Dear Reader, I last left you with me whining about the state of the food at the Great View Resort. It wasn’t helped by the overly enthusiastic wait staff who seemed a little overly fond of calling out my name and stood in a corner secretly taking photos of us. EEK! That aside, the resort’s service was decent, they dealt with numerous calls to the front desk with much patience…requests for a travel adaptor (which they didn’t have), a wine opener (we each carried a bag of alcohol from duty free and the customs guy asked if we drank), forks, and finally, a new door knob. Friend, who is a girl, managed to pull the door knob out of the door frame, to much incredulity and laughter from the rest of us. Thankfully, they had someone still at the resort to help us put back the door knob.

We had gotten two rooms at the resort and strangely enough, while both rooms were next to each other, one room had a lot of visits by creepy crawlies (same room with the faulty door knob) – there were millipedes, multiple flying insects and lots of mosquitoes, one of us actually received 16 mosquito bites in one night! The other room, mine, thankfully was free of much issues :p The tip which you should take from this paragraph is to be conscientious with insect repellent and to not forget about burning mosquito-repelling coils in the rooms.

The next morning dawned a little dreary but the sky soon cleared up after we had breakfast, which was decent enough, a small selection of food, but what they had was delicious enough. Interestingly, the phad thai served at breakfast tasted better than what we had for dinner. After breakfast, we made our way to the main part of Railay East, which was a 10-minutes walk, from there, we made our way to Railay West, where the pretty part of the island was. Railay East is pretty much a mangrove and thus no good for swimming, but that’s where the more affordable accommodations are found. However, getting to Railay West is a matter of a 5-minute walk. The beach on Railay West is really pretty and is a good place to chill. Just behind the beach, you’ll find Walking Street, where there is a restaurant and a ice cream and waffles place. Further in, you’ll find some shops that sell souvenirs, clothing, bikinis, snacks and a massage parlour. Between this massage place and the massage place at Last Bar on Railay East, the one at Last Bar is better.

To be honest, of all the places that we ate at, I liked the food at the restaurant at Walking Street the best (at least in terms of Thai food). Crispy and well-marinated fried chicken, well-fried pieces of crab cakes with nice chunks of crab and tasty and spicy somtam (green papaya salad). There is a bar that serves a good selection of drinks and even a reading corner that has a whole of books should you need something to read to while away the time. It was a good thing that I liked that place so much, because we were stranded there for an afternoon while the rain poured down, again.

On the third day, we made our way to Phranang Beach, which claims to be the most beautiful beach in Thailand. It looked like it was quite a long walk to the beach from our resort, so we decided to hire a long tail in the main part of Railay East. After bargaining down the price from 500 baht to 300 baht, we got into the water, fumbling through sucking mud (walking in a mangrove swamp) and onto the long tail, less than 10-minutes later, we jumped into the water again, amidst strong waves that made us weave around like drunks on the boat and caused us to have a splinter or two as we tried desperately to grab onto the sides of the boat.

Phranang Beach. It is pretty, the waves are calmer as compared to the beach on Railay West, but I cannot in good conscience say it’s the best beach in Thailand. The sand on the beach is lovely and soft, but as you get into the water, there are tons of pebbles which hurt the feet and there are lots of debris in the water. Maybe it was the wrong season to be there, our loss. It was, however, enjoyable and the scenery was really nice and we were glad to be able to spend a whole day there soaking up the sun and jumping into the water when it got too hot.

After baking in the sun for pretty much the whole day, we figured that we didn’t want to risk another ride in a longboat back to Railay East, so we decided to walk. Were we glad we did, we walked past lots of amazing rock formations caused by erosion over the years and there was even a place where there was a rope hanging down for people to climb. During the walk, we quickly came to the realisation that the walk from Phranang Beach to Railay East didn’t take as much time as we thought; we probably took about the same time to walk as we did on the boat -_-

On the morning that we were to leave, the skies opened up again. So there we were, four girls lugging our luggage in the pouring rain, getting absolutely drenched as we made our way to the resort pier. As the long boat made its way to the mainland, we froze our butts off while being lashed by wind and rain. Then, upon reaching the mainland, we had to walk another 10-minutes in the rain to where our appointed cab was. It is worth noting that depending on weather conditions, you may not alight where you were picked up at the Ao Nam Mao pier.

So there ends the story of our rather eventful trip to Krabi. I doubt I’d be back there anytime soon.