The best Thailand beach is Railey Beach

 Railey's composed of four separate beaches which are just a few minutes from each other--Tonsai Bay, West Railey, Pranang Cave and East Railey.   Whereas Ao Nang Beach has a little of everything for everyone,

Railey's for the purist demanding breath taking beach settings,  sensational rock climbing, kayaking and snorkeling

Just look at the map of Railey and you will get the idea.  Krabi's huge.  Railey's just one portion of it and as I have just mentioned there are four distinct beach areas.  Ironically Pranang Cave Beach is rated as perhaps being Railey's best beach, yet we never went there.  But I had been there during my first visit to Krabi when I had taken the speed boat tour which had whisked us off to four different islands.  There are no hotels on this beach although it doesn't take long to find a few at either East or West Railey so long as you are willing to do a little walking.  Railey is isolated from the mainland whichever beach you choose and yet it's not on an island at all.  It has the sea in front of it and huge practically unclimbable cliffs behind it.   There's no road from Ao Nang to Railey so the only way you are going to get there is by boat.  Yet it only takes 15 minutes and the long tailed boats leave both Ao Nang and Railey at all times of the day.  And if you want to take the ferry to Phi Phi you can jump on the ferry at Railey instead of having to go to Ao Nang to do it.

My girlfriend and I opted for Tonsai Beach instead of the more touristy West Railey and East Railey Beaches.  I just couldn't ignore all the Internet write-ups on the Tonsai Bay resort nor its low prices.  The clientele there would be young I had read.   Many of them would be rock climbers and I would be able to watch them from the resort.  I was coming to get the best pictures possible hoping to get one I could blow up and frame on one of my walls and this seemed to be the place to start.  The fact that the hotel reviews said Tonsai Bay turned off the electricity for most of the day didn't even faze me. 

I still don't know if they turned the power off or not because the first day we rented Kayaks right on the beach at the Tonsai Bay Resort.  My girlfriend and I paddled to West Railey and then we ventured on to the Pranang Cave Beach where we spied a little sand bar on its own little island directly across from the the Pranang Cave Beach.  Since we had snorkeling gear onboard the kayak, and we wanted to see as many fish as possible the waters around the little sand bar seemed to be the better option of the two.   There were hordes of people at Pranang Cave and just two or three people swimming off the little sandbar which was a couple hundred meters out into Pranang Cave Bay.  But first we paddled well past Pranang around the corner as picture on the map so that we were now headed ninety degrees perpendicular to it.  There we encountered a number of large boulders jutting out of the water and a secluded little lagoon a couple were swimming in as we weaved through a minefield of very picturesque miniscule islands looking like icebergs made out of stone.   There wasn't even a footpath to the little lagoon let alone any sort of road.   And as for the minefield of large boulders, the only way to experience it was by kayak or swimming because the little channels through it were far too narrow to allow even a long tailed boat to get through. 

Perhaps we should have paddled on to East Railey but we had planned on doing some snorkeling so we doubled back to the little sandbar across from Pranang Cave Beach.  Come to think of it, now that I'm looking at the map that sandbar must have been on Koh Nok.  I wound up snorkeling practically around the entire island.  Then we paddled back to Tonsai Bay where we relaxed in the little restaurant on the beach and drank bottled water and soft drinks to replenish all the fluids we had lost while kayaking.   There we heard the power was off.   Both the restaurant and the little shops around it were without power but by the time we got back to our bungalow the power had either been turned back on or it had never been turned off in the first place. 

I think I was practically the oldest person down at Tonsai Bay.   That night there were clusters of young people gathered down on the beach beneath the cliffs and a few of them were eating or drinking in the restaurant.  There was a bar close to the restaurant right up next to the tall cliff towering over us.  I wound up having several beers there and playing a few games of pool with my girlfriend. 

The next day we walked down the little dirt road that leads from the beach back up into the jungle past all the other bungalows one can stay at and little restaurants and even a place where one can get massages and had breakfast at the little restaurant.  Two young men walked briskly past us jabbering away in a foreign language.  One of the men was tall and slender without a trace of fat on him.  The other was much shorter with a build that strangely resembled a monkey's.  Monkey man kept talking in an excited tone to his companion.  I got the impression that in most places he wouldn't be considered the epitome of cool.

