All packed up and ready to go! The pool did look nice and cool in all our gear

As comfortable as it was, time has come to say our final farewell to the Krabi Discovery Resort that is totally not in Krabi. Not least because we could not afford more than this one night anyway 🙂

Our next destination was the Khao Sok National Park not far away at all, so we decided to take the scenic route there, bagging two more national parks along the way. We decidedly left Phuket to its own, after our experiences of Bali and Lombok, we were all touristed out for now.

There was only one little flaw in my cunning plan: It turned out that I forgot to check the maps on our GPS and it just so happened that we only had another 50 km or so more left before the big blank green of the no map generic land started up. We were little worried though. With less than 200 km to go, a mobile phone with heaps of data and a paper map, we were more than prepared. Plus, the Garmin does not need an installed map to record the track for later.

Limestone caves turned temple are a thing

We followed the main road through the hills and stopped at one of the many signposted roadside attractions for a brief break. Limestone cave pimped by temple-y bits seems to be a theme of the region.

The roads through the hills were nice, but once again the following coastal areas utterly failed to tickle our fancy. We had a horrible and overpriced lunch in one of the touristy roadside places and moved on quickly to forget about it.

The next national park had little to hold us for long, either. The road was nice and curvy, but the beaches were mostly blocked off by the high walls of massive beach side resort complexes or “developed” little towns in between.

We got our reward after all though, when we reached the higher ground of the Khao Sok National Park.

And then we came across this view

The air got cooler, the road curvy again and the views got up to fantastic at some points. Did I mention that I love limestone formations?

We concluded the day with some needed map updates and a good dinner in our lovely (and cheap) riverside retreat. Tucked away behind a palm tree plantation, it felt a lot like an Indonesian home stay – the good kind.