Haad Rin is a strange place. Its beauty is both a curse and a blessing. On the one hand, it is truly beautiful. Clear seas breaking on golden sandy beaches, framed by lush green mountains. Palm trees stand proud on the beaches edges, providing welcome shade and cliffs rise tall from the sea. But this all serves as its curse. This beauty has led to Haad Rin becoming popular. Full Moon Party popular. 30,000 tourists descending on its beaches popular. It's a place fully geared towards these once a month parties that start in the evening and end the next morning. Full of bars that don't open until the evening, crappy restaurants where everything comes with fries, broken glass scattered over the beach, scams on every corner and unfriendly Thai people. I cant stress how weird this is. I mean, if I had to deal with thousands of drunk tourists I'd be a grumpy sod too, but yeah, very different to the rest of the island. So what does the adventurer do with their time before (or after, though I probably wouldn't recommend it) the night-time frivolities of Full Moon Party? They go on a fricking jungle hike of course!
I'd read a random forum post about a walk from Haad Rin to Haad Yuan, the village in the neighbouring bay, only accessible via boat (or foot). I found a blog post describing the walk in more detail here. It doesn't actually describe where the walk starts, just links to a video. The video refused to load for me on my crap WiFi, but we decided it couldn't be that hard, so off we went.
Turned out, it was hard. We actually almost found it but couldn't believe the rocky hill in front of us actually was the path so retreated to a bar with more WiFi so we could watch the video.We didn't walk the entire way to Haad Yuan but walked to the viewpoint then headed back. Walking is also not quite the right word. There was a fair amount of scrabbling up muddy slopes and jumping from rock to rock. We would have carried onto Haad Yuan but we set off pretty late, had no money for a water taxi back (doh!) and didn't particularly fancy blundering around the jungle in the dark. But enough from me, pictures!
Met a couple of bonkers girls in flip flops and not much else carrying vodka bottles up the mountain. We were fully stocked up with water bottles, mosquito spray and extra batteries for the camera. God we're old.
There's a dam! Not a very impressive dam. But we did see a monitor lizard sliding down said dam. Unfortunately that happened right after the camera went away. Typical.
Here is a helpful photo of Sinead pointing out which way to go to see the viewpoint.
The "viewpoint" was a rock. With a very steep drop. And a stunning view. It was awesome.
We found a spring!
Many a lost flip flop was to be found lying abandoned on the lonely road.
On our way down a dark something scuttled into this hole. I know tarantulas live in burrows in forest. So naturally I stood around for a while hoping it would reappear. Then I decided I wasn't too sure how I felt about a tarantula chasing me in the dark so I took a photo and scuttled off myself.
Storm drain. Apparently loads of these concrete pipes have been laid down to prevent flooding. From what I saw of the island, not doing the best job but hey.
Met this nutter on our way down. Bare foot, setting off as the sun was setting and with a crazy look in his eye. He left us with these parting words of wisdom: "No shoes, no problems". Hopefully he made it... wherever he was trying to make it to.
As we were reaching Haad Rin we ran into a group just starting off. The dude leading them turned out to be the guy who had marked out the track. So we bumped fists and off they went into the jungle. We headed home to nurse our myriad of bites and break out the fluorescent paint; Full Moon Party baby!
