Ya Ya - Buckwheat Zydeco

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Railay Beach – Thailand 4-8-08

Easter Sunday and my Dad’s 15 year anniversary. Rough day to be alone in Thailand. There wasn’t a single recognition of the holiday anywhere. Not a chocolate bunny or colored egg to be found. And the nearest church was a boat, bus and scooter taxi ride away which I just couldn’t swing. Well, that’s the flip side of travel fun. You miss the important stuff when you’re away too. But where am I anyway? I forget some days myself. Railay Beach is a little peninsula only accessible by boat because it is surrounded by big hills. Yeah, you guessed it, big, freaky limestone formations again. I just can’t get enough of the darn things I suppose.

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The town itself is broken into the West – fancy resorts, the East- backpackers (me) and the North West – granola rockclimbers. The resorts had the nicest beach with the best sunset. My side had an interesting but non-swimable mangrove mudflat beach. We did have the nicest breezes and the good beach was only a short 5 minute walk. We also had the ‘reggae’ groups. I’ve noticed this ‘I want to be a Bob Marley Rastafarian’ vibe a few times in my travels but seeing a bunch of skinny little Thais grow huge dreads is just plain funny. Lots of the bars had the same pillows and ‘smoke’ thing going on that Dahab, Egypt had. Well, based on the waiter service there was plenty of smoking going round with the locals too (Thailand has the worse service I’ve seen yet but Railay was just horrid). I guess that’s why it’s called Thai w***. Actually it seemed like I was the only one in town not smoking sometimes. Especially up in the rock-climbing beach. Take a Ski town Granola (you know, the guys walking around with beards, Phish t-shirts, and sandals with white socks) put him on a beach, remove the white socks, add a climbing harness and you get the whole north-west section of Railay. You could only get to ‘their’ section by boat which was just as well. Too many young children would get scarred for life. I was there around 2pm (via kayak) and wow. Lots of pillows and hammocks being put to good inebriated use.

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Oh, what else can I complain about? Oh yeah, why the Ya-Ya zydeco tune? Well, it’s been in my head since I heard it looped at a restaurant in Xian China last month and it was the name of the hotel I stayed at. The place sounded cool, kind of Swiss family Robinson tree house thing with steep ladders up to everything. But honestly it was sleazy and the worst service EVER. Like Mom always says, you get what you pay for. In this case $11 worth of bad hotel. A Lonely Planet winning recommendation once again. So bad it got funny, like when coconuts would loudly slam into the tin roof randomly during the course of the early AM hours and with a decibel level off the description scale. Monkeys they told me. I didn’t hear any darn Monkeys after getting woken up the fourth time but whatever. It was an experience, and I still like the name and song. Ya-Ya. I also just read a Jack London tale about a sailor screaming ya-ya-ya at some attacking natives so there’s another reason for my madness.

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So to try to end this thing on a good note I did have a good time kayaking, ate some great Thai curry and relaxed a bunch on the beach. All of which I greatly needed. And Railay definitely is an interesting place. The beach is surrounded by the great limestone cliffs which makes it very photogenic (thus the many pics and granolas) and the sea kayaking was stellar. Paddling through caves and rock passages with waves crashing all around was very cool. I immediately thought it would have been a perfect location for a Pirate movie and I expected the dreaded Jolly Rogers to sneak attack the SurfNazis (ah hem, League Champion SurfNazis I should say) at any minute. Maybe Johnny Dep will play Doug in the movie version.