Day 6 - Sun 17 Nov: Thon Bok Kherani National Park to Krabi

Fine and sunny 25 to 33 deg and high humidity during the middle part of the day.
Ride: 63km; total ride: 123km
Walk: 2km
 
The day started early for me, dawn, with a walk around the local area, more palm oil plantations and villages, not much else.

Brekky arrived at our room at 7am and it was fairly slim pickings for a bunch of big blokes who are about to cycle in hot and humid conditions for over 60km; it was a quarter of a dodgy sandwich and one very cold egg accompanied by two tiny sausages. Apparently the “resort” (Dusit Phuphaya) doesn’t have any food, so it had to be bought in via plastic containers. Anyway, we survived and were on the bikes at 8am. It wasn’t long before we pulled into the Than Bok Khorani National Park “featuring waterfalls”. The “falls” were a drop of 20cm max but the water features and surrounding rainforest were very impressive. And, more importantly, the coffee at the shop back at the entrance was very nice.

The ride was straight forward and pleasant, although our northern hemisphere friends found it pretty tough around midday. Again, lots of rubber and palm oil, with plenty of riding through back-blocks past “real Thailand”, loved it.
Lunch was taken at a Muslim village about 15km from Krabi. Beef or chicken noodle soup; filled the spot, but the “beef” consisted of a couple of pieces of fat and gristle; no beef was located.

Arrived at the Krabi Heritage Hotel, a clean, very stylish, and modern place not far from the beach, early afternoon, giving us plenty of time for a swim in their pool and a walk around town and along the beach. Although very commercial and full of bars, restaurants, cheap clothes shops, and massage places, Krabi has a nice relaxing feel about it.

Dinner, by request, was a little later at 7pm. For some reason they drove us for 3km past at least 1,000 good looking restaurants to a very ordinary looking local one of unknown hygiene standards. Although the food was tasty the atmosphere was non-existent. I suspect that the choice of eating establishments is based purely on price. One thing is for sure the ingredients are fresh, they are fairly true to the Thai traditional food, and they ensure that you don’t walk away hungry. The dishes tonight were Tom Yum soup, fish & veg, fresh paw paw salad, chicken & veg, mild prawn & whole green peppercorns, bbq chicken and beef & veg. Of course, all accompanied by buckets of steamed rice.

Heading out of the resort this morning

National Park entrance

Waterfalls

NP



Reclining Buddha

Coffee shop

Lunch venue

Coconut-picking monkeys off to work

Drink stop in the rubber plantation

Krabi hotel

My room

The pool

Front of hotel

One of the boats used to ferry 100s of tourists every day to nearby islands

A big rock overlooking the beach

A cute restaurant on the beach

Now that is fresh!

A very local restaurant

Remnants of a huge amount of food


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