Massages and Karsts

What a difference a few days makes. From the high Himalaya to the beach at Railay, Thailand.

We had a one hour flight from Bangkok to Krabi, but because we were flying Air Asia, we were, of course, late. Turns out that Air Asia is better known around these parts as Air DeLAYSya, as they are always late. In fact, on the departure screen at the Bangkok airport it wasn't hard to notice that about nine out of ten Air Asia flights were delayed. The interesting part is that they were all delayed about 1 hour and 20 minutes.

Be that as it may, we arrived in Krabi and were met by our hotel's driver, who took us in a van about 30 minutes to a boat. This is one of those little outboard jobs that you see all over the place and it took us on a 20 minute beautiful ride over to Railay East beach. Railay is a beautiful place and in fact Lonely Planet calls the West beach the most beautiful in all of Thailand. What makes it so wonderful as there are no roads here, you have to get here by boat, so there are no cars or roads, only little paths from beach to beach (four beaches in all). There are also no dogs, but a lot of cats. Not sure about the reason for that.

But there are a lot of locals giving Thai massages and that may be the entire reason that Amy wanted to come to Thailand. Well, one of two reasons, actually, the other reason being that Thailand has one of the world's greatest cuisines.

So here you are, laying down on some of the softest, finest, whitest sand on the planet, with a very nice Thai man or woman massaging you from foot to head. The foot massage alone takes 1/2 hour, but personally, they could go on for days as far as I'm concerned. I opted not to have a massage the first day, but to swim in the water, which was almost bathtub temperature. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm, that was nice. And here you are, floating on your back, and you are looking up at some of the most amazing geologic formations anywhere. Here they have what are called karsts (I only know this because before Amy was a medical student she studied geology for a bit and happened to know this word). A karst is a big tall knob coming out of the earth, these are limestone, and are mostly about 500 feet tall. They are a draw to rock climbers from all over the world. And one of the most amazing things about them is that they have these very long and huge stalactites hanging down from them, some of them well over 100 feet long. I've only seen stalactites in caves, but these are all over the place here.

Our hotel, The Sand Sea Resort, is on Hat Railay West and it has several bungalows in a nice garden setting. There are a few other hotels on this beach, maybe three or four. Most hotels are on the east side and the beach there really sucks, so most folks come over to the west beach to swim. But this was low season, so there weren't all that many people. The food at the hotel was okay, but the second night we went a few doors down to another restaurant and had one of the most amazing meals of my life. We started with mien kam, a salad that consists of some kind of leaf with about seven different ingredients deposited on it, then you eat it like a taco. Things like chillies, dried shrimp, lime, nuts and so on. Then we had haw moek, which was like a Thai lau lau, seafoods curry coconut and veggies wrapped up in another kind of leaf and steamed. The bugger was SPICY! We followed this up with a whole red snapper, deep fried and covered with a spicy red curry sauce. This food was SOOOO spicy, but with the right balance of spice and other flavors, it wasn't all that bad, except that I had to eat about 5 bowls of rice and three large beers to cool my mouth down. Then we made an amazing discovery. It just so happens that a really good margarita will cool down your mouth from spicy food faster then beer, water or rice. So we had two of those. These were especially good margaritas, I think because they were made from kafer limes. Dessert was Bud's Ice Cream (from San Francisco, no less) and a pumpkin custard. Unreal.

The other great beach here is Hat ?? Phra naeng. There is only one hotel here the Rayavadee and it costs $1500/night, believe it or not. But you can walk right around the hotel to the lovelyl beach. It also has these karsts on either end and is just lovely white sand with bathtub water. In the day we spent here, Amy had five massages and I had two. The first one I had was an oil massage and it was quite nice. The combination of oil and a micro layer of the world's finest sand will take a layer or two of skin off you, but that feels nice. These Thai masseuses are true artists. They know the right spots and justs where to go. It is the ultimate in self indulgent, hedonistic pleasure, but what are vacations for? A few times he got just a little to close to Mr. Johnson, but what the heck. It was a great massage, right up there with my ultimate massage at the Pondok Sari in Pemuteran, Bali.

There was also some good food on the beach, including spring rolls and huge chicken legs. And all the Singha you could drink.

The last evening there we saw one of the most beautiful sunsets I've ever seen. Wow!

Back in Bangkok, we read about some outdoor fish restaurants in Chinatown, so we headed down on the ferry and walked for about an hour until we found them. There are several restaurants on the street, under awnings, that serve some of the weirdest looking seafood you've ever seen. All kinds of sea creatures are here. We stopped at two places and had scallops cooked in their shell (with the addition of a little piece of pork sausage, so some reason), a noodle dish with giant prawns, a plate of giant grilled prawns, and some sea clams cooked in a chili sauce. Ohmygawd. Between this meal and the one the night before, I've never been so happy with food.

After dinner we went back to the crazy street of Khao San to see all the tourist shops, got our last foot massage, and were in bed by 10pm, as we had to be at the airport by 5am for our flight. The flight home was uneventful, except that I left my most treasured souvenir of our trip, a gorgeous Bhutanese tangka of the Wheel of Life in the overhead bin on our ANA flight from Bangkok to Tokyo. But great ol' ANA found the thangkha and are sending it to San Francisco tomorrow.