ROMANTIC ON RAILAY & CLIMBING ADVENTURES

For Valentine's Day this year, Alex and I headed over to Railay Beach for a romantic getaway. The following night, we had plans to camp at Tonsai Bay for our friend Jason's birthday, so we wanted to stay nearby, but also treat ourselves to a nice resort and play tourist for the evening. And boy, were we impressed! Railay is a very small peninsula off the coast of Krabi, accessible only by boat. West Railay is arguably the best beach I've been on in Thailand, it's completely surrounded by limestone cliffs (karsts, for those geology buffs out there) and it has spectacular sunset views. The beach is clean, the sand fine, and it's not overly crowded. . . It's perfection. Railay East is more of the hotel, restaurant and shop side, but is also fascinating because the tides are so drastic; at noon the waves are literally crashing on the sidewalk and you're getting soaked, six hours later it's a five minute walk out to barely dip your toes in.

But I digress, we stayed at a really nice resort called Sunrise Tropical on Railay East. (No, we didn't get paid to promote them, I just enjoyed my stay so much that I'd recommend it to anyone. Cheers to great customer service!) I was honestly sold by the welcome: we were given mysterious albeit delicious green fruit juice and a cool, lemony scented towel to wipe the travel sweat off. Our room was also incredible, with a giant balcony, plush robes and even a bathtub! You might laugh about my enthusiasm over the tub, but luxury is hard to come by on our teachers salary, and a tub is pretty rare to see in our usual Thailand hotels.


They even put our name on a welcome board! *easily impressed* Just outside the hotel at high tide Thailand loves everything tacky. We had a cheeky beer and sunset viewing on Railay West.


The next morning I was dying to check out this climb up to a view point that I had seen with my parents the last time we were here, but none of us were wearing proper footwear. This visit to Railay I dragged my sneakers the whole way, and I'm so glad I did.





We had to climb like this for 15 minutes to reach solid footing and the path to the view point! We were quite confident we could handle it though because we saw a Dad and his 10 year old coming down from it and he said it was easy. No, I wouldn't say it was "easy", but it was such a fun climb, and there were plenty of places to grab hold of and put your feet. Neither myself nor Alex are climbers in the slightest, so it was a bit challenging at times and we had to get our bodies into some weird positions to climb to the top. And at the end we were sweaty and covered in red clay but it was some of the most fun I've ever had. And was the view ever worth it . . .





It was incredible . . . these pictures are postcard worthy but they still don't do it justice.


After that we got lost in the jungle for a little bit trying to find the elusive "lagoon" promised on the map.





I can't even begin to describe how high up the trees and cliffs surrounding us were. At one point, it felt like we were in Jurassic Park; note the prehistoric-looking tree we came across. We did find the lagoon, it's the small blue part hiding in the photo of the two giant cliffs above. We didn't venture down though because it looked intensely steep and at this point we were still wondering if we'd make it down from the first climb up. Maybe next time!

Stay tuned for part two: camping on Tonsai the following night!