A few days in Krabi, Thailand

We added a weekend and a public holiday to John's regular Thai business trip and visited Krabi, a seaside resort town in southern Thailand.  We chose this spot so John could do some scuba diving.  We traveled there just as the season was turning; monsoons start in late May, so we saw lots of clouds and had some rain showers, but nothing that stopped us from enjoying our visit.  And there were no crowds anywhere!

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We looked on Tripadvisor and Hotels.com to find a place to stay and chose the Pakasai Resort.  We wanted to be close to town and restaurants, so it ended up being a good choice. (There are luxurious stand-alone resorts with their own beaches, but they seemed too isolated for us this time)

One of the specialties of this resort was its "green" promise and local feel...the rooms are built up the side of the mountain and there are no elevators.  We chose a top room with a view, so it was a climb of 150 stairs to our room!

John got to do his day of diving while I shopped and then relaxed with a foot massage and pedicure (total $12).  The shopping there was no different from any other Thai souvenir shop, but the views were wonderful:

And (note to our son Jimmy) we found a hammock on the beach!

I was intrigued by the makeup of the beach; next to the fine sand there were swaths of crushed seashells.  Take a look close up:

We took a bike ride along the beach and came upon the National Park headquarters:

This "spirit tree" honored with colored scarves and spirit houses:

And a busy marina with big and small tour boats lined up for customers:

A few more sights around town:

These signs were everywhere; it is quite close to where the big tsunami of 2004:

Everyone is getting into the gluten free craze:

Also gluten free:

This town has gone upscale in its local "baht buses," the open air taxis for bar-hopping:

Our last evening there we dined at a mountainside restaurant.  They picked us up in their van and we were treated to an open air kitchen great food and a sunset-side table:

When I came up to take a photo, this cook smiled and said, "Ready?" and threw something in the big wok that suddenly flamed up huge!

We finished with John's favorite dessert, sticky rice with mango:

 We flew back to Bangkok, hopped on the Airport Rail Link and used our 4 hour layover to visit the new Platinum Wholesale Mall.  Picked up a few bargains and headed back to the airport for our 3 hour flight home.  We just missed the military takeover...I wonder when we will get to Thailand again??