Wow, what a great day on Koh Lanta yesterday! I feel like I keep saying “wow” when describing our adventures here in Thailand, and I don’t want to dilute it, but WOW! Koh Lanta is just so awesome! I tried to write this up last night but kept nodding off in my chair. Not surprising as I think I walked about 7.5km yesterday.
Our breakfast is delivered daily to the villa and our first spread was super tasty: fresh squeezed orange and pineapple juices, congee with chicken, green onions and ginger, soft boiled eggs, two kinds of curry (beef and pork), rice, fish sauce with a generous amount of red chilies and garlic, three kinds of black sticky rice (banana, coconut and custard) and some kind of gelatinous rice/coconut/purple fruit (?) yumminess. We could opt for a western/American breakfast, but why would we when the Thai food is so delicious?!
After breakfast, we had a dip in the pool. I keep looking around thinking someone is going to walk up and sit in one of the loungers, but nope, this pool is all ours!
I wanted to stock up on some cheap and refreshing cans of Thai beer so we headed out to the Tesco Lotus Express store in Saladan. Google Maps plotted out a walking route that was a mere 950 meters and traversed a few small sois with a left, right and another left turn. It looked simple enough but something was amiss. The road that we were supposed to turn right onto didn’t exist. What might have been a through way at one time was now completely overgrown like a wild jungle. I doubt the Google car has actually been here. We ditched Google and followed the scooters and tuk-tuks until we reached the main road and spotted the Tesco.
I’m mildly obsessed with the interesting variety of Thai fast food snacks and Tesco didn’t disappoint!
We were curious and tried to find the other side of the Google route to return but the narrow gravel road seemed to turn into someone’s driveway, complete with a couple of barking dogs that charged out. We again ditched Google and returned the way we came but with a slight detour on a road that ran parallel to the beautiful Andaman Sea. The colour of the water was just stunning.
Koh Lanta is a mix of Buddhist, Muslim and Sea Gypsy (Chao Ley, “people of the sea”) populations, providing an interesting blend of cultures and culinary traditions. On our way back to the villa, we could hear the midday Muslim prayers in the distance and paused briefly to listen.
Our excursion had taken longer than expected and with temperatures of 30+C, we were ready to hit Klong Dao beach! I packed my dry bag, grabbed a cold Leo beer and started making my way south through the waves, in thigh high water. The water temperature is like that of a warm bath. I walked all the way to the south end of the beach (about 3.3km) where the water gets deeper closer to the beach and it’s rockier. (At our north end of the beach, it stays shallow for a long way out and there are no rocks.) There were many longtail boats parked off the south end of the beach so I suspect that’s a good place to hire one.
Most of the tourists here seem to be European. I’ve heard a lot of German spoken. They have a shorter distance to travel to get here so it’s not surprising. But as I was taking photos on the beach, I heard some English spoken with what sounded like a Canadian accent. “Canada?” “Yes, Edmonton!” Carol and Craig were visiting Koh Lanta on a tour package that also included Vietnam and Cambodia and I took the opportunity to ask them some questions about these countries as we’d like to visit them too. We bid adieu and I stopped in at the Reggae Bar to get a cold Chang beer for my walk back north on Klong Dao beach. It seems that wherever you are in the world, if there’s a beach, there will be a friendly reggae bar!
Whenever I walk on a beach, I try to pick up some garbage. In some places I’ve traveled to–lookin’ at you Mexico–this can be a futile exercise because there’s just so much garbage. But Klong Dao was nearly spotless. I found a few plastic bottles filled with sand that someone else had picked up and left in a good spot to be taken to a garbage, and a piece of rope and a plastic tobacco package which I picked up for disposal. That was it!
When I got back to the north end of the beach, I dropped my dry bag, waded way out into the water and jumped in. My first swim in the Andaman Sea!
For dinner, we went to a small Thai family restaurant just a few minutes up the beach. I really liked the chill vibe there: comfortable bamboo furniture (more comfortable than the resort restaurant’s chairs), reggae music and super cool staff who alternated between serving food and playing soccer on the beach. Chef was Mamma and she came out to chat with us about the seafood stir fry we’d ordered. We also had shrimp cakes and mango salad which was almost exactly the same as Som Tam but with mango and cashews instead of papaya and peanuts. Super fresh, delicious and spicy!! Mai pet, mai aroi! (“If it’s not spicy, it’s not delicious!” A little joke that I learned from my unofficial YouTube Thai tutor, Mickey Stotch. It always gets a laugh out of the Thai folks.)
Also on the menu, some more of these amazing Koh Lanta sunsets!
Today has been a lazy day so far. We devoured another amazing Thai breakfast, enjoyed some poolside hang out time and now, just before noon, a tropical rain has started to fall. I think I might venture down the beach this afternoon and seek out a massage.