Sun, Sea, Salt, Sand, Sunburn, plus 397 Steps

We had the most fantastic non-cycling day ever! Business first, we dropped off the bikes at a bike shop to get our drive-trains cleaned. We didn’t want Randy to miss out on beach time so we insisted on the help of a bike shop.

We headed to the beach within walking distance of our hotel and got ourselves massages on the beach. AMAZING! Oweeeee…awwwwww…ooohhhh… didn’t know how much we needed those (wanted those, actually)! All limbered up, we were ready for the plunge into the sea & salt water. Jellyfish shmellyfish, we’re not giving up a single ocean moment due to some little round globular-with-no-brain. There were no beach chairs to be found so we just lay our belongings on the shoreline edge. We were quite literally the only people swimming as far as the eye could see. We floated up & down with the gentle waves thinking nothing could be better!

Better happened! It happened when we decided on a TukTuk ride 6km to another beach, Ao Ma Nao near the air force base. Beach chairs! Beautiful outcroppings of rock (mini mountains)! Beer for Randy! The whole beach scene was there. We couldn’t get our bums into that water fast enough. Pure bliss! Soft sand, little miniature crabs building sand-homes on the sandy beach, and the water was luxuriously warm! We just lay there floating on the salty water’s surface thinking we are in paradise. (Hua Hin…..forget about it! THIS is the place to be!) It was so lovely we couldn’t stop frolicking long enough to even re-apply sunscreen. Randy was so enamoured he totally forgot sunscreen. We all got burned…some worse than others.

At one point while floating, a group of young men all waded & jumped into the sea nearby. One struck up a conversation and we learned they were from the military base. He was super interested in hearing about where we were from (as most Thais seem to be). Then he went off to play with his buddies. We noticed them doing what all young men do with their beach buddies—bury one of their mates alive in the sand. They encased him in sand with some “special features”—like boys tend to do. I’ll leave it at that….(it was funny, we admit—you’ll have to zoom in on the photo for more information)

Burnt & freckled, with salty sticky hair and nothing but happiness glowing all around us, we finally had to extract ourselves from the ocean and nab a TukTuk ride to retrieve our bikes at 5:00. The driver was a real hoot! Despite the language barrier all of us (including her) were laughing our heads off by the time we reached our destination. Laughter is a truly universal language, and we loved that ride! We’ll remember it forever.

We wanted to climb the big humongous stairway to the top of the hill to visit Wat Khao Chong Krachok. Well, two of us anyways….Randy had no interest in sweating buckets to climb high into the sky for a good view. Deana and I however….we were going up! There were monkeys all around the base of the stairs and all the way up—all 397 stairs (estimated, of course). We’d heard we shouldn’t carry any loose items, that they might try to snatch them. So we made ourselves look like we had purpose in our movements and walked right by those monkeys.

We saw the sunset from way up high in the sky, then returned to ground level where Deana got another $4 neck & shoulder massage, and Randy and I foraged for yummy things to eat at the night market.

Trying to decide if we should extend our stay in paradise another day, we decided that despite it being a real treasure, by sticking around we might just miss the next treasure down the unknown road ahead…. We’ll roll out tomorrow.