus station and a regular service large tuk tuk took 60 baht from me for the onward road trip to Ao Nang.
I became part of the daily transport process as the tuk tuk netted the patronage of 6 well behaved and smartly uniformed school kids from outside a Krabi town school and deposited them one by one at various points along the well tarmacked road to Ao Nang.
I had been to Ao Nang before and as we came along the main drag adjacent to the beach my memories returned. I was the only passenger remaining and I waved the driver on up the hill away from the Ao Nang beach toward the bungalows that I remember being nicely presented and positioned in a garden setting when I visited a few years back.
There it was! I recognised the frontage from the road. A tap on the tuk tuk cab glass produced a ‘thank god’ like smile from the captain.
Adam’s Bungalows (25 Moo2 Ao Nang Beach, Krabi, Thailand. Tel: (+66) 0757 637 667, email: adambungalow@hotmail.com) had rooms and offered me discount on their book price. I paid 400 baht a night for the bungalow with clean firm bed, fan, ensuite cold water bathroom. My veranda looked out across their garden and one of the tall rocks that make up the Ao Nang geography looked over me from the distance.
I could relax again 🙂
Footnote: £1 = 50 baht.
Down The Road 