Bangkok,Thailand to Koh Ngai, Thailand …..fly, taxi and longtail

November 4th, 2018

A beautiful morning in Bangkok, a solid breakfast and our stay at the Old Capitol Bike Inn is over…..

The owner sees us off and in short order we are at Don Mueang airport, a secondary airport used by Air Asia and Nok Air. A 1/2 hour taxi drive….fixed fare this time 400THB (16 CAD)…efficient and economic !

Today we are off to Koh Ngai an island in Krabi Province, which is south of Bangkok in the southern Andaman Sea >> see interactive map below. We are flying on Nok Air to Trang (about 1.5 hours), then by taxi to Pakmeng Pier from whence a longtail boat is taking us directly (we hope), to the beach in front of Coco Cottage, our home for the next five nights.

A no frills flight (1x150ml bottle of water = 2 sips) on a well used, packed 737, which included several small ones providing us with a screaming serenade for a good part of the flight. Trang Airport is small and our luggage appeared as soon as we reached the arrival area……pretty good at 110 CAD for both of us.

Scooped up our stuff and  in the arrivals area spotted our driver, hard to miss a guy in a neon tie dye shirt holding up a sign with ones’ name on it, big welcoming smile and we are off in his Pajero with Bob Marley tunes getting us into beach mode  ……45 minutes later he announces we are at Pak Meng Pier and passes us off to the “Captain” of our boat.

Without any further ado, we literally jump on the longtail >>> these are the go to boats in this part of Asia, think war canoe with a car engine and a super long shaft + 2 bladed propeller….. and in a cloud of diesel fumes we are off. No communication save for the roar of the engine, smooth seas, although there are ominous looking clouds over the mainland shore, but luckily no rain and some nice vistas along the way…

….45 minutes later we are in sight of the Coco Cottage beach. Here is our driver in action…

The boat is maneuvered as close as possible to the coral studded shoreline, some 150 meters offshore …low tide, that’s as far as we are going. We are ready: dressed in shorts and water shoes, over the side we go and to the beach > hotel staff hump the big bags. Now that was a SMOOTH transfer.

Check-in with the regulation welcome drink and we are in our cottage by 13:30 !! Some pics of our digs and the ocean out front……not often are we oceanfront and this definitely rates as a “splurge” accommodation on this trip, albeit no TV but ok WIFI.  Although one has to keep this in perspective, on our trip through the USA in 2017 some of the motels cost significantly more and the ambience was somewhere around zero on a scale of 1 to 10 (great)….so yes we are pleased.

A short walkabout the property as well as on the beach and it’s time for cocktails and dinner…

Nice dinner at the restaurant and we retire feeling pretty good about life….