Sunday, Jan 16, 2017
On the drive from our hotel to the boat we picked up 4 other passengers… 2 from Finland, one from Sweden and one from Australia (but born in Ireland).
The boat can take about 20 people… but there are only 14 of us… 11 divers and 3 snorkelers. The boat is small and comfortable. We all share 4 toilets – each toilet has a hose to wash with after using it and toilet paper to dry off… the paper then goes into the garbage (not in the toilet).
Before taking off they dropped a nice bowl of fruit in the water as an offering to the good spirits, then lit fire crackers to scare off the evil spirits. It took about 4-5 hrs to get to our location… we were happy not to get sea sick along the way. The boat finally anchored at about 2am. And then the motion was just a gentle wave. Our bed room is very small as expected. The bottom floor is the engine room…we haven’t been down there. The next floor (water level) has the rooms, bath rooms, and kitchen. In the rear is all the snorkel and scuba diving
The next floor is an area to relax and have meals in the back and a small smoking section in the front. The top floor has coaches for relaxtion and mats to stretch out or exercise?
Morning #1: up at about 6am… up for coffee and a banana, and then an hour of the most beautiful snorkeling Annie and I have ever experienced. It wss just the two of us with our guide in the little dingey boat. Then back to the boat for breakfast. This is everything we hoped for. There’s no WIFI or G3-G4 internet so we’ll post when we’re done with this trip in 4 days. Unless we find a pocket of signal.
We went back for 3 snorkeling adventures to day and one visit to a beach. The fish and coral are beautiful and it’s surreal and peaceful to be swimming among them. I tried taking phoros with the iphone underwater… but I haven’t gotten the feel yet. Somehow I set it on video, timer, square pictures, and time delay and can’t figure how to turn it back to regular. So we can’t share these images with anyone, but we’re enjoying them.
Another fun element is sharing this experience with a multi-national group of divers – mostly Scandinavians. One of the Danish guys was having fun trying to get me to say some Danish words… words that use sounds not found in English. I tried… we both laughed.
I tried writing each day… figuring I’d post when we got a signal…. We never got on. So now that the trip is done, I’ll post this from the first day out (I never got further.) We’ll put pictures up later…. but we may not have an internet connect for the next 5 days again… we’re off for a desert island.
The bottom line, the snorkel boating trip was a wonderful fantasy that gave us everything we dreamed of. We’re in a jungle hotel now (we can take a canoe down the river to watch elephants bathing – we arrived later tonight, so we’ll do that in the morning before we leave). If by any chance we get disappointed in the rest of this trip, coming back to this hotel and spending the rest of our time in Thailand here would make us happy campers.
https://www.agoda.com/bangpling-nature-home-stay/hotel/khao-lak-th.html
We promise – pictures and back up stories will follow… but maybe in a week?