Category: 2023-01 Hanoi to Singapore

From Prachuap Khiri Khan, we took the train north to Hua Hin, where we had a five-hour wait for our sleeper train. The town used to be known as an exclusive holiday destination of the Thai royal family, but nowadays it’s a popular domestic and international holiday resort, with practically every major hotel brand represented along the very long beach. After a confusing transaction at the left luggage office in the train station (where we may have paid someone who didn’t actually work there), we headed off on foot to check out the beach. Even late in the day, it was pretty busy (and incredibly windy), but it did make a great spot for people watching and admiring the many kitesurfers off the beach.

Our next stop was Jek Pia, a local institution that has been in town for more than 50 years, where we continued a long tradition of ordering things that arrive on fire and then immediately regretting our choice. One of the ladies who was serving took us under her wing and came over to check up on us several times – she was simultaneously very maternal and extremely disapproving! She tutted in disbelief that we’d started our hotpot with just four pieces of pork and instead dumped the whole lot in – probably a good move or we’d have been there all evening. When I scalded myself on some hot broth, neither Oli or I were particularly perturbed as I do that kind of thing all the time, but she also witnessed it and was absolutely horrified. Enough was enough! She called out some orders and one of her staff came to confiscate our fire, leaving us just with our cooked food. We wanted to be offended that she didn’t trust us but we were actually quite relieved to have it off the table.

After quick trip around the night market in Hua Hin and then a long wait at the station, we boarded our sleeper train that would take us south towards the provincial capital Trang.

We arrived the following morning later than scheduled and had missed the first minibus to Pak Bara but managed to squeeze onto the second at 11.00, ready for a 13.30 ferry to the tiny island of Ko Lipe. But Ko Lipe wasn’t even our final destination – from the main jetty, we took another seriously bumpy tuk tuk across the island, and then a taxi boat across the water to the sparsely-habited, National Park island of Ko Adang.

Twenty-eight hours after leaving our hotel in Prachuap Khiri Khan, we hopped off the boat and onto our very own desert island.

Although Ko Lipe is also a part of Tarutao Marine National Park, it may as well not be, since it has been developed so extensively. In contrast, Ko Adang, a larger island of approximately 5 km by 6 km sitting just across the water, is mostly made up of jungle, peaks, empty white sand beaches and coral reefs. In one small corner, there’s a ranger station, small restaurant, camping area, and a series of little National Park bungalows, which is where we stayed. The bungalows weren’t remotely fancy, but that didn’t matter in the slightest when we were waking up to a gorgeous view of the Andaman Sea.

We got up early to take a short hike up to the peak overlooking our beach, about 225 m above sea level. There are three viewpoints, and from the third, we ate our breakfast with a beautiful view across to Ko Lipe. It’s such a tiny island and there were so many people on it – we had to keep reminding ourselves that not everyone is quite as unsociable as us and maybe they liked the company!

We spent the rest of our time on Ko Adang swimming, walking on the beach, gazing out at the sea from our terrace, and conducting repeated and very detailed budget planning meetings. I should probably explain the last one – somehow, despite estimating how much cash we might need for our few days on the island and adding some contingency, we realised as soon as we arrived that it was going to come down to the wire. By forgoing coffee (😧), planning what we would order for every meal based on price/calorie ratios, and replacing breakfast with the snacks we’d brought, we managed to scrimp and save enough for a luxury item: hiring two snorkels on our final day.

This was a bit of a highlight – the reef was gorgeous, with blue starfish, hundreds of neon-coloured fish and some spectacular corals. We did swallow quite a lot of seawater between us though, as we kept getting hysterical giggles at each other attempting to talk through our snorkels. It turns out the letter ‘b’ is particularly tricky, and don’t even attempt ‘fish’.

