Ko Yao Yai

Wind Dodging

The wind was forecast to be all over the place after our visit to James Bond Island. So we ended up shuttling between Ko Phanak to shelter from the north-easterly winds and an anchorage near Ao Po Grand Marina to shelter from the westerlies (nice lunch in the marina cafe, but dinghy visitors only reluctantly welcomed). From there, we hid from the north-westerlies at Ao Lo Pa Lai, where the only action was picking up an old fishing line on the anchor when we left.

After the wind had settled back to its normal direction – northeast – we headed further north up the island to what became our favourite place to hang out.

Ao Lo Pa Ret

The beach at Ao Lo Pa Ret is clean; it is easy to beach the dinghy or pull up a paddleboard. It has beach bars and restaurants, and the town has even more restaurants, together with shops, tour companies and scooter hire places. Despite all that going on, it hasn’t taken on the look and feel of Magaluf in the 1980s. It is a very pleasant place indeed.

And because it is so pleasant, we decided to stay a while to make the most of those beach bars, restaurants and shops – and a scooter hire place.

The shops in town are geared up for people on holiday. They have a healthy supply of beer, crisps and sweets and a very unhealthy level of plastic packaging, but not much in the way of fruit and veg. For that, we needed to go out of town. We decided that a motorbike and sidecar would be our best option because we could stuff it full of groceries. With the deal done at 400 baht for the afternoon, we set off in the weird-looking contraption below and headed off into the hills.

Google Maps only gives a hint as to what shops are out there. Mk 1 eyeballs are a more accurate witness, so we stopped whenever we spotted anything with fruit on display.

Provisioned up we set about on the important mission of doing next to nothing (apart from scraping the barnacles off the bottom of the boat, which has plagued us since Singapore).

It’s as well we made the most of the leisure time. Things were about to turn nasty.