We arrived in a town called Krabi & stayed one night there before we ventured to the first island we wanted to explore. Since we had a relaxing night in the small town, we were up at 7am ready to go Tuesday morning, only to be disappointed because nothing was open! Luckily we found a couple guys with a long-tail boat who offered to take us to Railay. We were kinda hesitant at first, but discovered that this is the common thing....long-tail boats are everywhere!
So we loaded up our things & arrived in Railay a mere 15-20 minutes later. This turned out to be our favorite island because it wasn't over-run with tourists. We stayed in an awesome bungalow for two nights, had a spectacular crystal-clear beach to swim in, and found a great bar with good music & a fire show.
The first mission was to go on an elephant trek. We went to another island about 20 minutes away for the day. We enjoyed the elephant ride, but wished we could have actually pet & fed them. After the elephants we were taken to what they called a "tiger temple," which turned out to be a Buddha temple with statues of tigers everywhere. We were lead to believe there would be real tigers, lol. They left us here for two hours & we were wondering why they left us here for so long when we had signed up for a 3-part package, including kayaking as the final activity. Turns out they forgot we signed up for that, which is why we had to so much time at the temple. However, they did give us a refund for the kayaking part, so we weren't too upset.
Back on Railay island, we decided to find the beach for an evening swim. Along the way we came across a group of monkeys hanging out on the a fence line. We took some pictures but didn't have any food to feed them. The beach turned out to be beautiful. The water was so clear & we made it in time to watch the sun set. Made for some great pictures! Look closely at the last picture for the monkey eating a coconut in the tree. Kinda hard to see unless you see it in full size, but it's my favorite!
After our swim we went to a place called "The Last Bar" where we saw an amazing fire show, as well as some good-looking Thai guys, haha :) We made a few friends and had a great time trading stories & listening to some acoustic cover songs that a couple of the guys were singing. Before we went out that night we had signed up for rock-climbing the following morning. Of course our night out led to a bit of a hangover the next morning, so we re-scheduled the rock-climbing for 2pm instead of 9am lol.
After nursing ourselves back to normal (aka sleeping in) we had some lunch then headed out for our rock-climbing adventure. Now I'm not sure why this happened, but when we got there, the instructor said that his boss told him to take us on the "advanced" route instead of the "beginner" route like we had signed up for. He promised us we wouldn't be doing advanced climbing, but we would be seeings some better views due to route we were taking. They didn't charge us extra, so we figured why not?!
This route turned out to be a walk across the island, a short trek through part of the jungle, a hike through a bat cave, rappelling down the outside wall of the cave, AND THEN a climb up the wall on the outside of the cave. Oh, not to mention we had to jungle trek back to the beach & then walk across the island again once we were finished, lol. The pics below are of the bats in the cave & the view outside from the top of the cave. Made it worth the hike!
The cave was great until we were sitting down relaxing and I looked up to see how close the bats were above our heads! My favorite part was rappelling down from the cave and then belaying for the instructor while he set up our course to climb. He kept repeating "my life, my life!" while I was belaying, which meant he was trusting me with his life, haha :) As for the actual climbing part, I kinda sucked to be honest! I blame it on being exhausted from everything else, but it is a bit more difficult to do than it looks. I've only climbed on the practice walls inside a building before, so trying to grip onto real rocks was way different! I made it about half-way up before my arms were shaking uncontrollably and I had to come back down. Then Jenna gave it a try and got just about as far as I did. We decided to ditch our dreams of ever becoming professional rock-climbers...sad day, haha!
After a tiresome day of attempting to climb, we headed back to the beach for another evening swim. This time we remembered food for the monkeys, but they seemed a bit greedy & we had to run away fast before they all started jumping off the fence for food. The funniest part was when one jumped off, stood in front of Jenna (who had the cookies) and put one hand on his hip and held out the other hand as if demanding a cookie, lol. We wished we would have had our cameras for that one!
We really wanted to go to the beach during the day, but we kept planning so many activities during the day that we never had time to sunbathe on the beach. We kept saying, "we'll lay out on the next island!" but sadly we never did. Oh well, we did much more exciting stuff!
That night we got manicures & pedicures since we gave up on being "tough girls" lol & then we went out for our last night in Railay. We were supposed to hang out with the rock-climbing instructors, but there was a mix-up on which bar we were supposed to go to so we ended up at "Last Bar" again & watched the fire show. Wasn't as cool as the first time because their best guy wasn't there, but was still an enjoyable night. The next morning we packed up for our ferry ride to the next island adventure...Ko Phi Phi!
XOXO,
Amanda
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