The rock climbers had finally made their appearance and I started to watch them from the restaurant.  I had heard that Railey was considered by many to be one of the four best rock climbing areas in the world.  They even taught rock climbing here at Tonsai Bay.  In front  of us where the rock climbers were all doing their thing, pitons had been driven into the cliff face out of which sprung ropes and there was even a ladder or two fastened to the cliff.   One rock climber was only a few feet up the cliff.  Above him was an overhang.  I wanted to stay there a little longer just to watch---say a couple of hours--but I knew that would bore my girlfriend to death.   I had however done a little rock climbing myself but that was over forty years ago when I had spent two months mountaineering at Colorado Outward Bound and the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) in Lander, Wyoming.  So I knew a little about the technical aspects of climbing a cliff although none of us had focused too much on it and I would never have been much good at it anyway.

Now how was that guy going to get up and around that overhang?   Well, he never did it, not while I was watching.  All the guys at Tonsai Beach were slender. I never saw a single one of them with an ounce of fat on him.  That's what it takes to go up such cliffs as I was looking at now.  To even have a chance at it one had to have excellent power to weight ratio. 

Over to the left I watched two young men much higher up on the cliff wall.  One had a willowy physique.  The other was---Monkey man.  Once again I wanted to stay there in that restaurant for a couple of hours just watching the rock climbers.   Monkey man kept going straight up that cliff.   From my brief experiences rappelling down cliffs and climbing up a several cliffs  using only toe holds and pressure grips I knew exactly what it felt like to be up there and Monkey man simply took my breath away.  He had the back and shoulder muscles to heave himself straight up just about anything, no doubt having possibly the perfect build for getting up inclines that were impossible for mortals such as myself to climb.  I also knew that I never was coordinated enough to ever amount to anything on such rock faces.   Many of these guys I had the finesse and the agility of a ballet dancer.

We watched a group of monkeys playing in the trees above us and on the rooftops of the shops close by.  There was a small scuba shop there so I decided to check it out to see what if offered.  Inside I found a cute young blonde woman.   I asked her about her Padi diving classes and where her shop's boat took everyone.  The woman was extremely helpful, being willing to spend all the time in the world to answer my questions.   I learned she was Swedish.  She spoke excellent English--better than most Americans many of whom have no concept of words that are longer than one syllable.  From her I learned that many of the rock climbers come to Railey and Tonsai Bay just for the rock climbing and could care less about Scuba, snorkeling or anything else and that some of them come for weeks and even months to perfect their skills. 

No doubt I had some of the best technical rock climbers in the world staying not far from me.  But even at sixty I'm sure that I could have taken a rock climbing course had I wanted to.  We had to move on because we had made an appointment through the same man we had rented our kayaks from to rent out a long tailed boat and driver.  Several miles out is an island where the snorkeling is supposed to be quite good which is where we went in the long tailed boat.  I'll let the following pictures tell their own story about our snorkeling experiences.  But after an hour or two of it we had both had enough and had the boat driver take us to West Railey Beach.  I wanted to use an ATM and since Tonsai Bay didn't have an atm machine the nearest place was West Railey.  Now I might be wrong, not having stayed there at either place but on the evolutionary ladder I gather that East Railey is on the top rung because in general it has the most expensive resorts and that East Railey is where people like to go who like to be coddled the most.  i got the impression that West Railey's somewhere in between having a nice sandy beach, some upscale resorts and at least one, "the Sand and Sea Resort" that falls into the inexpensive category.  After getting off the boat, my girlfriend  and I walked past the "Sand and Sea Resort" and mentioned to each other we'd both like to stay there sometime in the future.  The ATM was not far away, so I got my money and we went back to our boat.  

That night we found a little spot where they did massages up the dirt road from our bungalow and both of us got massages.  My girlfriend said hers was the best massage she had ever had.   The woman I got was so strong that I often found myself cringing as she squeezed and pummeled deep into my muscles.  I thought she'd literally tear my ligaments out at times.   But when you come to think about it, they've got to have some excellent massage gals at Tonsai Bay.  Serious rock climbers are going to pull their muscles and even if they don't they need to keep them flexible so they are sure not to be spending their money for massages that don't get the job done.  No doubt my massage lady was used to massaging young guys who had muscles of iron.

The next day we took a long tailed boat about a mile into the bay where we boarded the ferry that would take us to Phi Phi.