Monthly Archives: January 2024

On the Road, Thailand

Island living at Koh Lipe

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A five-hour speed boat ride delivered us to an island paradise about as far south as you can go in Thailand. Koh Lipe’s clear turquoise water and white sand beaches didn’t disappoint (at first).

Our poolside room at the Mali Sunrise Resort was huge, and it was just a few steps to the beach, where the hotel’s restaurant served up fantastic food and delicious happy hour cocktails.

We quickly discovered the route to “Walking Street,” a paved road that connected our side of the island with another popular area, Pattaya Beach, and featured shops, restaurants, bars, and massage parlors. Although cars were prohibited, there was no shortage of motorbikes and a creative type of taxi: a motorbike with a large sidecar attachment with bench seating. Frankly, it was a little too chaotic for us, so we generally hunkered down at our resort.

One day, we took a long-tail boat to the neighboring island, Koh Adang, which is the second biggest island in the Tarutao National Marine Park. Bigger than Koh Lipe, it remains undeveloped except for a campsite and a few bungalows operated by the park. I had read about a hiking trail, so we set off, following the sign to Chado Cliff. I had no idea the “trail” would be quite so steep and treacherous. I loved it! We hiked to three viewpoints. The third offered an incredible view of Koh Lipe.

On the way back down, we caught up with a young couple who were taking forever to descend. We kept pausing to let them get ahead, but honestly, it was torture watching the man struggling so much. I snarkily commented to Tony that the stupid guy was hiking in Keen sandals, which clearly didn’t have enough tread. As if the universe reached out to slap me for being mean, I promptly slid on some loose sand and fell smack on my back. Other than a few scrapes and a bruised ego, I was fine.

Safe at the bottom of the hill, Tony and I high-fived. Look at us, pushing 60 and kicking ass! We celebrated our success with a quick dip in the sea before heading home.

Another day, we booked a private snorkeling trip that stopped at five locations for us to jump in the water. One site was particularly noteworthy with blue coral and heaps of colorful fish. We stayed in the water until I started shivering, and even then, I was reluctant to get out.

One of the stops, Hin Ngam Island, was covered in smooth striped rocks. Tony immediately pocketed one, but then we saw the sign. I convinced him to leave the rock where he found it.

Lunch was included in our day trip, so we stopped at Sai Khao Beach for some fried rice and a swim. Heavenly.

On our last day, I told Tony I wanted to walk the length of our beach, but at the end of Sunrise Beach, we just kept going. Tony was sure we could walk the perimeter of the whole island. It’s only 1.5 miles wide and a little over a mile long, so it seemed doable. At some points, we had to climb over boulders, and once we had to wade waist-deep into the ocean to get around some big rocks. Finally, we hit a wall … literally. A huge wall of rock cut off our trek, so we turned inland and aimed for another beach. By the time we got there, though, we were hot and tired. We abandoned our quest and headed back to our resort for a little pool time. We may not have walked the whole perimeter, but we covered a lot!

Koh Lipe was not the unspoiled, tranquil getaway we had been expecting. So many people had claimed it was the place to go to escape the crowds. Wrong. Maybe that place doesn’t exist.

Here are some other things that made me a little grouchy:

  • Too many long-tail boats docked at the beaches. Who knows what yucky stuff they leak into the water? We had to swim around them, and when walking on the beach, we had to be careful to step over their mooring ropes or risk falling on our faces.
  • Way way way too many motorbikes zip through the pedestrian areas. You just can’t let your guard down.
  • The skies were overcast and dreary almost the whole week. As the poster child for Seasonal Affective Disorder, I really needed that sun to come out (which it DID on our last day – yay!).
  • It was insanely windy on our side of the island. Like, CRAZY windy. You couldn’t sit on a beach lounger and read a book without your bag blowing away.
  • The sand at our beach comprised rough tiny pebbles, sharp shards of shells, and broken coral. It was far from the soft baby powder sand promised by bloggers and YouTubers (had they even visited the beach?).

Reading over that list of gripes, I almost deleted it. What a whiny baby, right? Ha! But then again, don’t you hate when people sugarcoat their travel stories and leave out the not-so-perfect parts?

The fact is we had a great time at Koh Lipe. Was it the paradise I had envisioned? No. But that’s OK. Tony and I both find our bliss at the beach, and this was no exception. Would I go back? Probably not, but only because it was a long journey and we have so many fabulous beaches closer to home. Which one should we visit next?

