Khanom beach

Just had an amazing weekend away at Khanom, the nearest nice beach to Suratthani. It’s a beautiful quiet beach, with perfect sand scattered with thousands of seashells. It was really chilled out, especially on Sunday-Monday (which are the days we get off as a weekend). We pretty much had the beach to ourselves, other than the people working at the resorts and their kids, who kept us very entertained. A young, tiny Thai boy aged about six kept wandering around aimlessly with a massive adult-size bike – the seat was higher off the ground than his head. Seemed like every time we went round a corner he’d be there in the distance somewhere, just pushing this bicycle around, like some kind of humorous sub-plot.

I took my guitar and we sang some cheesy songs on the beach, talked rubbish and got drunk. Also went to a cool bar at one point and the girl who owned it (apparently a survivor of the tsunami) had been in a recent motorbike accident and served all our food and drinks by hopping on one foot, laughing all the while.

Can’t believe it’s December now. The sea was incredible, warm and lush. Went in at night under the near-full moon and stars, swimming in the shimmering phosphorescence. Jealous yet? In the darkness I saw a huge jellyfish-shaped beast though and had to flee abruptly.

Talking of beasts, rather than just sit around on a beach the whole time we went on an adventure to find Khao Wang Thong Cave. It’s a kind of tourist destination in that there were signs from the main road, but we quickly became lost in a labyrinth of eerie, dusty back roads and had to ask no less than five different people for directions.
I said something about it being like the start of one of those horror films – next we’ll get a flat tyre and won’t be able to escape the cave-dwelling beasts. “And you’re the funny one, so you die first”, Brandon told me, which had perhaps the wrong effect of making me swell with pride.

Glad we made it there anyway, it was amazing. A whole complex of caves in the side of a mountain – and like I said it’s not really a touristy place, we were the only people there and had to clamber through a tiny rusty gate 4ft off the ground and turn the lights on and off ourselves. It was pretty creepy inside, descending into darkness only broken by the sparse little lights in some of the corners. We had to crawl on hands and knees at some points and there were about ten or so different chambers, all different shapes and sizes, water dripping from the stalactites and bats flapping around in pandemonium. F**king cool.