May 14 On to Thailand (Day 230)
A very early wake-up alarm this morning! We had to catch the 5:26am 1.5 hour commuter train into Sydney Central Station then buy tickets for the 15 minute subway ride to the airport. We had a few hours at the Sydney airport to go through security, find our gate and have a bite to eat for breakfast. We boarded and settled in for the 9.5 hour flight that crosses Australia in a diagonal from southeast to north central, basically Sydney to Darwin, then over the Timor Sea, Indonesia, the equator, the Gulf of Thailand and into Bangkok! It was so bright outside that we had the window shade down most of the time, but early in the flight we did see that we were flying back over where we had just been yesterday, the Blue Mountains!
Somewhere down there along a cliff face are the Three Sisters!
We peeked outside again as we approached Bangkok, and this is the most we saw of the iconic Thai city!
The clouds building in the distance portended the rest of our day!
At the Bangkok airport we had to go from the international terminal through many corridors and another security checkpoint into the domestic terminal to catch our 1.3 hour flight to Krabi Town, the transport hub for Krabi district which has become a tourist mecca for the islands, beaches, limestone geography and inexpensive cost of vacationing! We arrived at Krabi airport well after dark and in the midst of a torrential downpour and were grateful that we had pre-ordered a taxi from the hotel where we are staying! Our bags loaded, we settled in for the 50 minute drive to Ao Nang (pronounced ‘ow Nong’) through flooding streets and past intrepid motorbike drivers wearing flip-flops and plastic ponchos billowing around them as they dodged the puddles and the spray from the many taxis and vans zooming down the streets! The rain let up when we arrived at the hotel and we checked in and immediately went to our room, cranked the air conditioning up and crawled into bed!