Adventures in Ang Thong Marine National Park #2
Ang Thong Marine National Park, Thailand, 2012-09-02 12:00 by Laerke
We sailed onto the beach at Samsao Island, there wasn’t a soul to be seen but I did spot a little hut that could be the ranger station and wandered up there. I yelled Sawadeekaa a few times before 3 young men popped their heads out – they looked beyond baffled. I tried to explain to them that we were here to camp, we had our own tent, and somebody should have called over from Wua Talap to announce our arrival, but they just looked at the ground. In the end we came to the conclusion that they probably didn’t speak English… So we just went over to what looked like the camp area set up our tent and encouraged the guys to go back to their TV, this worked out to everybody’s satisfaction.



Notice the natural arch in the background :)
Our dinner of to-go fried rice brought over from Wua Talap was served up in the evening. However it seems that storing friend rice in a plastic bag in the heat and sun all day isn’t the best idea. The fried rice had gone very slimy and sticky… Somehow Martin managed to eat most of his, while I resorted to eat some of our breakfast for the next morning. We slept well in our little tent until we were woken up by some strange sounds at 3 o’clock in the morning, we figured it was some animal sniffing around, maybe mice or rats that were after the left-over from our failed dinner – until we saw the silhouette of a man! We started talking a bit louder and making some noise to let him know we were awake and we saw nothing more of him, but it was a bit weird.

In the morning we discovered that some tiny bugs had invaded our bread for breakfast! We were not having the best of luck with food on this trip so far, we banged the bread on the table a bit and it seemed like the little bugs fell of – and then we ate it (the bread, not the bugs). You gotta do what you gotta do when you are out in the wild :)

We started kayaking back towards Wua Talap, but taking a different route this time. We stopped at a few deserted beaches along the way.



The beautiful rockface                Kayaking under an overhang
Back at Wua Talap first thing we did was to grab some lunch, we were pretty hungry by then. After that we did a trek to the Tham bua Bok cave, it was a hot but fun climb up with lots of crawling and a few ropes to help you get up the steepest parts. The cave itself was really cool, beautiful stalagmites in really odd shapes.




The next morning, after spending some quality beach time before the day-tripper boats came in, we headed up for another trek – to the island’s viewpoint. This is heralded by Lonely Planet as the most stunning vista in all of Thailand! It’s 500 meters of pretty treacherous trail and we were glad we had brought closed shoes with us, this wouldn’t have been all that fun in flip-flops I think. Despite there being a few clouds in the sky that kept the sun away, it was a hot, humid day. The climb was broken up by viewpoints every 100 meters. They only got more and more beautiful, egging us on to the top. When I saw what we had to do to get to the top viewing platform, I burst out laughing. We would have to cling for dear life to a thin rope laid out over sheer cliffs of sharp limestone outcrops plunging to the jungle and ocean below. But the view was so worth it! The sun came out and we got a perfect view over all the islands, it was like seeing a 3D topographic map of the national park, and we could easily see our kayaking route.


That afternoon we were picked up by the Orion boat again and headed back to Ko Pha-Ngan, what an adventure we had had! Ang Thong is now put on the list of some of the most beautiful places we have visited. But this place is slightly ruined by its popularity; it really is no fun to share the beach or the trail with hundreds of other people. We managed for the majority of time to avoid the crowds and that made this is great trip for us, if we had to have stayed with the tour boat our experience would have been a lot poorer.
Ang Thong did have one last surprise in store for us, as we were setting off on the boat with the sun slowly sinking behind us a group of dolphins were spotted! The boat stopped and we got to watch the dolphins play around the boat for a good while – what a perfect ending to our Ang Thong adventure.



The sun setting over Ang Thong National Park



The playful dolphins – they were hard to photograph