Being a National Park, the wildlife away from the reefs was also pretty cool. We spent a vast amount of time following crabs around the beach – they are fascinating creatures! We also saw plenty of lizards, crab-eating macaques (who, controversially, don’t eat much crab), spectacular schools of flying fish, and most exciting of all, some flying lemurs. This was a first for both of us, and while Oli thought they weren’t much to look at, I fell in love with their funny appearance – somewhere between a big bat, a koala and a sloth.

Perhaps the part of our plan that was most satisfying of all was that our island paradise also happened to be perfectly situated to cross by sea into Malaysia, via an easy ferry connection from Ko Lipe. We were pretty reluctant to leave, though – it’s not often we come across somewhere so perfectly unspoilt yet comfortable. We’ll be back one day!

Tips from us

We didn’t find a huge amount of information about Ko Adang online, so just in case you’re thinking of going (do!), I’ve popped a couple of pointers below:

It took us a couple of attempts to book our bungalow. We were able to check availability on the Department of National Park, Wildlife and Plant Conservation website but didn’t manage to make a reservation online (it sounds like this is a common problem). In the end, what worked was to ask our Thai-speaking guesthouse owner to call on our behalf (numbers in this article). She was passed around a bit but eventually spoke to someone who said they would check availability and call back that evening. Unfortunately, we were leaving town, but our next hotel called again and managed to make a reservation with just a first name and they were happy to accept payment in cash when we arrived.

We found this blog post really useful when planning our trip – it helped us decide that Ko Adang was a better choice for us than our original plan of Ko Tarutao. However, they mentioned that bungalows 1-6 all had a sea view, but actually we’d recommend avoiding Adang 5 as it’s set back behind the other bungalows. Adang 1-4 and 6-8 all have a lovely sea view, with the most direct views and greatest seclusion found in the lowest-numbered bungalows (but also the longest walk from the beach and restaurant). We stayed in Adang 6 and loved it.

Prepare for the bungalows to be fairly basic: cold water showers, no WiFi, electricity only between 6pm and 6am, and genuinely the hardest bed I’ve ever slept in – I’m not sure what we were sleeping on but it wasn’t a mattress as we know it. The only thing that caused us any kind of problem was the bed; it really was that hard. If you happen to be travelling with a yoga mat, it’ll come in handy! On the plus side, we had air conditioning, which was an unexpected treat.

There’s no WiFi at all on the island, but the mobile data connection was surprisingly good.

The restaurant doesn’t serve alcohol – not even beer! Apparently this is a recent development and it took us by surprise. One of the campers we met had popped over to Ko Lipe to stock up and the staff were happy for him to store his supplies in their giant cool box, so that might be an option if a cold beer is important to you.

Finally, remember to take enough cash for your time on the island (or you can pop over to Ko Lipe where there are ATMs, but we didn’t want to break the spell of our desert island by going somewhere busy!) The taxi boat from Ko Lipe was 100 baht per person from Sunset Beach or 200 baht per person from Pattaya Beach (where ferries arrive and depart), snorkels cost us 50 baht each to hire for the day, and I’ve popped photos of the restaurant menu with prices below. The portions weren’t huge but the food was tasty.

If you do make it there, enjoy – it’s a special place! And please do say hello to the flying lemurs from me.

After the sober sights of the last few days, it was time to continue on our path southwards and visit the catchily-named town of Prachuap Khiri Khan. This small town came highly recommended by Lonely Planet as being off the beaten track, our previous guesthouse owner had described it as unspoilt, and it received a glowing write-up from the same blogger couple who had loved Nong Khai, so we were pretty confident that we were onto a winner.

We boarded the open-windowed train bound for Bangkok, but hopped off after about two hours to change onto a southbound train. This required some planning and speed, since the train really didn’t stop for long at each station and they weren’t announced in advance. Thankfully, all our practice at Public Transit Roulette meant that we were ready! The train conductor seemed very surprised to see that we were on the move and wanted to know where we were going. Repeating “Prachuap Khiri Khan” three times because our pronunciation was so poor took quite a while, but eventually he understood and took great pride in telling us that there was a train heading in that direction in 40 minutes – well, we knew that, that’s why we were here! We thanked him anyway, and we were really amused to see him hanging off the train as it pulled out of the station, beaming at us and calling, “Remember, 40 minutes!”.

