A Day in Ao Nang
Story: Wandee Rathanapan
One year after working and taking adventure in shivering days and nights in New Zealand, today is the first day I return to Ao Nang, a charming bay of the Andaman Sea. Here is filled with the enchanting beauty of the sea, scattering piles of rocks, stores, sea gypsies, and long-tailed boats. In the early day, Ao Nang was just a place for a change of air and where lonely fishermen villages were located. It now becomes the gate to Krabi that welcome a large number of tourists from around the world who flee from cold and hot weather to fulfill their holidays everyday. Beside its beauty, you can conveniently look for an accommodation and get there easily by using many kinds of transport such as boats, buses and aero planes. Ao Nang, therefore, is a place to fulfill everyone’s desire who wish to visit islands along Ao Nang bay with just a blink like One Stop Journey.
I come to Ao Nang this time purely with my heart and a little money in my pocket I get from selling a car, the old friend of mine who accompanied me from northern island to southern for seven months. Actually, it sounds too boastful to tell you that I’m ready to pay for all because I don’t have that much money. But I’m ready to pay with everything I have for my two beloved ones whom I wait to see for a long time. One of them is my missing older sister who decided to live in Austria almost a year ago and the other one is my special person who walks beside me along my journey in New Zealand. So, this place is colorful and lively than ever.
The first night we met, we expressed our affection by riding on a Tuk Tuk in the pouring rain to dinner at Wang Sai Sea Food, a well-known seafood restaurant in Ao Nang. It located so close to the beach that we can see sky, mountain and schools of fish swimming in the water. While peeling shrimps and crabs for one another, we ordered a lot of dishes as if we had lost in the jungle for several days. One of the dishes we ordered has southerly spicy taste, prawns in sour tamarind soup and stir-fried pak mieng (Gnetum Gnemon) which is rare to eat and cost almost a hundred baht per kilogram. The chef of this restaurant is very skillful in cooking hot and spicy seafood dishes to please Thai and foreign customers. We just greeted him officially after dinner. Then everyone needed to take a walk to help the digestion.
It is good that Ao Nang is a long beach with a 6-kilometer road. We walked on a small wooden bridge under which is a shed that fishermen built to avoid heat in the lunch time or to wait for their new passengers. We walked up to the front of the beach where foreigners called Beach Road. This road is known as the most beautiful road in the night of the New Year’s Eve because of the counting down and beautiful fireworks in the sky. Hundreds of long-tailed boats align in the front beach while the other days it is crowded with tourists who go shopping for their favorite products. The stores in front of the beach look specially popular because many people want to take the breeze and see the landscape in the night time.
There are stores that sell common products such as clothes, shoes, hats, swimming suits and CDs as well as restaurants, ATM and currency exchange booths. This shows there’s a lot of cash flow each day in here especially in baggage stores. I think if I had enough money for investment, I would not forget to run such business for sure because there’re a lot of foreign tourists spending over night here. Only just a few don’t stay over night here because they wait for boats to go to other islands. When they get more stuff with them, the very first thing they think of is a bag. In the contrary, what seems to be the best-seller for Thai tourists is suntan lotion because they don’t want to get darker. While foreigners walk or ride motorcycles without any cloth on their top until they get red like grilled shrimps, my older sister is among those persons who carries this product with her all day long.
Shopping is not my favorite activity but the preferable activity in Ao Nang in my thought is walking into a minimart and buy an ice-cream and a piece of pineapple to feed a tribe of monkeys at Phai Plong Beach. The top of the beach is completely different from the end of the beach. When you can get pass a group of Thai massagers, you will truly find peace because there’re only monkeys, a high mountain that you can climb by a wooden ladder, tattoo makers and a bar called The Last Bar.
For someone who likes to travel on islands, they can go offshore just like Sarah and Wolfgang my sister’s Austrian friends did because they had been waiting for holidays to bathe themselves in the sea for so long. When a mini-bus of the tour agent came, it took us to Nopparatthara pier. Somjai, our sailor took us to many islands in Ao Nang he had ever taken his passengers since he was young until his hair now turns gray. What makes Ao Nang so charming is that it consists of small and big islands totally 83 islands altogether. It is convincing that many hidden islands must have had a lot of natural beauty left. Tourists choose to travel only where they heard it is beautiful. Most of the sailors introduce Talayvak as the first place to visit because in the morning when the tide is low we can see a long beach surrounded by clear sea at both sides. We can see not only the natural beauty on land, but we can also snorkel in the shallow area to sightsee schools of fish and the underwater world. Being so tired, we took a break and started to have lunch at Poda Island. It is the only island that is allowed to run restaurant business so this is the main reason why the food there costs so expensive.
Traveling four islands within one day almost causes us heart attack because of the heat, but the sailor who was born with the sea and has a lot of local knowledge told us to lie down and that when we were ready we could play cards. He told me he was just watching the game while the boat took us to Pranang and Rai Lay which is the closest area to the front of Ao Nang Beach. It takes only about 15 minutes to get there. Here is the best place to take a walk because it is a small beach that has a lot of small details all in one place; salesperson selling grilled corns, fisherman pants, pineapples and massagers. I learn by chance that these salespersons have a secret in calling customers. They give a small wooden carving of a penis to Pranang, the holy spirit who protects the sea, situated in the Pranang Cave. This small wooden carving of a penis tied with a red cloth draws foreign tourists’ attraction quite a lot. We set off to the way connected to Rai Lay, the most well-known place for mountain climbing. Many years ago, I got a free climbing because a staff wanted to see a brave Thai girl climb to the mountain top. An interesting thing in Rai Lay is that Rai Lay is divided into two parts, the Eastern and the Western Rai Lay. They are both beautiful. The very first thing you must do is to tell the sailor to pick you up at the right point because we spent a lot of time seeking for the sailor just before we died of tiredness in the hotel.
It is easy to find a hotel and accommodation at Ao Nang. Tourists can find an accommodation from the cheapest rate like a guest house, accommodation of the National Park, three-star and five-star hotels both in Thai style and modern Moroccan style like the Alis Hotel, the only hotel with the Mediterranean taste at Andaman seaside. The Dawn of Happiness, the bungalows at the front of Nam Mao Beach where we can touch the breeze, listen to the wave sound and get the privacy that we can’t find from anywhere else.
Tourists can get to Ao Nang by several ways. They can reach there by boat from the near by Island such as PP Island, Koh Yao, Koh Lanta. There are also buses from the Southern Bus Terminal everyday which takes about 9 Hours. They can also get there by plane. There are many flights from Bangkok to Krabi. It takes about one hour and fifteen minutes to get there. They can also take a direct flight of low cost airlines from Singapore.
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