Skip to main content

Bang Bao, Koh Chang


I went to Koh Chang on the advice of my brother. Good advice. Though talking to the owner of where I am staying, he wouldn't recognise the place if he came back now.

It's the low season so there are not too many people around. I'm staying in a little wooden hut on top of a cliff just on the outside of Bang Bao which is quieter still. At night it is quieter still, just myself, the owner and his family, 2 labs, 3 cats and the infinite sound of the ocean. Which is why I'm pretty stoked that I managed to swap the *shitest novel Stephen King ever wrote for Dostoevsky's 'The Brothers Karamazov'. It should keep me occupied for a while.  A very rare thing to find a decent novel in a hostel bookswap - usually it's Dan Brown, Tom Clancy, Andy McNab or Stephen King or German.

I quite like Bang Bao, even though it's a tourist village it's worlds apart from Phuket. I've walked down the main drag a few times ( a pier in this case) and no one has offered to sell me a suit yet.

The first thing I learnt about riding scooters in Thailand is that Thai helmets are not made for Schumann heads.  The second is that you don't follow trucks up hill, they have a tendency to not quite make it and start rolling back down. So i spent the day riding around the island, ignoring the beaches (beached az) and seeking out little waterfalls and fishing villages.

After that it rained. a lot. and I didn't do to much more. Did go 'fishing' though. I had more luck fishing for gold fish from a second story hotel balcony using nothing but dental floss, a safety pin and hot chips. Needless to say I didn't catch anything. Ended up fishing on the end of a pier in what was probably less than two feet of water, if only because the view was pretty amazing and the two dogs from the guest house took pity on me and kept me company.


* It's also the only Stephen King novel I have ever read but he seems quite popular and the Shawshank redemption is quite a good movie so have to take it on good faith that anything else he has written is better than 'The Cell'.
Labels:
Location: Ko Chang Tai, Ko Chang, Trat, Thailand

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Amasya

Lonely Planet suggested that Amasya is one of the prettiest towns in Turkey. Set in a mountain valley with a river running down the middle, I couldn't agree more. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves when I eventually post them. Once again the weather was perfect and it hadn't snowed here at all which was good because I had a lot of walking to do. It was a strange town. Mostly because it was one of the more modern towns I had come across, it almost had a cosmopolitan feel to it. But then there would be a horse and cart parked in the street. Most people spoke some English. They would come up to me (blond hair = foreigner), especially children and say hello, welcome, what is your name? where are you from? but that would be it as if that was as far as their grasp on the English language would go. This was excellent but as the conservation wasn't going to go any further (my Turkish matches their English) it made for a weird silence until one of us went on our way. I d...
Post a Comment
Read more

Torun

The train ride from Warsaw to Torun was a little different as I spent the entire journey in the Cargo carriage, old west stole away style. I would like to say that this made it more exciting but it really didn't. The train was full and even though I had a ticket with a seat number and everything on it this really wasn't enough for rather large man who was in my seat and was two thirds of the way through a six pack (at 8 in the morning no less). The conductor wasn't getting paid enough to care so I found myself sitting on my backpacker surrounded by bikes and other unfortunate souls who were unlucky enough not to score a seat. My first problem with the Hostel I stayed at in Torun was that the directions were from 'a' train station, just not 'THE' train station. What was a 5 minute walk was actually 50. Once there I was greeted by no one. A few knocks on the door, a yell up stairs, a ten minute wait while looking through my guide book for some where else and f...
Post a Comment
Read more

Al Hudayda

I asked the hotel manager in Manakhah about getting to Al Hudayda. He assured me I just had to catch a taxi to Al Magraba on the main road and wait for a taxi to pass by. And so I waited. And waited. And waited but of course taxis don't leave Sana'a until full so I wasn't having much luck. Not that I minded much. I just sat in a road side cafe drinking tea,watching what was going on around me and answering the same three questions to anyone that cared to ask. With the help of a local I eventually managed to hitch a lift as far as Banjil. Turned out for the best really. Its must more comfortable on the bends when you have the back seat of a land rover to yourself. The drive out of the mountains along a wadi was quite impressive but once out of the mounatins the drive to Banjil and the shared taxi to Al Hudayda from there was like the drive from anywhere to Port Augusta. Long, flat, hot, featureless, boring. During the day Al Hudayda is dead. There might have been a bit going...
Post a Comment
Read more