I went to Thailand hoping for a life-changing adventure, like I’d had before (twice), but two weeks is just way too short. I’m already forgetting the stories from this trip, and I haven’t even caught up on my blogging of it yet.
Even with only two weeks in the country, one of the unmissable things that I knew I must do on this trip was take my family to the Andaman Sea for some jungle/island/beach experiences. So, while we were booking the Phuket trip, we also tagged on a couple days in Koh Yao Noi.
The long-tail boat got us there the slow way, with absolutely gorgeous views. Then we settled into a nice family bungalow by the beach at Sabai Corner. It was a traditional Thai style building with sloped roofs, a hammock, and a loft for the kids’ room. But, with my mother-in-law, sister-in-law, children, and wife all in the bungalow, it just wasn’t big enough to fit me. (I’m not supposed to share a room with my female in-laws anyway.) So, I got my own room, one of the smaller bungalows on the hillside, with my own little sleeping loft and a hammock on the porch.
Sabai Corner was beautiful, peaceful, and the food was great, so we never really had to leave. Everything we wanted got written down in a little log-book (our “tab”), which we settled up when we checked out. That means all the delicious Thai dishes we could eat, the Phad Thai, the Ka Pow, the curry, the spring rolls and crepes and ice cream too. It was an awesome menu and the kitchen did not disappoint. There were also smoothies and juices and “detox waters”. They even put the scooter rentals on our tab. And when we checked out, the total for 6 people and 3 days of all this good stuff was less than we’d spend on two family meals back home.
Javan and I rented motor scooters to get around the island and we found all kinds of cool stuff. That first night, Javan rented a fishing pole and went fishing off the end of the dock while I did my deck of cards workout in the rain. We took Nathan along for a few rides with us too. The next morning we went up an abandoned road onto the top of the hill and found a defunct building that must have been a restaurant or an event hall or something in the past. All the windows were busted out and there was some finely-painted graffiti on the wall that Javan recognized as an allegedly racist anime caricature. We also found the most incredible view up there, where a Thai local had tried to camouflage the trail to his viewpoint. This wasn’t the only camouflaged trail that I found on that island, but I grew up in the woods and I know all the tricks, so I’m pretty good at finding trails even when they don’t want to be found.
That was only the beginning of our big adventure for the day. The boys and I rode around the whole island that morning on a mission to find an ATM and some breakfast. Unfortunately, most of the ATMs on the island were out of order. And, outside of the tourist spots near our hotel, we couldn’t find any restaurants to eat at. We eventually did locate both an ATM and some breakfast options in the village, but the things the locals were eating for breakfast didn’t really appeal to us and we ended up eating at 7-11 instead (7-11 is kind of a big deal in Thailand). As we headed out of town, we marked the location of a really cool looking restaurant on the rice patties that we wanted to bring the women to. We continued riding around the island without a map until, to our surprise, we found ourselves back at the familiar fishing dock, and then home with our ladies.
Telling the women all about the things we saw, we hatched a new plan to rent a Song Taew (a pickup truck with two benches in the covered bed, used for local taxis around Southeast Asia) and take them on a tour of the island. The menfolk rode our motorbikes as the women rode in the truck, and their driver took us to see the Holy Spring Water. These were a series of 3 fresh-water springs that appear only during low tide on the marshy flats along the west side of the island. After the springs, we drove through the rice patties until we found that restaurant we were checking out before. Now that place was weird. It was an absolutely beautiful venue, but with no customers. And the service was terrible. It was almost as if they didn’t want us to be there. First they told us that we could only get drinks (no food), then when we ordered our drinks, they came back saying they couldn’t make half of them. So we decided to leave, and on the way out, they told us they had food–but there were only two dishes on the menu. It was weird, and the roof was made with imported Canadian plywood. All this led me to cook up a theory that the place was actually a front for some illicit business, or maybe that it had been built by a wealthy expat who just wanted a nice cafe-vibe to work on his laptop from. We ended up eating lunch on the beach back near Sabai corner.
There were more things that happened in our two-ish days on the island, but do you really need all the details? We took more scooter trips and found more little secrets. There was a village of treehouse rentals that somehow reminded me of my friend SunRay’s place back in Clear Lake, Washington. There was a tennis court were people gathered every evening to play a variety of sports (not tennis). We got massages. I swam. Nathan and I explored an island that is only accessible at low tide. When it got dark, we hung out on the porch or in the restaurant and went to bed early.
And at the end of this side trip, we took a speedboat ferry back to Phuket.
Nic Nakis 