Giving one last look at Phuket as we crossed the bridge taking us to the mainland, I just gave a deep sigh, it did not feel like I was REALLY leaving. I am on my way home, and just saying it felt wrong.
The bus that took us to Krabi was a small mini van, and it was packed. People were sitting on each other’s laps and bags and backpacks were squashed and squeezed in every nook and cranny. The majority of the bus was filled with Russian people. They were very loud, shouting at each other and just being obnoxious. The one boy was playing on his ipad with Gangnam Style blaring on repeat for the whole 3 hours on the bus. We finally arrived in Ao Nang, and just in time too because if I had to sit through another performance of “Hey sexy ladies” complete with Russian grunts and groans I would have probably thrown the kid’s ipad out the window.
From Ao Nang we had to catch a longtailboat to Tonsai. Tonsai and Railay are two small beaches on the coast of Krabi, it is still part of the mainland but because of the surrounding cliffs it is not accessible by road and one has to take a boat to get there. It feels like you are on an island because of this.
As we sailed around the cliffs from Ao Nang to Tonsai the most beautiful beach came into view. It was low tide so we could not reach the coastline, instead we had to walk on the rocks and coral towards the beach, which was quite a difficult task with my huge backpack.
Tonsai was small with very few places to sleep/eat or party. We booked into the first place we could find just so we can put our heavy backpacks down. There was no cellphone reception and no internet either, it was amazing. It was quickly becoming very dark and we decided that we needed to go explore a bit.
We left our little bamboo bungalow and headed down to the beach area for nice dinner and a couple of beers. We heard that there are a lot of rock climbing day trips so we decided to go to bed early so we can do some rock climbing the next day.
We woke up at about 11 o’clock and realised that we missed the rock climbing excursion because they leave early in the mornings depending on the tides. This was a blessing in disguise because it gave us a chance to explore both Tonsai and Railay that day.
We spent the whole day swimming and hiking on the mountain trails between the two beaches. We found some caves and also did a little rock climbing of our own. It was a perfect chilled day.
That night we had some amazing pizzas at a restaurant which was underneath a huge overhanging rock cliff. After dinner we went to the beach with some brandy and eventually started talking to a group of Brits. We had a fun night with them and eventually ended up (for some reason my nights always end up like this) swimming in our undies with florescent plankton. I am so glad that my cousins could experience this for themselves because the plankton are not always around and trying to explain the awesomeness of such an occurrence really does not do it justice.
One of the British girls nearly drowned because she laughed too much at our names. It is proper Afrikaans names but when you pronounce it in English it does sound strange I guess. My one cousin’s name “Wimpie” completely cracked her up. In Afrikaans it is pronounced Vimpi but I guess if you say it in English it sounds like “wimpy”, as in “That is a wimpy kid”.
So after awkwardly trying to explain our heritage whilst in our undies we decided that it was time to go to bed because the next day a lot of traveling lays ahead. I will miss Tonsai.
Thank you to everybody that voted for my blog. I am officially one of the finalists and I am going to the next round. 100 Blogs were chosen world-wide and now it has to be reduced to only 16! Keep your fingers crossed. 