On the Road, Thailand

Two nights at Cheow Lan Lake – lovely scenery and not much else

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Our accommodations at Cheow Lan Lake were basic. I mean mattress-on-the-floor-no-wifi-not-even-power-outlets-in-the-room basic. The Keereewarin Chiewlarn Resort floated on the lake with raft houses linked together in two perpendicular rows, joined at a common dining area.

Our original itinerary said we would be hiking, so I assumed we would boat to some chunk of land a couple of times during our stay. With that in mind, I booked two nights at the lake. In fact, we didn’t do any hiking, and the only diversions were to play in the lake and head out twice daily for long-tail boat rides to look for wildlife. There’s only so much swimming two old, out-of-shape people can do, and the boat rides got a little tedious when the wildlife continued to stay hidden.

Fortunately, our guide took his time getting to this destination, and it turned out to be one of my favorite days of our vacation. Quite a few guests at the treehouse resort were heading to the lake, so we all piled into two vans for the trip. After a rest stop at a small family-owned campsite, we went for a glorious hike in the national park. We kept up a steady pace, pausing to appreciate a particularly incredible tree with buttress roots taller than Tony or slowing down to explore a couple of caves, where stalagmites and stalactites sparkled and tiny bats hung from the ceilings. It was exactly the hit of nature I needed.

We returned to the campsite for lunch and then took off for the lake, where we boarded a long-tail boat. Rather than going straight to our “resort,” the guide gave us a tour of some impressive karst formations in the lake. Thais call the area “Guilin, Thailand” because of its similarity to Guilin, China, where the landscape is littered with these towering rocks. Tony and I visited Guilin when we lived in China, but we had no idea that the two areas were once part of the same coral reef. Visit Khao Sok explains the fascinating geological history:

The history of Khao Sok national park starts 300 million years ago. Rising oceans created a shallow sea with conditions perfect for the growth of coral. The result was a massive reef which stretched from China to Borneo. Eventually, more sediment buried this reef deep below the surface, and the pressure compressed the coral into limestone. It is this limestone that forms the Karst mountains we see today!

About 60 million years ago, the Indian tectonic plate collided with the Eurasian plate and as a result formed the Himalayas. At the same time, Thailand was rotated clockwise and moved to the south-east as the Himalayas rose. The ancient, buried limestone was thrust up, folded, faulted, and then eroded into its current form.

The lake itself was created when Thailand dammed the Pasaeng River in 1987 for hydroelectric power and flood control. As the waters rose, efforts to rescue and relocate animals largely failed, and the five abandoned villages – including homes, schools, and temples – still sit at the bottom of the lake. Kind of sad.

Although two nights was one night too many at our primitive raft house, I can’t complain. I spent a lot of time sitting on our deck, reading a book, and enjoying the scenery.

The view from our room.
Another raft house view.
Morning boat ride.
Searching for elusive wildlife.

Finally, we took a boat to the mainland and were happy to find the driver we had booked to take us to Phuket Town. Previous visits to Phuket were solely for the beaches, but this time we stayed in town and poked around the touristy neighborhood. We had hoped to visit the night market, but it was closed, dang it. The next morning, we boarded a speed boat for the 5-hour journey to Koh Lipe. Island time!

On the Road, Thailand

Khao Sok National Park – jungle time and elephant spa day

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After six years of living just steps from the Andes foothills in Chile, I find I’m missing nature. My suburban Bangkok neighborhood is leafy enough, and I can walk along the canals to get away from the hustle and bustle. It’s surprisingly quiet and peaceful. As our semester break approached, though, I knew what I needed. I booked the “Explorer Lake Trip” package in Khao Sok National Park, which included two nights in a treehouse in the jungle and two nights in a raft house at the Cheow Lan Lake.

On Dec. 18, we arrived at Our Jungle House, an eco resort in the national park, where the lady at reception took one look at us and suggested we rethink our plan to go rafting with a cave exploration. Instead, she said, we should go tubing. Which we did. However, the river was quite low and slow, so we had to paddle the whole time to keep up the with guide, who had taken off his flip flops to use as oars. Yes, it was nice to be out in nature, but it also felt like a consolation prize.

