Beach Pretty

We flew from Siem Reap to Bangkok, from Bangkok to Krabi, rented a car, and drove in the general direction of Ao Nang, past the upscale beach at Kloung Mung (sp?) about a dozen miles from Ao nang and then another few miles to the even more upscale beach at Tubkaak. Beautiful coastline is easy to come by in Krabi. Beautiful beaches are a bit harder to find. At Tubkaak Beach, four hotels are huddled together with a fifth under construction. Two of the hotels, the one we stayed at (the Amari Vogue) and another (The Tubkaak) have been battling it out for the top rank on Trip Advisor for all of Krabi province.
The hotel we stayed in had a bit of a strange layout. Because beach front is hard to come by, the hotel works backward from the beach, up a hill, stretching back roughly 200 yards (and 102 steps from beach to lobby), with rooms flanking grounds that are only about 20 yards wide and carefully terraced. It’s as odd as it sounds but somehow it works and the hotel has managed to stick in no less than five pools, most with built in Jacuzzis or elephant shaped fountains or something else to distinguish them, all ending at a magnificent beach, virtually empty (all the hotels are small), with karsts looming in the background. A 15 minute longtail boat trip took us to uninhabited islands in the middle of the bay. (That’s where the white umbrella is and where Naomi and I are swimming.) It’s the same sort of seascape as Halong bay in Viet Nam but with much warmer water and less junk floating around.
Tubkaak, with about 250 hotel rooms total, is not the standard destination in Krabi. The closest resort to the airport is Ao Nang. Although Ao Nang was much nicer than I expected (Amrita, are you out there?) with two nice beaches and a lot of mediocre restaurants, it’s as much of a jumping off point as a destination. Spectacular Raillay Beach, with huge, sheer cliffs is a ten minute longtail boat ride away. Tubkaak, Raillay and Ao Nang all face west, and beg for pictures of sunsets which are never as good in bytes as in person, even with a lot of Photo Shopping. Ko Phi Phi Don and Ko Phi Phi Ley, neighboring islands, are about 45 minutes away from Ao Nang by speedboat. Ko Phi Phi Ley (made famous by a mediocre Leonardo Di Caprio movie, called The Beach, about hippies gone bad) has no buildings and really is beautiful, although post-Leo, its most beautiful spot (Maya Bay) fills up with speed boats carrying visitors, first from Ao Nang, a little later from Phuket. Ko Phi Phi Don is almost equally as beautiful. It is also frequently held up as an example of development gone mad and what’s wrong with Thailand’s environmental policy more generally. What this amounts to is that there are a lot of people there (not a bad thing, no?), that the hotels and restaurants run on the cheap side, and that the whole place has a hippie/backpacker vibe. It’s not someplace I would want to stay at this stage of my life but I would have loved it 40 years ago. My loss.
So, I really don’t have much in the way of observations or thoughts. The coastline is as beautiful as anyplace I have seen. The beaches, at least the ones we went spent most of our time on, were clean. There’s decent snorkeling. And the water is warm.
We're home on Thursday. I'll post one more time when we get back.
Beach pretty.