We arrived in the seaside town of Ao Nang late in the rainy afternoon of Thursday 23 August. We dumped our stuff in our room, grabbed some umbrellas and walked down the road/river to a cool litle Italian place for a delicious pizza meal. The rain didn't look like it was going to pass any time soon, so we headed back to our room where we had coffee and treats and basically just vegged out for the rest of the evening. We had decided to treat ourselves to a slightly better hotel than normal, so this turned out to be a pretty good option :-) Slept so well that night.

Friday we decided that this hotel wasn't really worth it (no free wifi??) so we checked out and moved to a backpackers place just down the road. Once we were all settled, we took a packed lunch and went down to the beach. We had just finished eating when it started to rain again :-/ so we took shelter in this cool coffee shop / tattoo studio, where we stayed for most of the afternoon. Monique took a look around the street stalls and then we walked up the road for a bit of a dodgy dinner at a street stall... We got pancakes on our way back to the room where we did some admin (and some checking up on Kevin's brother Jason who had just been admitted to hospital with some unknown illness) before going to bed.

Saturday was a gorgeous sunny day (finally!) so, after some quick admin in the morning, we hopped on the next longtail to Railey Beach, about 15 minutes away, only accessible by boat. We had a great afternoon relaxing on the clean, uncrowded beach :-) Late in the afternoon there was another tropical downpour, which we took as our cue to head back. We arrived back at the main beach and had our last swim in Thailand in the rain - good fun and way warmer in the sea than out. After a quick shower back at the room, we walked up the road to the local street stalls for some delicious Pad Thai and braaied corn-on-the-cob and chicken-on-a-stick. We were forced to eat back in our room because of the rain, but later we went out again for our last Thai pancakes for dessert. Mmmmm... :-)

Sunday we were up early to pack, and then went out to find some brunch and some snacks for our next journey, which would be a long one :-/ We hopped on the next "local bus" back to Krabi Town, where we were just in time to catch the bus back to Sarat Thani. After much hassle and drama, we caught another extremely crowded and dodgy bus to the train station accross town - again making it with just minutes to spare! Fortunately the train was running late so had time to grab some dinner before boarding what would be our last train in Asia, back to where it all began 2 months ago - Bangkok.