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| A few years ago my daughter, Susan, and hubby, Troy, asked me to join them for a ten day sailing excursion in Thailand. They needed a cook. Their good friend, Joel, was an experienced sailor and he would be the skipper. I agreed but felt bad that Sharon did not want to come along. |
| I flew to Bangkok and then onto Phuket. This was two days before the others arrived. I wanted to check out where I could get supplies for the ten days at sea. With a rental car I explored the island, stopped at an interesting restaurant for lunch and visited a couple Buddhist temples. I did find a large supermarket where we could stock up on beer and groceries before we left on our sailing adventure. |
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| Elephants are a big thing in Thailand! Besides the decorated shrines, I saw several places where we could go for an elephant ride in the jungle. So when the gang arrived, we did just that. |
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| But wait, we came here to go sailing, not to elephant around! With food, drinks, charts and other important gear in tow, we boarded Lily, a 36 foot Jeanneau Sun Dance slope. We had chartered the boat from Sunsail, a British company with several locations around the globe. |
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| Our plan was to first go up north into Phang Nga Bay and then head south to Krabi and Phi Phi Don. This was, of course, well before the tsunami destroyed so much of the islands in 2004. |
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| It didn't take long for us to see the limestone formations that make this area so famous. The islands rise straight up out of the water, have a multitude of colors and are covered with lush vegetation. We anchored off Koh Panak (Koh means island) and soon used the dingy to explore some caves along shore. Inside were several bats but it was too early for them to be disturbed. |
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| It was May and low tourist season in Phuket. It was warm, humid and we wore bathing suits almost the entire trip. The whole ten days we saw a few power boats, several fishermen in their wooden craft, but only one other sailboat. The following morning we continued north and stopped at Koh Hong, an island with lots of special "hongs" or chambers. After we dropped anchor, we took the dingy through some narrow passageways. And now we saw some tourist boats and local fishermen. |
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| After we squeezed by these two young fellows, we found ourselves in a beautiful "hong". The ceiling was open to the sky but there was no way one could easily climb to the top. T went part way to take this picture. |
| We entered another cave and paddled as far as we could. Then Troy jumped overboard and found a way to get into another chamber. While Joel stayed in the digny, the three of us crawled through the opening (hoping the tide would not move in too fast). The entrance was just big enough for our heads to go through. |
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| Late that afternoon we anchored in the lee of an small island directly opposite Koh Tapo, better known as James Bond Island, because of the movie Gold Finger that was shot here. Before dinner three of us took the dingy while Troy sailed the windsurfer across. |
| There is a tiny beach where Bond supposedly landed his airplane. Now there are souvenir stalls as visitors arrive from Phuket. There is even a long dock for larger boats that come here in the high season. We explored some of the caves and then returned to our Lily. |
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It had been a full day and tomorrow promised to have more in store. Joel had made arrangements with a fishermen to pick us up in the morning and take us in his long-tail boat to the Gypsy Fishing Village. |