Our next train was scheduled to take five hours and we’d treated ourselves to second class in the hope of some air conditioning, but no such luck. It was another window-cooled train, and we were soon to learn that these are even more of an assault on the senses by night since this is when the bugs turn up!

When we eventually arrived in Prachuap Khiri Khan around 10pm, we were pretty tired and absolutely filthy from the open train windows, but we had just one more mode of transport to tackle before we could shower and sleep: a tuk tuk meets motorbike side car. I can confidently say it is one of the least comfortable forms of transport I’ve ever taken, but it got us safely to our destination with only moderate jarring of our backs and necks, so I won’t complain!

The next morning, we borrowed bikes from our hotel to get around town. Amazingly, these were free of charge and roadworthy (but the lock did jam shut later in the day, leaving passers by to assume we were attempting to steal them – you can’t have everything)! Our first destination was the local air base, because we’d read that we could show our passports to get access to the best beach in the area, which sat within the base. In reality, the guard seemed supremely relaxed about letting us pass and simply gestured us towards a neighbouring building where there was a book to sign in. There were no headers at the top of the page and no one to ask, so just as everyone previous had presumably done, we copied the person above and the errors continued down the page – I’m sure we wrote ‘beach’ in at least four of the columns! We hopped back on our bikes and cycled through the beautifully tended grounds – and then right across the runway!

As we pulled up at the beach, Oli turned to me and asked, “So is this the Thailand you’ve been searching for?” It really was!

After a day spent at the beach, we headed into town for a cycle along the promenade, which was an equally chilled affair.

The next day was the first of a multi-day journey that would take us nearly to the Malaysian border, but we couldn’t leave before picking up our laundry. Bizarrely, they had scrawled ‘Oli’ onto the label of every single item we gave them, and where the garment didn’t have a label, just straight onto the fabric with a permanent marker. We’ve had a few weird laundry experiences, but this has to be the strangest!

With that, it was time to bid farewell to Prachuap Khiri Khan to continue our journey south. It occurs to me now that we never did sign out of the air base, I do hope they’re not still looking for us…

Today, Kanchanaburi sits close to the end of the train line west of Bangkok, but during the Second World War it briefly connected Thailand to Burma (now Myanmar). So poor were the workers’ conditions that tragically more than 100,000 prisoners of war and civilians lost their lives during its construction, and thus this line became known as the Death Railway.

We took an early morning taxi across Bangkok to the old Thonburi station to meet up with the 07:50 train to Kanchanaburi. Travelling by rail was definitely slower than road, but it would have felt wrong to take the bus on a route with such historical significance.

Shortly after arriving in Kanchanaburi, we set off on an afternoon excursion to Hellfire Pass – a cutting through the rock necessary to avoid steep inclines on the railway. To get here, we first headed to the bus station, only to find out the (supposedly hourly) bus wasn’t for an hour and ten minutes, and as we sat there waiting in the baking heat, we discussed our hopes that this wasn’t going to turn into another disastrously-rushed trip like in Alerverdi, Armenia. Progress was slow when we finally began our 87 km journey towards Hellfire Pass, and I could see that we were getting further and further behind schedule. As we chugged along, Sara pointed at a few guesthouses and remarked that at least we’d have somewhere to stay the night if we missed the last bus home, and I could tell she was only half joking.

Arriving at Hellfire Pass, we were met straight off the bus by a chap who worked for the Office of Australian War Graves. As kind and helpful as he was, he couldn’t stop the museum from closing in fifteen minutes time, so he suggested (in the nicest possible way) that we get a move on. On top of that, he recommended that we were back at the bus stop in good time if we didn’t want to miss the last bus back to Kanchanaburi (which he explained was highly unpredictable and could arrive any time between in one and three hours’ time). To be on the safe side, this gave us a whole 45 minutes to explore the rest of the site!

