Jarrod and Sara’s Site

What’s up again everyone. Heard there was more snow, sorry to some, enjoy to others. I know most of you will hate this, but we really miss snow and hope we get bombarded in March… sure it won’t happen though… sorry. Anyway, we hope everyone’s doing well and enjoying the winter as much as possible.

After our dive trip, we had traveled back to shore and arranged for the dive shop to drop us off at a bus station so we could head further south to the town of Krabi. We were in a minivan with a few other divers, mostly older people who were heading back to luxurious beach resorts. Surprising to us, and shocking to most of the people in the van (who couldn’t believe we didn’t know where we were going or where we would spend the night), the van stopped and the driver pointed to someone’s front stoop, on a fairly main road, and said, “There’s the bus station.” We shrugged our shoulders and grabbed our bags and I said, “The bus is going to stop there and take us to Krabi?” he smiled and said (though didn’t speak english well), “100%” and then jumped back in the van and vanished. We were just off a sensational 4 days and were optimistic as we walked up to the place and saw a man sitting on a small chair outside. We asked him if this was the bus stop and he didn’t understand a word of English and looked at us like, what do you want? We then said, “Krabi?” and he grunted, smiled, and pointed to a little table and signaled that we should sit and wait… so we did. We had no way of communicating, had no idea whether the bus would come in 30 minutes or 5 hours, so we sat and waited and found the situation pretty amusing. We were encouraged when a few locals started to congregate there for no apparent reason and we figured they would be waiting for the bus too. Then a bus came, that was not going to Krabi, they got on, the man signaled to wait, then he jumped on a motorbike and took off. We got a little nervous at this point, but he returned a half hour later and motioned for us to wait more. Fortunately, we waited for about an hour and 45 minutes and a really nice, air-conditioned bus with reclining seats stopped and charged us peanuts for the 4 hour ride to Krabi. When we arrived in town at 10 at night with no place to stay, we walked around for about 10 minutes and found a real nice room for a good price. It is so easy to travel here, if you are patient, everything just falls into place… for the most part… and I probably just jinxed that, but it was real nice.

The next day we had breakfast at a really good cafe (May and Mark’s) and we were talking to the friendly woman owner about islands to visit. She said that if we wanted a quiet, undeveloped place, with beautiful beaches, that was not very expensive, she would recommend Ko Jum. Since that is exactly what we wanted, she got on the phone and arranged a pick up for the following day to take us to the ferry and booked our bungalow on the island. Pretty good service for a cafe…

Ko Jum was fantastic. We knew it would be cool when during the ferry trip, all of a sudden 4 long tail boats came roaring up to the side of our ferry with a number of yelling Thais aboard each. Sara thought they might be pirates and it sure looked like that was a possibility, but when one of them yelled, “Andaman! Andaman!” and we saw the sign on the boat for Andaman Beach Resort, we realized that this was our pick up. So we tossed our bags onto the small boat and jumped from the ferry onto the small wooden long tail boat that would take us to our resort beach. Best hotel pick up ever. We spent 5 nights there at a really nice, simple “resort” that had about 30 concrete bungalows that were clean and comfortable. It had a big open air restaurant right on the beach, and thats about it. The long strip of beach we were on had about 10 of these types of places, all similar, some more rustic, wooden tree house type things, one really plush resort, and most somewhere in between. The rest of the island was fairly empty with two little villages, one main road (dirt, only saw 2 cars while there for 5 days), and a few other beaches with similar simple set ups. There was no television, or internet, and some of the places had just received electricity. The beach itself was really nice, though some parts were really rocky and not great for swimming. Sara loved it because there was an inordinate amount of coral, shells, etc. washed up on the beach and great for beachcombing. The water was warm, clear, and clean and the weather was amazing.

There’s not really a ton to tell you guys about this place. We basically spent our time here, swimming, eating, drinking, sleeping, reading, writing, and lounging. It was the best. The biggest outing was renting a motorbike for the day and driving through a beautiful forest on a dirt trail to the other side of the island where we had a great lunch and did all the same stuff… just at a different beautiful beach. Great quiet, restful, beach week… we loved it.

Next we moved on to Ko Lanta….

See you guys soon!

Jarrod and Sara