Underground - Hat Yai, Thailand

…I wake up at eight, after two hours sleep, mouth tasting of cigarettes and hung over as fuck. (Ever had a morning like this? I’m sure you can relate.) All I want to do is crawl into a hole in the ground. It’s my lucky day today because crawling into a hole in the ground is exactly what Cookie has planned for us…

Ever had a really fucked hangover? A squirter? I had a doozy in Hat Yai a few weeks ago.
Last time I was in Hat Yai before that was seven years ago. It was the first city I ever went to in Thailand. I arrived from Malaysia, walked across the border and took a bus to Hat Yai. I didn’t know anything about the city then, and I still don’t, really.

My impression from seven years back is that Hat Yai is a grim, commercial city. It certainly wasn’t a place I had any particular interest in visiting again. Now I’m headed back there, because Jessy is there, and she has promised to improve my opinion of the town.

(Top photo: Phu Pha Phet Caves.)

Jessy has moved to Hat Yai because there are better job prospects there for teachers at the moment than there are in Krabi. While I’ve been mucking around in Laos, swimming in waterfalls and playing music, Jessy has been working her butt off, job hunting and setting up an apartment, which makes me feel a little bit guilty. (Not guilty enough to make me want to get a job myself just yet, though.)

I hitchhike from the Laos border as far as Nuea Khlong, on the Thai southwest coast. It’s late when I get there, but I’m so close to Hat Yai, so I keep trying for a ride almost until midnight, chatting with truck drivers. I end up sleeping in a half finished building beside the road, and in the morning I finally give in and ride a bus the last few hours to Hat Yai.

(Above: Jessy’s five star apartment in Hat Yai. Just outside the window is a narrow balcony – with no handrail.)

Jessy has lucked out with her Hat Yai apartment. It is spacious, modern, well ventilated and cheap – a miraculous combo in Thailand. Not only that, it is right above the school where she teaches!
At night the cool breeze blows through the big windows and there is even a balcony – well, more of a ledge really, since it has no handrail (seems like the builders just never quite got around to putting the handrail up.) After I get over my vertigo it’s pretty cool sitting in the moonlight, having a smoke and peeking over the ledge into the dark street below.

(Above: Cookie, Nick and Jessy squeezed onto Cookie’s bike.)

(Above: out on the town for Nick’s (centre, standing) birthday.)
(Below: Jessy looking slinky. I know – totally gratuitous eye candy.)

I get to town just in time for Nick’s birthday. Nick is one of Jessy’s work colleagues. He is a charming Englishman, with an equally charming Thai girlfriend, Cookie.
Cookie has set up a full night of fun to celebrate Nick’s birthday. Most of the party are ex-pat English teachers; Nick and Jessy’s work colleagues. The crew includes a Canadian (Jessy), two Brit’s (one of whom is Nick, the birthday boy), a Thailander (Cookie), two Americans, a Dutchman, and an Aussie (me).
We have dinner at a really delicious restauraunt, and then go down the road to a bar with a rocking live band. Many lagers are consumed. We all get well lubricated and Nick and I join the band for a couple of songs karaoke style. Great fun.

The next morning, I wake up at eight, after two hours sleep, mouth tasting of cigarettes and hung over as fuck. (Ever had a morning like this? I’m sure you can relate.) All I want to do is crawl into a hole in the ground. It’s my lucky day today because crawling into a hole in the ground is exactly what Cookie has planned for us.

We pile into a car with the crew from the previous night and head out of town. We are all pretty under the weather. For the first half hour of the drive, we are a pretty subdued lot, slumped in our seats and squinting through our sunglasses. We make a stop at 7/11 for essential supplies like coffee, Red Bull and hot dogs, and the mood improves a bit.

When we arrive at Phu Pha Phet, everyone is feeling pretty cheerful, but then we see the steep path we have to climb to get to the cave entrance. There is some grumbling in the ranks, but Jessy, ever intrepid, takes the lead and we all grunt and puff our way up the hill.
It’s worth the effort. The cave is beautiful and absolutely huge. Some of the cavernous chambers are more than a hundred metres from floor to ceiling. The rock formations are surreal. Some are bulbous and jumbled like petrified waterfalls or giant jellyfish. Others are skeletal spires reaching like trees into the darkness. In many parts of the cave, water is constantly dripping from the roof above. There is evidence everywhere that the cave floor has, at some time in the past, been an underground river bed.
I take dozens of photos, but it is impossible, with my compact camera, to do justice to the magnificence around me.

In one part of the cave, our guide asks us all to turn off our flashlights. The blackness is total. It’s a really nice feeling of serenity, being in total silence and darkness. After a few seconds though, somebody snaps on their light, and catches Nick, and Cookie, with their tongues down each other’s throats. Poor Cookie is quite embarrassed. Thai people are pretty shy about physical intimacy in public.

After a couple of hours underground, we stagger out into the sunshine, blinking. Time for lunch. We have a good meal and feel quite revived. Good thing, because the next item on the day’s itinerary is a bit of white water canoeing.

Jessy and I are both pretty experienced conoe… ers? Canoe…ists..? We manage to stay inside the boat most of the way down the rapids, but we take regular dips in the water to refresh ourselves. Some other members of the party are less stable in their vessels. Nick and Cookie seem to spend more time in the water than in the canoe, but it doesn’t matter. The water is deliciously cool and the scenery is idyllic.

Jessy has succeeded in turning around my opinion of Hat Yai. It goes to show you that your impression of a place is often more about the things you do and the people you hang out with than the geography.
Gotta love the geology, though.

(Below: if there’s a better hangover cure than floating down a river I don’t know what it is.)