I flew into a town called Krabi (round trip from BKK was $90!!!) and took a bus about half an hour from Krabi Town to a beach called Ao Nang. My hostel is cheap and about a 20 min walk from a public beach.
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| One of the nearby islands. |
Have you ever read about the cliffs that climbers can free solo climb on over the water? That's here! There are all of these amazing limestone cliffs and rock formations. Some of them come straight up out of the water. It is amazing. The first day or so that I was here, I was reading about places to go and things to do during my 9 days here. I started to feel very frustrated because it feels like everything is part of a tour. You pay to snorkel. You pay to go to islands.You pay to kayak. Most of the main attractions here are not easily accessible by public transport or by walking. What a load of carp! I think one of these days I will rent a bike and see what I can explore on my own. I had been thinking that it would be really nice to learn to drive a scooter so that I could take myself around on my own, but as I was eating dinner I watched a car pull out in front of a motorcycle. No one was injured, but the bike was all sorts of dinged up, and the two guys on the motorcycle definitely had some nasty pavement burn. Killed my interest in motorcycles for the time being.
Instead of spending the entire time trying to by as cheap as possible, I decided to do a snorkeling tour. Why? Just for the halibut. Gotta start somewhere. Although it put me over my budget for the day, it was a really great decision. The tour ended up being about eight hours long, so I felt it was well worth the money that I paid. I got to go see nine islands that are not easily accessible any other way and snorkel around some of them. Lots of fishies. They fed us dinner at sunset and did some fire dancing once it got dark. The last part of the trip was swimming in the water at night with the bioluminescent plankton. When you kicked your feet or moved your hands, they looked like little blue sparkles in the water. The looked similar to stars swirling about. It was so cool!! The highlight of that trip was not actually the things we did, but the people. I met several people from Malaysia and a couple from Spain. In the same day I spoke English, Thai, Spanish and learned some words in Malaysian. Oh and I have now met three girls from Malaysia that are all engineers. Woohoo! Two girls that are traveling solo and one girl that is traveling with her younger brothers. While I am definitely on the hunt to find some cheaper or less touristy things to do in this area, it was really great to get to spend the last couple days with these people. I was feeling pretty tanked after my snorkel adventure, so the next day I decided to spend at the beach. Mother Nature was feeling a bit crabby apparently, and it rained all afternoon. Turns out this is the best time to be at a busy beach with warm water. Everyone leaves!I think my beach standards must be lower than the averave vacationer, because I just rolled up my towel and went in the water. It was much warmer than the rain!
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| Longshore boat. A cheap and relatively fast way to get around. |
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| That's a hull of a boat you've got there sir. |
Edit: the internet is to slow right now for me to upload any pictures, so instead I think I'm going to read about bioluminescent plankton. Actually, I'm not sure what the microorganism that glows is exactly. I assume plankton but I may be wrong. Anyways, the little organisms don't glow constantly, because glowing expends energy. Instead, they glow when they are agitated. This is a defense mechanism against predators called the "burglar alarm effect." By glowing, they are drawing attention to the predator which will draw attention to it's predators. To create the glow, the organism has to either synthesize (or acquire from other organisms) luciferin. Then the luciferin is oxidized with luciferase as the catalyst to create light and oxyluciferin. There are a couple of other mechanisms, but this is the most common one. Generally, the light is blue/green because this is the part of the light spectrum that is most visible underwater. This is a pretty great article if you want more info.
Why did the algae and the fungus get married?… They took a lichen to each other. (although, unfortunately, their marriage is on the rocks)