We woke pretty early and opened the curtains to this sunrise view!

It looks like we have a water view, but if you look closer the whiteness just below the sunrise is actually the corrugated metal roof of a neighboring quonset type building!

We showered and headed down to the buffet breakfast, ate our fill and returned to the room to shower again! It’s the humidity! I’ve been in August Minnesota ‘Mississippi-drippy’ humidity but this is a new scale of moisture! Our first order of business was to get some local currency, then use it to buy some lighter weight clothes! The main street of Ao Nang is lined with open air restaurants, tourist vacation clothing stores, currency exchanges, tourist operators offering packages to islands, beaches, tours to various sites, open air massage businesses, etc. We wandered around, biding our time until we could take a longtail boat around a rocky headland to the resort we will be staying at for the next 5 nights.

Walking down the waterfront we passed several resorts with restaurants.

While I got an iconic Thai massage Robert settled next door at a restaurant for a beer. Then we joined the other visitors and caught a longtail boat.

The resort on Tonsai beach can only be reached by boat!

Tinidee Hideaway Resort! A very peaceful, beautiful beachfront resort. No cars, but you can occasionally hear the motors of the longtail boats. No plastic water bottles, but a great purified water system with a pitcher. Individual bungalows set in a coconut grove and a restaurant/bar serving all day 7am to 10pm!

A collage of our first impressions of our idyllic resort and bungalow!

We unpacked, showered again and headed to the restaurant for our first meal during which the threatening rain finally broke and poured for the duration of our meal! It cleared and we explored a little bit of the surrounding limestone cliffs and coconut grove.Good night!

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!

Today should be the best day weather-wise of our stay here in Glenbrook! So we took advantage of it and caught the train for the 1 hour ride to Katoomba, the gateway town to the Blue Mountains to hopefully see the sights we missed in the mist of our visit on May 8! The Katoomba station is still 1.5 miles from the visitors center so we caught the local bus to Echo Point and it stopped at the restaurant where we had lunch during our ‘Off Train Experience’ with the Indian Pacific Train. Compare this picture to our view from the restaurant deck on May 8th!

There was still a layer of clouds, but they stayed above the mountains today!

The Echo Point Visitors Center is a very short walk from the restaurant and we finally got a view of the Three Sisters!

The 3 Sisters and the Jamison Valley in the Blue Mountains.

The visitor center is mostly a souvenir shop, but an employee gave us directions for a hike down a steep staircase into the valley, around the base of the 3 sisters, past Katoomba Falls and back up another steep staircase, then along the Cliff Walk back to Echo Point! We purchased some snacks and filled our water bottles for the trek!

The Giant Stairway is VERY STEEP! Steps hewn from the cliff rock itself were started in 1916, but construction was paused in 1918. Work commenced and was completed in 1932 with the addition of metal stairways where the rock itself could not be carved.

Over 900 steps later we reached the path along the talus slopes above the valley floor, shaded by the rainforest growing in the depths of the valley.We stopped briefly at the base of Katoomba Falls, an unassuming river flowing around a jumble of huge boulders. Then we began ascending the Furber Steps, bringing us up the cliffs. As we climbed the series of steps, with some flat grade between them, we began to get views of the entirety of Katoomba Falls, an awesome waterfall!

From the bottom you have no idea of the height of the falls! Notice the Skyway gondola above the falls, crossing between the cliff faces. We rode the gondola on May 8th and had absolutely no view, or even idea of, the magnificent falls below us!

A spur trail took us closer to the falls than we anticipated, giving us a view of the river cascading over a bench of rock overlooking the valley.

We finally reached the top of the cliff and were level with the Skyway gondola!

As we hiked the Cliff Walk back to Echo Point we passed the Katoomba Cascades waterfall. The path was getting crowded now.

One last look back at Solitary Mountain in the Blue Mountains National Park as the clouds finally broke up and the sun came shining through!

Giant Stairway to Furber Steps Loop was an awesome 3 hour hike, strenuous at times, but worth it! We caught the bus back to the train station and the train back to the Airbnb for a busy night of packing for our early morning departure tomorrow!

Happy Mother’s Day to all the Mothers out there! We hope you all had a wonderful day, and were celebrated by your children and fur-babies! We had a great relaxing day walking around town and seeing all the families out and about. We stopped at a pub and enjoyed a snack while listening to some live music.

Delicious fries or ‘chips’ as they are known here!

The forecast today was for showers, but the weather held long enough for a walk about town to pick up groceries and stretch our legs. We meandered into a park across from the row of shops that include the Continental Deli, the Greengrocer, the Foodworks Grocer and the Bottle Shop & Liquor store, which is the street we got to know the best!

This huge Eucalyptus in the park must be significant, it is encircled by a well maintained picket fence!

Eyeing that big cloud moving in we headed back to the Airbnb before the rain started!