Discovery Cruise 6 Day / 5 Night

“And “WOW” was the only word that Peter could manage to get out of his mouth.”

Day 2

“I never knew until last night that sleeping on the boat can be this good. Hey, this doesn’t look like Koh Pak Bia,” I said to whoever was listening to me at the dining table that next day.

“Yeah, I would say so myself but look at the time. It is almost noon.

“And no we are not at Pak Bia anymore, we are somewhere off Ao Nang in Krabi, and guess that the others have already left us two,” replied Peter, my roommate, as he was pointing at the dinghy loaded with the other cruise members sailing towards what is called Chicken and Poda Island.

“That’s okay. They will come back for us later,” indifferent, I told Peter as I dug my fork deep into my brunch.

The crew actually came back to pick us up about fifteen minutes later to join the others on the beach where a serious morning workout, at least for me, began.

The magnificent Railay Beach is located on a peninsula cut off from the mainland by a massive limestone mountain. One as such can only get to Railay by boat so, unlike the others, it is not swamped by the mainland crowd, street vendors, souvenir stands, and all that. At Railay, nature in other words, has remained intact while making just about enough room for the influence from the outside to blend.

First, we went to Diamond Cave. From the outside, it looks like a typical cave, led in by a little thin passage. In single file, we squeezed and zigzagged through the passage, and in less than thirty seconds, voila, standing in front of us was a cave a size of a building.

Look inside Diamond Cave

Click here to open the panorama

“Have we been shrunk or the cave is really that big?” A scene from the movie “Honey, I Shrank the Kids” popped up in my brain. And “WOW” was the only word that Peter could manage to get out of his mouth.

Diamond Cave is just totally amazing. If one has ever wondered what it is like to be inside a volcano, this I would recommend.

Out from the cave, we began to half-trek half-walk through and around the peninsula, trying to make friends with lizards, monkeys, and what-have-you. But then I spotted something, a western man in tights, shirtless, in the middle of a blank cliff about a hundred meters in front of us.

“Quite crazy, huh? Do you think you want to try?” asked Jimmy, our Swedish cruise director, as he went on to tell us how popular Railay is among the avid and perhaps the world’s best rock climbers these days.

“Thanks, but no thanks, Jimmy. It’s too easy for me,” I was particularly proud of my reply while the others just giggled. Really, I had no idea why.

On the way back to the dinghy, we cut across to an adjacent beach, Phra Nang Beach. There is another amazing cave, believed by fishermen to be inhabited by the Princess Goddess or Phra Nang in Thai.

Back on the yacht, the first thing I did was dashing to the cooler to fledge a bottle of ice-cold Phuket Island Lager while the crew was beginning to prepare for our dinner.

The dinner was superb as usual. And again, we sat there around the bar on the fly deck, talked and talked, taking in as much as we could of what the nature has to offer, and for me and Peter, the green-bottled beer.

Of course, we could have gone back on Railay to party at, the crew recommended, the Reggae or the Sunset Bar. But again, ” thanks, but no thanks, I had all I need in the world here on Jim Jam,” I told Jimmy.