As I need to leave Malaysia every few months to renew my visa, we had planned for several short trips around south-east Asia this year. For some reason, however, we didn’t actually get around to booking the first of these until a week or so before my deadline, and even then at the last minute we switched our destination from Bangkok to Krabi, trading a reliably fun bustling urban centre for an unknown but hopefully peaceful tropical beach.
We picked a small hotel in a small town away from Krabi itself, called Ao Nam Mao. The real tourist spot is Ao Nang, but we wanted somewhere with fewer tattoo parlours and night clubs and Ao Nam Mao definitely doesn’t have any of those. In fact, with a 7-11, a one-person police box, a couple of motels and a couple-of-days-a-week market, Ao Nam Mao is one of the smallest towns I’ve seen (it reminded me of Omarama in New Zealand where I was briefly stranded by flooding two years ago). According to one web site, Ao Nam Mao’s distinguishing feature is that it is a populated place, but I don’t think that quite does it justice.
Far from feeling isolated, though, it’s just a ten minute songthaew ride to Ao Nang via the inland roads, or for much more fun take a long-tail boat around the coast via the stunning Rai Leh peninsula, which I’ll show you in my next post. Our hotel faced onto the beach, and this time I think I’ll let the pictures do the talking to show you how our first morning looked.
Nice photos, not a tourist in sight! Do you live in Malaysia now?
The tourists were all around at Ao Nang getting their hair braided – this beach was wonderfully quiet, with the regular long-tail boats being the only disturbance.
[…] visa, so we’ve made plans to visit Chiang Mai next week, but first we’ve come back to Ao Nam Mao in Krabi for a few […]