A tour in the surroundings of Pak nam pran

Another day without wind. What to do what to do.

During times like that, annoying things get stuck in your brain like a virus eventhough you really don’t want to.
Take a minute to listen to these two ice cream songs of the two major competitors here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmM8l4Gowr4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUVHqe7AJGM

If you listen to these too much, you’ll end up whisteling the tune sooner than you know it! Decide for yourself which one you like the most.  

How hard can it be to make a hard boiled egg? Apparently it’s tough. I guess people here in Thailand don’t like their eggs well done, or hard boiled. Carlos brought in 6 of them in total before he got the hint, and eventually asked for fried eggs, to avoid having a liquid yellow.

 

 
After a great breakfast we went to the little woody hill to have a look at the view. I got a chance to make my best impression of Tarzan. :-)

A nice view from the top of the hill at the beach where we have been kitesurfing a lot, and where we also teached and had our practical exams for the instructors training.
A monkey passed by to say hi to us as well, when we climbed down.

 

  
Some kilometers south of there, we found this beach side restaurant that had really great food. We were the only guests in the small place, and they placed a table right at the beach for us. Still in the shade of course.
The view of the sea and some islands made it a really relaxed setting.

 

After dinner we went for a coffee. This also gave us the chance to pick up the latest edition of the thai magazine “Pop teen”. What a treat.
Why is it that the girls in this magazine pose with a surprised and confused “I got no freaking clue of what’s going on” face? Is that some kind of craze going on here I don’t know about? Anyhow, here’s my best impression.

 

After coming home I had my first thai massage. 2 hours of hard core pain. :-) Nah, maybe not, but it was a bit more rough than I thought, I had no clue they used elbows and knees, but it was good! It left me feeling really relaxed. And it was cheap too. 300 bath for 2 hours! How is it possible?

Khao sam roi yot national park

I woke up really early, before sunrise, unable to sleep. I thought as well I’d make use of the opportunity to go down to the beach and see the sunrise.

There was not too many people there, just a few sand crabs and a few birds. Really calm and quiet.

After this, I definitely couldn’t go back to sleep so I went for a coffee at one of the restaurants that I, and the others have come to like.

Passed breakfast, Grey passed by and asked if anyone were up for a day trip to the Khao sam roi yot national park. There was absolutely no wind that day and no chance of kitesurfing, so it sounded like a great idea to me, and it was.

We took the scooters down the coast, it took a while to get to the first checkpoint (where you enter the park) that was about 40 km away. We passed lots of great nature and village life on the way.

 

The first stop on the trip was a massive cave in one of the lime stone hills. We rented a lamp for 50 bath, climbed up through the forest to the cave entrance, got in there, and started to explore it. It was really big, and the trail we took was something like 200 meters long, with small narrow passages, big halls, and very damp air. A bit further in we encountered a group of 50 bats hanging from the roof. Quite cool!
Apart from the air being damp, it smelled like someone smoked weed in there, or maybe that is just what bat shit smells like.

This kids sandal was one of the casualties the cave caused. I found it about half way through. I hope the kid got carried down the mountain again, as there were some pretty sharp rock on the way down.

Finally, the exit. We got out and headed back for the entrance to get back down to our scooters. On the way down, we heard some danish tourists crying out for help, “hello! do you know the way down?!”. Well of course we did! Not the shortest though, we took them on a pretty long detour through the dense forest. At times, you almost had to fight your way thorugh it, that’s how dense it was.

       
Once back on our scooters we continued on towards a beach that we had seen on the map. On the way we passed this temple that was under renovation, and took a detour in to the village to catch a glimpse of how the people lived. An old lady passed by, pulling a carriage that seemed at least 100 years old. It made me feel like I was in a different age.

 

    
Finally, we made it to the beach. It was awesome! White sand, palm trees and practically deserted. The peace, beauty and tranquility of it is hard to describe with words. It was just simply stunning.

There were some traces of human activity apart from the restaurant located a little bit further inland. Something that looked like a traditional hut and someone’s left shoes in a tree.

 

 

 

After lunch we just continued on down the road and got to another temple. This one had a much nicer setting though between two lime stone hills covered with lush forest, and it was guarded by a hoarde of long tailed macaque (monkeys). 

 

 
Look out for who?

A little bit further down the road there was a trail to get up on one of the hills to a view point. 15 minutes and 132 altitude meters of climbing later, we reached the top and this magnificent view. We stopped there for at least 20 minutes to take it all in. The thai landscape is incredible with all the nature and its intense colors.
In the mid bottom of the picture you can see the temple from the earlier pictures.

