Another beautiful day (sunny, warm, slightly breezy) and another delicious breakfast, then at 9:00, right on time, our 5 motor scooters were delivered out front by Santa Clause who goes by the name of Mr. Moo in Thailand (just kidding, that was the name of the guy we rented the scooters from. He rented boats, too). After some brief instruction on their operation, and handing over 4500 baht (about $125 give or take) we had 5 scooters for the next 5 days! Only about $5 per scooter per day. Really? How could we not? No special licenses needed, no forms to sign, just some cash and a handshake and our promise to leave them at the hotel by 6:00 pm on the evening of the 29th with the keys at reception.
The handshake was a rarity. Owen had mentioned that he'd read somewhere that it's impolite to touch other people (I guess masseuse's are exempt) so that explains why we experienced lots of little bows with the hands held together in the praying fashion when greeting or concluding business. Mr. Moo must have been accustomed to foreigners.
Motorbikes (125 cc scooters) put everything in a whole new light. Suddenly we had a lot more range to our explorations and the fact that we'd rented them for the remainder of our time gave us a great sense of flexibility and independence in our planning. We could pretty much do anything we wanted whenever we liked, and that's what we did! Merry Christmas!
To start with we decided to scoot on down to Dolphin Bay and in particular the Dolphin Bay resort Manu had told us about the day before with the intention of possibly renting the stand up paddleboards and paddling out to Monkey Island. On the way we wanted to stop at the same headlands where we'd hiked and swum before and climb to the top of the hill which we'd missed because we hadn't seen the trail but we spotted it on the way back.
On the way up the hill Owen and Max found a cave (of course) which they proceeded to explore (of course). The geology of the hills there is limestone (I eventually found that out after thinking it was volcanic) and the parts of that which dissolved left lots of fissures and holes and caves. You can see one example from the beach in one of the pictures I posted in the previous episode. In this case we eventually heard the boys' voices coming from further up the hill and after we climbed up there we could look down and see where they'd gotten to.
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| Owen at the bottom of a cave. He didn't get there from where the picture was taken, but rather he came into this area from another opening which led off to the side and came out further down the hill. |
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| Me looking down at Owen in the cave. Note I have chosen better footwear for hiking today. |
Eventually we reached the official viewpoint at the top of the hill:
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| Again looking north along the beach, similar to another picture from yesterday but probably about twice as high up this time. Our hotel is around the curve of the beach at the top of the picture. I don't know if I've mentioned the water yet but it was very clean, nice sandy bottom except near the headlands like the one we're standing on here where there were some rocks, and super warm! Like a good day at lake Michigan only even warmer! Nice waves, too, starting medium and getting larger as the week progressed. |
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| Christmas morning in Pranburi, Thailand! Does it get any better than this? |
This viewpoint was slightly unsatisfying as it clearly wasn't the actual peak of the hill and only gave us a view to the north. We had heard that from the top you could also see Dolphin Bay to the south. So while everyone else headed on down Owen and I started bushwacking (and cactus-whacking) further up. Eventually, though we didn't actually get a view to the south because of the vegetation, we found a rock outcropping with some flags planted on it and decided to call that the peak. Owen of course insisted on climbing it.
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| The limestone was quite sharp and ridden with pock-marks and sink holes and caves, as has been discussed. This made for good hand and foot holds but was very abrasive and sharp on the hands. |
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| Owen on the 'summit'. |
When we got down again we found Eddie and Darcy enjoying a sit-down and a morning beverage at a little spot near where we'd parked our scooters. Max was off shopping for souvenirs.
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| A nice place to rest and wait for everyone to reconvene. |
Once we were all back together again we headed off and followed the road south around the headland outcropping we'd just been climbing and finally got a view of Dolphin Bay, which was very cool looking as you can sort of see below with the mountains rising out of the haze at the far south end.
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| First sighting of Dolphin Bay |
On the way around the hill we'd passed yet another outrageous temple which, later in the week, when we'd passed it several times without stopping, taking pictures, or hardly even giving it a glance made me chuckle. It was like "Oh yeah, another amazing temple. Ho hum!" I still don't have a picture of it.
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| There was a little fishing fleet sheltered in the lee of the headlands (which you can see on the left side of the picture). The wind was from the north west so this spot was out of the wind. I think the boats mostly went out at night and we could see their green lights at various distances and locations on the water. Eddie said he thought green lights meant they were fishing for squid, which makes sense because there was sure a lot of squid around, drying in racks by the side of the road, on the menus, and in our bellies. |
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| Eddie during one of our occasional stops to check the map. This is about half way down Dolphin Bay and you can see the headlands I've been talking about jutting out into the water in the distance. That's what we'd just been climbing and where we'd hiked around to a secluded cove the day before. |
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| Eventually the coastal road we'd been following hit a dead end at yet another headland hill where a river flowed out into the bay. We hadn't noticed this on the map at first. There are some more fishing boats in the river. We had to back-track a little bit north here so we could cut inland and get around this obstruction, then back out to the coast to continue down the bay. |
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| Fishing boats on a river. |
Eventually we passed by our nominal destination (Dolphin Bay Resort) and decided to follow the road to its end. When we got there we checked out the beach and took another album-cover worthy shot. Believe it or not the name of this beach (according to our map) was "Young Girl's Breast" and the beach a little further south, which was not accessible by road, was Brassiere Beach.
