Thong helped Sarah and I book a ticket to Ko Muk, a very small island south of Ko Lanta, for 8am this morning. We made it to the pier on time and arrived on the island before noon. Ko Muk doesn’t have a pier or dock so the ferry stops near enough for a longtail to come pick up some passengers and bring them to the beach.

We walked around to a couple resorts right on the water to find a place to stay, but the first two we checked were extremely expensive (relative to ko lanta!) at 700 and 1200 baht / night (US$17.50 and US$30). We kept walking inland and found Hadfarang Bunglows who had double rooms for 350 baht / night (about US$8). Also, the restaurant at Hadfarang, JJ’s, was highly recommended by a group of Swedish travelers I met in Krabi last week. We took one of the bungalows and shared it with a variety of lizards, grasshoppers, mosquitos, butterflies, moths, gnats and snails. It sounds bad but was actually pleasant - none of them bothered us and the room had mosquito nets.

Ko Muk has no ATMs, though, and we didn’t anticipate this. Since I had lost my wallet the night before, Sarah and I had only around 2,000 baht between us which needed to cover everything including the 800 baht boat trip back to Ko Lanta. We managed to spend only part of it and still enjoy several great meals including a BBQ feast that night at JJ’s.

During the day, I went for a walk across the island (only a few km’s, the island is pretty small). Outside of the main tourist area (“Charlie beach”) the island is home to a few very poor muslim fishing villages. Several times as I went through the streets kids would point and shout “farang! farang!” or run up to me to practice their english: “Hello! What your name?!” I walked as far as I was allowed - at one point a family came out into the road and told me “no farang allowed here”.

The parts of the island that have electicity only have it for a few hours each day - one period in the morning and again at night. From what I saw, the majority of the island doesn’t get any power at all.

We would have stayed another night if we had been more prepared with money, but we booked our ride back to Lanta and arrived in the afternoon.