…The Great Northern Road Trip 2020 : Day 1

The story starts HERE.

As drives go, it was pretty simple. After skirting around Surat Thani, it was due north all the way on the only highway that exists. Heavy traffic in places, nice scenery in others. 500kms. Arrived in Hua Hin early afternoon.

It took me quite a while to find my hotel because the place I booked on Agoda doesn’t exist! But that’s a story for another day.

After finding the place Agoda had moved me to without telling me, I wandered off to the beach. Just a few hundred meters. I stayed at the very southern end of the town, partly because I had no interest in getting stuck in seaside traffic, and partly because I wanted to make a swift getaway next morning back onto Highway 37 – which is essentially a Hua Hin/Cha-Am bypass. It was really just a brief stopover on my long trek to northern Thailand.

The area is known as Khao Tao or turtle hill. Apparently not only because of the shape of the hill but because the area was famous for turtles, before the hordes of tourists took over.

So, having arrived earlier than expected, I found myself busy with sightseeing. The beach area is really quite nice…

As you can see in the above photo there’s a temple area on the hill. I’d planned to send Maxie up to get aerial photos (to save me walking up the hill!) but there was a strong wind blowing off the sea, and I deemed it too strong for drones. And I deemed myself far too lazy to walk up the steps. Next time. Maybe.

Instead, I jumped back in Bert. That was definitely unplanned.

But there was something I’d spotted on the last few kilometers of the drive to the hotel, and I wanted to investigate. I’ll come to that in the next article.

This one’s about beaches, and on my way back to the hotel I took a slight diversion to the tiny bay just the other side of the rock with the wat.

This one is Hat Sai Noi (noi meaning small) and the more northerly one Hat Sai Yai (and you’ll probably guess that yai means large.)

It looked like there was a photo shoot taking place so I didn’t linger, and anyways the sun was setting. Instead, I headed back to the hotel I wasn’t supposed to be staying in.

NEXT: Wat Khao Din, Hua Hin…