Prachuap Khiri Khan

Don’t recognize this town?? It isn’t much of a tourist town. We just stayed here for a couple of nights to break up our trek from Bangkok to our first Thai Islands. We found a 3 hour bus here and booked a couple of nights at the biggest hotel in town – the Prachuap Grand Hotel. The bus ride turned out to be 5 hours – not 3, and they dropped us off on the highway, instead of taking us into town. We weren’t in the mood for a 1.5 mile walk… with our bags…. in the Thai heat…. so we looked sad on the side of the road until someone took pity on us. A guy ran back to his house to get his tuk-tuk and gave us a $3 ride into town. (One guy was trying to convince us to ride on the back of his scooter – with our rollie bags and backpacks. Just couldn’t see that working out real well).

After settling in, we walked to the waterfront to see our first beach in Thailand. It was not what we had expected. The wind was blowing super hard and the waves were looking like Oregon or Washington State ocean waves crashing against the boardwalk. Apparently there was a monsoon off shore and this town was getting hit hard. Some of the sidewalk walls were getting knocked down because of the large waves and a lot of the townspeople were out to see the damage. We found a beachfront restaurant for some good seafood where we could watch the action with the waves.

The next morning we went to check out the hotel’s breakfast buffet. This was not your normal American Travelodge assortment of hard boiled eggs, blueberry muffins and ridiculously small bagels. They had all sorts of Thai dishes, soups, salads, and even a candy buffet that they called the “Diabetes Corner”. Vegas can learn some stuff from this place.

The wind was much calmer than the previous day so we decided to walk along the beach to the Buddhist temple overlooking the town. It was a much prettier town now that the monsoon effects were dying down and we were hoping to see some monkeys that were reported to hang out on the 367 steps up the hill to the temple.

There were more than a few monkeys. There were a few hundred. At the base of the hill we saw some aggressive monkeys fighting each other and lunging at people. One little monkey charged at us until M shrieked at it. One guy gave us a bunch of rocks to throw at them in case they got too close to us. Another lady gave us some bamboo sticks and showed us how to bang them against the ground to scare them away. The sticks and rocks didn’t seem to scare them that much. We did make it most of the way up the stairs but it was a little nerve wracking at times. Because we were on a stairway, you couldn’t really run away. The monkeys were hanging out on the railings in many places and on the ground and you just had to step through them. Most of the older bigger ones were pretty mellow but you never knew when you would find an aggressive younger one. Monkeys are really cool… but they also can be scary.

We saw the view from 3/4 of the way up but decided we didn’t care about the temple enough to fight through the last gang of monkeys so we came on down unscathed. It was still only 10am so we decided to walk the waterfront and see if we could see a different group of monkeys on the other side of town. The town is home to a Thailand Air Force base and after walking a couple of miles across town, the guards wouldn’t let us walk through their base. So, we hailed another tuk-tuk to take us across the base and across the runway to the park with the “monkey monument”. These monkeys are Dusky Langor Monkeys and were much calmer than the Macaques monkeys on the other side of town. They have white circles around their eyes so people call them the glasses monkeys but we thought they looked like Googly Eyes so we called them the Googly Eyed Monkeys. We fed them some baby corn that one of the guards gave us and we didn’t get the fear of the death that the other monkeys had given us. One of them had an orange baby hanging on her the whole time. We didn’t see any monkey fights and they all seemed to get along.

Next Stop is Koh Tao. Our first real Thai Island.