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| A couple islands off Young Girl's Breast beach. The one in back (furthest to the left) is Monkey Island. |
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| There wasn't much for us at Young Girl's... plus there was some sort of production going on there (maybe a wedding, or music video shoot?) because there was lots of audio-video equipment and tents set up on the beach and we felt a little out of place and there wasn't a restaurant or bar so we decided to head back up north to the major commercial stretch of Dolphin Bay and look for something to eat. We had passed one place we'd noticed on the way down where patrons were sitting on the beach and getting served from the restaurant which was across the road and we thought that was pretty cool so we were looking for that place. |
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| It turned out that place was Dolphin Bay Resort (or at least that was one of the places) so we stopped there with a primary mission of resting and snacking and cocktails and just scoping out the scene in general. We got a nice little shaded beachfront table. |
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| Monkey Island as seen from Dolphin Bay Resort. You can stand-up paddleboard there and visit the monkeys? Really? Maybe you but we all decided that was a lot of open water with a pretty stiff breeze coming down the beach and some pretty large waves and the monkeys would just have to get by without us. I ordered an absinthe sour which was the drink special from the night before (the waiter told me) but since he'd forgotten to take down the sign he got one (then two) for me anyway. |
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| While we were waiting for our food and drinks to arrive the boys hit the books. I thought this was so amazing I had to take a picture of it. |
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| So gratifying to see them reading! Anytime, anywhere! They are both reading books I had gotten them for xmas and had Amazon ship to Darcy's house. Happily they'd received them in time to bring them on the plane. Max was reading "The White Spider" about the doomed Tony Kurtz expedition to climb the Eiger (dramatized in The Beckoning Silence, available on YouTube) and Owen was reading one about Cryptography (maybe it's just called "Code"?) written by the guy (Simon Something?) who'd done the YouTube videos about math content in The Simpsons, which had led me to stumble upon it. |
There were craft available for rent from Dolphin Bay (a small Hobie-cat sailboat, a couple stand-up paddleboards as advertised, and a single and a double kayak) but I didn't think to pursue the Hobie until we saw it being set up on the beach for someone else. Otherwise we would have liked to have taken that out. We played a tiny bit of Frisbee (okay, contrary to my earlier assertion that we only had the Frisbee out on one occasion in Thailand I now remember we had about 4 total throws here), took a swim, and the wind had completely died so at that point we were glad we weren't on the Hobie because we could see them still about a half kilometer downwind (what was left of it) and it would have taken them forever to get back. We decided to head back north toward our neck of the woods ourselves.
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| A late afternoon shot at approximately the same place we'd taken a similar shot earlier in the morning, heading north along Dolphin Bay on our way back to the hotel. We're almost to the Khao Ka Lok headlands (our local landmark) at this point. |
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| The same fishing fleet in the lee of Khao Ka Lok as we'd seen in the morning. Different lighting though! |
And then we were "home". We ate at the hotel restaurant for the second night in a row and the final time. I had the superb grilled salt-encrusted snapper again but overall we decided, I think, that the other offerings weren't as great and we wanted to see some different places in the future. At least that's how it worked out.
Thus ended our second day at the beach and our first day with motor scooters! A quick note about driving the motor scooters: I was kind of concerned for our safety since in Thailand they drive on the right (as opposed to left, as we're accustomed) side of the road. And anyone who has visited a country like that knows how easy it is to step out into the road looking to the left (expecting traffic in the near lane to be coming from that direction) and suddenly hear a horn honking and feel the whoosh of a car narrowly missing you as it speeds past from the right. I'd had that experience many years ago in England and this was my first driving experience in any foreign country, much less one that drives on the left, and I was concerned that one or more of us would have an accident. Luckily we didn't but we had plenty of close calls, for exactly the reasons I described. Or sometimes we were slowing down to make a right into a business on the right side of the road and if you didn't check behind you you'd find yourself turning right into another passing scooter or car (because it's sort of just a free-for-all on the roads). And even when there wasn't an actual problem involved it still nearly stopped my heart each time I'd be cruising around a left-hand bend in the road and suddenly see a vehicle approaching me in the right lane (where it should be) but institutionally I'd think "Oh No! They're in my lane! I'm going to have a head-on crash!" It sure felt good to be able to twist that grip and just speed along the road enjoying the breeze though! Thank goodness we didn't have any actual accidents.