At the museum, we learned the reason why it was nicknamed “Hellfire Pass”. One of the prisoners of war likened the view from the top of the cutting at night to something from Dante’s Inferno – with fires burning at intervals of 20 feet and shadows of forced labour moving through the darkness. Beyond the museum, we continued down some wooden steps onto the pass itself. The views from the pass across the mountains were stunning, which made it almost impossible to imagine how miserable it must have been to work on the railway. It was only once we continued along the pass and through the cutting that the scale of the operation became clear, having just learned about the basic tools that were available to create such a path through the mountain.

Fortunately for us (and unfortunately for the nearby guesthouses), we made it back to the bus stop in time for the last bus back to Kanchanaburi. At this point we were feeling like intrepid explorers who were very far from home, before meeting a chap at the bus stop from Weymouth, Dorset. Small world, as they say!

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The following day, we (more sensibly) spent the morning in Kanchanaburi, visiting its famous bridge and a couple of museums. The town’s rail bridge spans a nearby river, which was made famous by the book and subsequent film The Bridge on the River Kwai. However, there’s only one catch – this was the bridge, but this wasn’t the River Kwai. But after the success of said movie, tourists began the turn up in town looking for the River Kwai, so the Thai authorities ingeniously renamed the river in an effort to meet visitors’ expectations.

Sadly, the bridge’s tragic history didn’t end with its construction. In 1945, when news came that a bombing raid on the bridge was imminent, the occupying Japanese forces sent hundreds of prisoners of war out to line the bridge, ostensibly to prevent the raid. The tactic didn’t work, and the allied bomb destroyed the middle section of the bridge, and many more prisoners of war met their end here.

We returned to our guesthouse to find a concerned member of staff who called out to us even as we were still in the road: “Oliver, why you miss breakfast?!” I mean, she had a point – we’d paid for breakfast when we booked the room but since completely forgotten. Still, they were very kind not just to notice, but also to keep the breakfast out for long enough for us to enjoy a snack after our morning outing.

Our final stop in Kanchanaburi was the excellent Death Railway Museum, which really helped put everything we’d seen into context. We learned that while around 12,000 Allied prisoners lost their lives during the railway’s construction, a further 90,000 Asian labourers were also killed, most of whom were not recorded and left no surviving accounts. The working conditions for all workers were awful, but we learned about some of the factors that affected the survival rates in different camps, such as proximity to a clean water source, distance between the camp and work site, and the existence of effective administration on both the Japanese and prisoner of war sides. The museum sought to explain the reasons behind the brutal treatment of the railway workers, which worsened over time as the the Japanese chain of command put more and more pressure on those supervising the construction of the railway. It was no surprise that progress was slower than the schedule set by those in command, since the original inspection party of Japanese engineers had told their commanders that the topography was not suitable for a railway, but had been ordered to begin work regardless.

The museum also described how much of this information was learned via secret diaries and photographs that were buried with the dead, which were found later when their bodies were exhumed after the war. Most crushing of all, we learned how some prisoners of war felt ambivalent when the war finally came to an end, and struggled to return to previous relationships and careers as a result of their mental or physical condition.

British forces dismantled part of the railway connecting the two countries following the war, returning equipment and supplies to the countries from where they had originated. The remaining assets were sold to Thailand, with the warning that the railway track was incomplete. However, the Thai Minister of Communications somehow missed this memo, and his inspection party’s train hurtled into a ravine where a bridge had once stood. The minister died soon after the incident, and thus ended the use of the Death Railway with one final tragedy.

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After just a single night in Kanchanaburi, we continued our journey south towards the seaside town of Prachuap Khiri Khan.