Boat rides & cave temples in Thailand
If you’ve been keeping up with the blog, you can see that we’re just checking off one country after another on this incredible trip! My last post covered the photogenic, Malaysian town of Penang. From there we sailed north and docked in Phuket, Thailand. (Pronounced poo-ket) We decided to do a tour at this port as many of the interesting things to see were a ways from our docking location.
Our tour took us north from Phuket to the province of Phang Nga, where we visited a temple that was actually built inside a cave. The entrance to the cave was crawling with these goofy little monkeys looking for handouts…and with all the visitors there, they certainly got them! Once inside the cave, it opens up into a very large area with a huge reclining Buddha and several seated Buddhas, all in vibrant gold. If you continue on, you get to a more narrow and inclined part of the cave where you can explore the interesting rock formations. We spent about an hour exploring and photographing here before moving on to our next stop.
We then got on a small boat and cruised around Phang Nga Bay, which is a national park and home to many small islands, the most famous of them being James Bond Island, named after the two films that were shot there. The island is tiny but amazing to look at, with giant rock spires shooting up out of the water. After cruising around for a while, we visited a floating village, which was interesting because the whole “town” was build over the water on dock-like platforms. There was a market, a school, restaurants and homes. It was all pretty rugged, of course, but it’s amazing to see how differently some people live.
Finally, we finished our tour with a delicious Thai lunch at a hotel in Phang Nga. You just can’t visit Thailand without having some of that amazing food!
Our next stop would be Myanmar (Burma) so more on that soon! For now, here are some of my images from Phang Nga:
