Simply cycling around
First day visiting the Phuket peninsula. The roads are steep and windy here! We have done only 23km but it’s like we did 50km. Today we cycled at the northern point of the peninsula, following the coast, visiting some lookouts and finally arrived at Kata beach where we spent the rest of the afternoon.
Last night was quite good in the Buddhist temple except I’ve forgot that monks wake up very VERY early each morning. At 4:30, the prayer started and last maybe one hour. At 6am when we woke up, we saw monks walking out of the temple to collect food for the day. When we left the place, the monks were not back yet but we could say “Kapunkaaap” to a woman who were sweeping the ground. The biggest surprise of the day was, very hard to guess, elephants! Soon after we had breakfast, we saw an elephant and it’s “owner” walking on the side of the road. There is a place called “Sangtawan safari” nearby. I imagine these elephants are accompanied outside daily to have something to eat and maybe to do some little work once a while. Today we did enter in the Phuket peninsula for real and saw even more elephants used for tourist trekking. Finally, we finished the day by camping next to the beach in a cemetery.
Today we planned to visit Railay beach which is not far away. It’s actually the next one after Ao Nang beach. The only way to access to it is by long-tail boat. We paid 200 Baht return as the trip is really short. Once on the other side, we have visited the area and discover a lagoon that is hard to access to. Then we spent some time in the water and swam around this big limestone rock.
Nopparat Thara beach is the neighbour of Ao Nang beach. This place is not as busy, has less tourists shops and many more cheaper place where to enjoy Thai food. On the beach, during low tide, there is thousand of tiny crustaceans that we don’t even notice at first. This is not why we came here but that took most of my attention until the end of the day.
As I mentioned yesterday evening, today we are going to visit the “Seven Wells” (for seven natural pools) and something we did not plan: the “Seven Wells peak”. I must say, signs panel in this area are pretty bad. They confuse more than they inform us. And to make sure we are confuse, people told us wrong timing (about the walk) and nothing is in english. Fortunately, with all these things not in our favour, we did not get lost. Are we good? No, we simply kept going straight up until we ended to the top of Langkawi island and got nearly a 360 degrees view for free!
First day in Langkawi. From what I’ve heard until today, this island is the first tourist destination in Malaysia. That’s what I’m afroad of… Personally, I prefer Borneo with its adventurous side. Touristy places means to me, higher prices for anything, especially food in my case. I did not plan to go there at first but like Penang, everyone is talking about it. Even the Malay family we met in Kuala Lumpur, Amir told us about this island many times. Our goal is to find as much free things as possible. Fortunately, there is some like watching Parachutes, jungle walks, waterfall and cycling around the island :-)
This is the first thing we saw this morning when we woke up. Mount Kinabalu! The weather is fantastic today. We only expect that we can climb this mountain! If I’m not mistaken, we are going at the further peak on the left hand side. Its name is Low’s peak. Let’s start the day!