Kayaking around Koh Payam

Koh Phayam is fabulous for many reasons, one of these reasons are the cute little rivers that flow out into the sea. They make the beaches even more awesome than normal, and you can kayak down the rivers.

Map of Phayam... with  rivers!

So far we've been out twice in a kayak to investigate these rivers. The first time we hadn't quite remembered that the tide was an important factor here and we tried to shuffle our kayak down a trickly little river that clearly couldn't handle us.

A river on the beach

It didn't matter couldn't get down the river that day as instead we headed out to sea and found an undiscovered beach (which Nic has now named Ündiscovered Beach... not originally named with the umlaut, I just added that by mistake and now I think they look exotic so they're staying).

Ündiscovered Beach

Ündiscovered Beach was perfect, there was a broken old house and a little stream coming from a pond behind the house. It was really pretty big. If nobody stops us, we might claim ownership of the beach and rebuild the old house.

Our new home

Our next kayak trip was even more fun. We were clever and were ready for the tide this time. We let it take us up the river and when it was ready it took us back down to the sea again. It was really easy and incredibly beautiful. We've done tours through mangroves before and it is really interesting scenery, but when there's no one else around but you and you can move around as and when you please, it is so much better. This was one of many high points that we've had so far on our travels. It's hard to explain how incredible it was. It was so tranquil and unusual and exciting. It was just amazing.

There were loads of sea eagles and other birds that we've decided are hawks and kestrels and insanely big ravens. They were taking off really close to us and flying all around us. I took some photos, but I'm afraid that David Attenborough would not be proud of me for them.

I promise that these were more impressive in real life!

So it was all really nice. We parked up in the mangroves for a bit and it was really sweet, there were no other noises except for a few leaves falling or some scary lizard creature scuttling about trying to eat us.

Then we pretended to paddle back to our beach (but really the tide did most of the work).

Our beach...

...yes, it really is this awesome.