A brief glimpse of life as a backpacker in the south of Thailand

Dton Sai beach in southern Thailand is only accessible by a longtail boat from Krabi and when you're over there, there's only electricity from a generator that isn't started until sun down. It's a quiet, relaxing beach of backpackers and rock climbers with little more than a couple restaurants, guesthouses, and bars along the beach. There happens to be a new internet shop on the beach but the price is too expensive and the connection too slow to make it worth it. Phones only work along the water's edge. Secluded from any worries of the rest of the world, this beach is the perfect place to relax and not worry about sitting around relaxing, doing nothing. After all, aside from serious rock climbing, there's nothing else to do.
For non-climbers like myself, the rock climbers sneaking up the rock faces is another thing to watch while hiding in the shade from the dangerously hot sun. Standing at the base of the rock where they climb, I see no possible way to get my increasingly lazy butt up the wall. But for them there are slight cracks and edges to grip and grab all the way to some invisible finish line. (Notice the climber in the bottom left of the picture.)
The views from the beach make doing nothing all that much easier. Even the rock climbers sometime skip a climb in order to sit and relax instead, staring off into the islands floating in the horizon. Even this picture does them little justice however. Their size is enormous. From the beach they look huge but in kayak up along the waves breaking against the limestone they seem impossibly big.
I met up with Hale and Taraneh on the island (it's a beach but since it's inaccessible by land I feel like it's an island and consistently and incorrectly call it an island). We caught several windy sunsets on the beach but on this day as the sun dropped through the clouds and behind the round, steep mountains, it turned the sky, the clouds, and everything else a color we'd never seen before. With the breeze so strong and the sky turning strange hues of orange I (again, incorrectly) thought a storm could be headed our way. But slowly the sunset faded to blackness, exposing thousands of stars that only come out when in the middle of nowhere, away from any light pollution.
After Dton Sai beach and a similar trip to Ko Phi Phi, Taraneh and I took off to Khao Lak, a town on the Andamen coast where I used to live and volunteer nearly two years ago. I was able to visit old friends and go to the old places I used to hang out.For $5 a day we rented a motorbike and drove it to different beaches, waterfalls and mountains. Here, just outside Khao Sok National Park, I stand looking extra-cool with my bike helmet. The park remains the one place in the province I regret not being able to explore but the legions of leeches living there somehow make me feel alight about it.

This waterfall is so tall it's impossible to capture it in a single shot and still show its size. I've been there several times and have yet to take a beautiful picture that captures the height of the falls. Its beauty remains, like so many other things while traveling, in the moment we were there and, if anything, it was ruined by running around trying to capture it with the camera instead of just sitting down and enjoying it.
Showing up unannounced at my old school during school break was a long shot to see some old friends but it ended up there was an area-wide soccer, er... football, tournament being held. I was able to meet up with a small group of my former students, as well as the gym teacher. Then I was forced to play football in the opening game. I really suck, but it was all for fun, the fat, un-athletic men versus the women, in a goofy game to start off the tournament. The women grabbed us and ran with the ball, throwing it into the goal while another woman tackled the goalie.
These few pictures are only a tiny glimpse of the week-long tour we took of the south of Thailand, but they show some of the highlights of what was an extraordinarily relaxing 7 days. There are few times in life (at least for most) when one can see a sunset every single night, usually relaxing beach side, digging their feet in the sand and sipping on a beer. The evenings were decided on a whim at sunset and the following day usually held some plan but always with the option of letting another adventure serendipitously take us in a different direction altogether.