Krabi

Our main purpose in going to Krabi was to do one last bit of caving. Unfortunately, I didn't have as good information on the Krabi area, so we were restricted to some of the more well known caves, plus whatever we could find on our own or with sketchy information. We rented a car for the day, since we'd be going well out of town.


Dec 17 - Dec 20

Our main purpose in going to Krabi was to do one last bit of caving. Unfortunately, I didn't have as good information on the Krabi area, so we were restricted to some of the more well known caves, plus whatever we could find on our own or with sketchy information. We rented a car for the day, since we'd be going well out of town.

I had some promising intel on a wild cave near Ao Luk, narrowing it down to a supposedly visible entrance in about a half kilometer of road. We drove out there, and spotted what might be an entrance on the side of the hill, but there was a couple hundred meters of very dense jungle between the road and the possible cave. While we were scoping this out, another car stopped, containing a British family looking for another cave in the area. They were very surprised to encounter Americans, since they hadn't seen many. I was surprised to run into another caver on such a random stretch of road. Since we didn't have a path or a machete, we had to punt on that cave.

On the way there, we'd seen several signs to other caves in the area, one of which I knew about called Tham Phet. Like many other Thai caves, this one was on the grounds of a Buddhist wat. There was a single monk at the cave shrine, and he waved to us as we approached and pointed us uphill to the entrance when he saw our headlamps and helmets. We left a small donation.

Shrine at Tham Phet, from Thailand - Krabi

The name of the cave is supposed to mean "diamond", and I could see why it was called that, because some of the flowstone was very sparkly. Overall, the cave is less than a kilometer, but it's got a couple of loops in it, and low crawling parts, so it is an interesting cave. It also has a monster tree root in it, about the size of a firehouse, that travels along the floor of one of the passageways for at least 150 feet. Here, I did get my first exposure to cave pearls. Some of them were old and no longer pretty, but I did find a large field of them at another point in the cave that looked more like the classic pictures I'd seen (except they weren't sitting in a pool of water). I think this was all the caves we did on the first day, because I was feeling kind of sick and wanted to rest. So, we called it a day.

Cave pearls, from Thailand - Krabi

The next day, I was feeling much better, so we set out again. We weren't entirely sure if the next cave, Tham Khlang, would be open or not. The information we had said that it had been closed after the tsunami, possible because its amazing formations had been damaged. We were close, so decided to give it a try anyway, and it turned out to be open. This was a guided tour, run by the guy who lived on the land, which looked like a plantation - some of the trees were palm trees, and some of them were another kind which were tapped and dripping a sticky liquid. We guessed that this was a rubber tree farm, since the tourist brochures mentioned them in the area.

The cave itself was very heavily decorated, with denser formations than I've ever seen before. Plus many of them were kind of hairy, having a coating of small crystals, or in some cases tiny helictites growing out of them. I didn't see any visible damage from the tsunami. On the way into the cave, I spotted a large (about 6' long) gray snake, but it got away before I was ready to take a picture. I don't know what kind it was. The end of the cave was another entrance, with a large Buddha shrine in front of a deep pool. As we approached the pool, the guide flipped a switch, which I thought might turn on a light, but instead we heard a long string of firecrackers going off, echoing all over the chamber. When we got out, we saw that his wife had walked around outside the cave to this entrance to light off the firecrackers. I'm guessing they don't get all that many visitors.

Tham Khlang, from Thailand - Krabi

Pool in Tham Khlang, from Thailand - Krabi

Driving around, I spotted some features in a cliff that looked indicative of a cave, and sure enough, we found a complex of small caves in the area. They also were associated with a Buddha shrine, but the area was deserted. We did find a huge hill of dirt full of shells outside one of the caves, and given that we were more than 10 miles inland, figured that they had to be from when Phang-Nga Bay was much, much higher. One of the caves in this set had a trickling stream passage and a large number of bats which flew about as soon as we entered.

Ancient shells, from Thailand - Krabi

At another promising roadside location, we didn't find a cave, but we did find a dumping ground for old household shrines. Cars honked as they went by, and we weren't sure whether they were doing so because it was a sharp, blind curve, or to give a greeting to any spirits there.

Shrine graveyard, from Thailand - Krabi

Our last stop was fossil shell beach, which we discovered was a tourist trap as soon as we arrived. There were booths lining the parking lot and partway down to the beach selling shells of all kinds, made into all kinds of silly things (like windchimes and trivets and boats). Of course, each store was selling the exact same thing. Fortunately, no one was there to collect the crazy high entry fee, so we got to see the site for free. The fossil beds date from 20 to 40 million years ago when the area was a swamp, and covered with snails and molluscs. The beds look like large broken slabs of blacktop, and the fossils run 1 to 2 meters deep in places. Most of the slabs we saw on the beach were pretty worn, either because of the wave action, or from people stepping on it. You were supposed to take off your shoes, but we saw a number of people ignoring this. It was still interesting though, to see such a vast and dense fossil field.

Fossil shell beach, from Thailand - Krabi

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