Ao Nang

[fivemack]

The last two nights, I've been sleeping in a wood-framed green canvas tent in the middle of the Khao Sok rain-forest.

This has reminded me how nice hot running water is.

I've floated down the local river in a rubber ring; I'm the largest person in my group and had the least-inflated ring, so got even more of the delight of grounding on every sandbank and stubbing my toes on most rocks than anyone else. I've sat on the back of an elephant trekking through the jungle; I've walked through the edges of the jungle with a guide who pointed out oil-palms and wild banana trees (wild bananas taste just like bananas ought to, but are full of hard black seeds so all you can do is stick them in your mouth and suck the flesh away from the seeds), and picked up a common bronzeback snake (lovely blue spots!) for us to admire and caress.

I'm now in a hotel five minutes' walk from the Andaman Sea beach at Ao Nang; I've had a swim, in water warmer than any fiscally-prudent municipality would keep its swimming pool.

The landscape around here is famous from The Man with the Golden Gun: sharp limestone cliffs rising hundreds of metres, vertically or even sometimes at an overhang, from the sea or from the forest. Not climbable without equipment; there's the possibility tomorrow of hiring equipment and a guide, but it would mean not snorkelling, and I've always had trouble stepping backwards off perfectly good cliff edges.

Comments

[del-c.livejournal.com]

The diver and marine biologist Monty Halls was somewhere around there for an episode of Great Ocean Adventure, where he climbed on foot to the top of an island to see a WWII Japanese pillbox, and then, instead of climbing down again, his guide made him jump off the island back into the water!

[rwl.livejournal.com]

I thought that was one of the areas where the tsunami came in last December.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

It is; you see the occasional local walking around with a 'Tsunami Survivor' T-shirt, and the massage bungalows on the beach look suspiciously newly built. I got a bit of a shiver walking along the beach, noting the sand sloping gently down out to sea in just the way that would cause tsunami waves to mount up as they hit. And noticing that the new tsunami-evacuation-route signs mark a route *parallel* to the sea-front for several hundred yards; I don't see why that's remotely sensible.

Nobody brings up the topic and it's hardly one you can ask about.