Tony and I have trekked in jungles around the world: Costa Rica, Bolivia, Borneo, and many times in Thailand, to name a few. We really didn’t need a guide, even though that’s generally my jam. Unfortunately, our “explorer” package came with a guided tour, and the guide never showed up. By the time our eco resort found another guide, we were way behind schedule. We were joined by a mom and her two grown kids from the UK, who were way more excited than Tony and I were to pause at every sign of a tarantula burrow or an unusual leaf that curled when you touched it. Been there, done that.

I felt so jaded during the whole hike. Really, I just wanted to keep moving and enjoy the Seusstastic landscape of wildly tangled vines, unbelievably huge leaves, the occasional rustle (monkey? monitor lizard?), and the woop-woop call of gibbons. At one point, we came to a lovely waterhole fed by a rushing stream, and the others stripped off their hiking gear to take a dip in their swimsuits. Nobody had informed us that we might be swimming, so we were unprepared. Being unprepared makes me cranky. 

I tried to brush off my irritability to appreciate the jungle. I couldn’t get enough of the fig trees’ wild root systems and the towering bamboo arches that created a tunnel along parts of the trail. At the waterhole, we spotted a 5-foot-long monitor lizard (so maybe I wasn’t too sad about not swimming). Our guide pointed out a pit viper sleeping high in a tree, which got him talking about different types of snakes. He said the most venomous snake in the region was the king cobra. “He bite you, one minute bye-bye!” he said with a laugh.

Because of our late start, we returned to the eco resort with just barely enough time to wolf down some lunch before our scheduled “elephant experience.” Despite living and traveling in Asia for so many years, we’ve never had a first-hand encounter with elephants.

Although many tourists still hope for a photo opp atop an elephant, a friend in India helped me understand the cruelty and abuse elephants suffer in order to be domesticated. I knew I didn’t want to contribute to that type of tourism. Instead, we visited the Khaosok Elephant Conservation Centre, which is committed to elephant welfare. This article from the Travel & Leisure website explains why you shouldn’t ever ride an elephant.

At the conservation center, the guide, Chalee, explained that elephants had been used in Thailand since ancient times when they were trained to carry soldiers into battle. Later, the logging industry took advantage of their size and strength, and of course, tourists eagerly pay to interact with and ride an elephant. As welfare organizations have worked to raise awareness, tourists can now find more opportunities for an ethical encounter with Thailand’s national animal.

All of the elephants at the conservation center had been in the family for generations but were now retired from any type of labor or service, Chalee said. We were assigned to Boonsong, an elderly elephant they called “the grandmother.”

During our visit, Boonsong was never tied up or controlled with a sharp hook as I’ve seen in other places, including India. Her handler, called a mahout, simply called out commands. I realize that she was most likely abused in her training at some point to behave so compliantly, which is heartbreaking, but I want to believe her life now is all about indulgence and peace.

Our first task involved mashing up bananas and powdered elephant food to make a cookie dough-ish paste that we rolled into balls. Then we fed the balls, along with some mini bananas and pineapple, to our elephant. Chalee had demonstrated how we could hand off the food to Boonsong’s trunk, or we could put it directly into her mouth.

After her snack, we walked with Boonsong to a mud pit. Chalee noted that elephants love mud because it acts as a natural coolant. Elephants can only sweat from their feet near the toenails, she said. Their big, flapping ears serve as another cooling method in Thailand’s tropical heat.

Tony and I climbed into the mud pit with Boonsong and her mahout. We used a coconut shell to scoop mud from the floor, and then we rubbed mud all over the elephant’s body. I had expected her skin to feel leathery, but I was surprised at how thick and rigid it was. However, Chalee pointed out that elephants are very sensitive to touch and can detect insects or changes in temperature. She encouraged us to stroke, but not to slap, as we applied the mud.

From the mud pit, Boonsong walked to a huge shower, where her mahout washed off most of the mud before leading her to the river for her full-body scrub. We splashed into the river with stiff brushes and coconut buckets, scouring her legs and lower body. When the mahout gave the signal, she dropped down to her knees so we could wash her upper half. Elephants here are prone to illness caused by a biting fly that deposits its egg in the wound, which is one reason a daily bath helps to keep the elephants healthy.

Stepping from the river, squeaky clean, Boonsong immediately used her trunk to blow sand over her body, the equivalent of applying insect repellent and sunscreen.

Overall, the experience was a bit contrived, but I didn’t care. When I try to describe how it felt to spend time with Boonsong, I can only think of cliches: She was majestic, gentle, intelligent, and endearing.

Although the jungle wasn’t exactly meeting my nature needs, my first elephant encounter was everything I hoped it would be.