We got down from the hill about when it was dark to make the long drive back home. You wouldn’t believe the amount of mosquitoes you get here at night. I must have killed at least a hundred of them, my t-shirt was just filled with them!

 
At the end of the day I had yet again the dish that has now become my favourite. Fried squid in red curry. Pak nam pran is known as squid city, the fishing boats are pulling up huge amounts each night, so it is really fresh and tasty.
The pinapple juice was great too, there’s a countless number of pineapple fields around here.

A quite quiet life by the beach

We had some good wind the last couple of days. It gave me plenty of time to practice on my back rolls which are getting better by the day.
It is really quiet out here, not much people around and not much noise either. I usually wake up at around 7 with all the animals making noise. I don’t know what they are, but there’s so many strange sounds going on. It’s a really cool way to start the day, it makes me smile. :-) At home though, I can get pissed off sometimes by the seagulls when they were screaming in the morning. I wonder if the Thais feel the same way about their animals when they’re waking them up.

So, that’s what’s been going on here. Surf by day, hang around at the beach, and barbecue at night. 

This puppy has been hanging around the beach for the last weeks. Really cool, bites anything that moves :-)  There’s also been countless occations to enjoy a Chang after surf.

 

Here’s Eck, showing how it is done on the barbecue. We had chicken for 3 days in a row after this, and there were still left overs!

 
I don’t really trust the kitchen we have. It is quite disgusting. There’s a very high risk of someone (non human that is) already eating, or living in your food when you take it so you have to check carefully. Luckily heat kills most of the bad things.

Becoming IKO certified kiteboard instructor with IKA

“ITC Water. English”, is the quite crypthic name of the course that is turning messy unstructured kite surfers into ready confident instructors. Ika, our examinor, greeted us on Monday at 8 at the surf shop, and we continued in quite high pace during the whole week until we finished on Friday. I felt like I was back at work, almost. At least it was at a comparable intensity. We had lot’s of theory about technical stuff related to kite surfing and psychology of teaching as well as some practice on real life students, which was really fun and valuable. We got pretty lucky with the weather, and had strong winds all days. Too strong actually as it was a problem to get small enough kites to the students for them to practice, as well as the shore break got pretty intense with all the wind.

Practical lessons and topics at the beach. From the left is Ika, behind Ika is Julia, and then Nier, Harry, Jos and Carlos. The only participants not in the picture is Gray and me.

 

Devotion, courage, sacrifice. Yes, this was definitely needed during the course. Some kind of Thai red bull.

 

We went studying at one of the cafés here in Pak nam pran during the morning. Thanks to this detour I almost failed the exam, as we arrived 1 hour late for the practical teaching on the beach. Carlos convinced us we were supposed to start at 10, when it was actually 9.. :-)
Anyhow, I had a really bad start that day. That, together with difficult conditions and not having the right gear available on the beach made it difficult to please my first student who actually got much bigger interest in drinking beer than learing how to fly a kite.
Luckily I got another chance to teach the day after, with the right gear, and a student that actually was interested in learning the sport. That lesson, and some sweet talking, helped me to pass.

 

Some of the things in the course required a lot of work. Like the boat license course, which I didn’t have, and therefore had to do during the night. We went to a restaurant with WiFi nearby to complete the online training, which ended up to be really heavy. So much that we stayed until the owners politely asked us to pay and leave.
In any case if you’re ever at a place so late that the watch dog gives up and fall asleep, then it’s probably time to get going. Here’s Gray at the bar, paying for one of his countless fruit juices. I think he had at least 3.

 

And here it is!!! The reward for a week of sweat.
I learned a lot of new stuff and filled in a lot of blanks, so yes, I consider myself a much safer knowledgeable kite surfer after this week, as well as a capable teacher. I’m glad I did this, not only for the knowledge, but also for meeting a lot of great people.

 

 
Graduation party! On Friday night after the completion of the course, we all went to Hua Hin to have dinner. Later on we went for a couple of beers at the bar street. It ended up being a pretty long night out..
The party had really good momentum and was great fun, and I could have gone on for much longer regardless of being more sleepy than a zombie as I studied until 1 am the night before. :-)
I was contemplating going home at around 4 am, and after a thai lady boy grabbed my nuts while I was having a water outside the seven eleven, I decided it was the right thing to do.
So half an hour later we were all in a taxi back to the surf shack where I crashed until 11 the day after. In spite of being even more tired the day after, I managed to complete my first couple of back rolls!!

 

 
Take a look at this dog, guarding groceries at the restaurant in Hua Hin. Do  you notice that he’s sleeping with the nose in a bowl with ice cubes? Maybe he had something spicy to eat. :-)