Ao Phang-Nga, famous for the incredible verdant limestone cliffs is 95km northeast of Phuket. In the National Park which is accessible by boat or kayak are plenty submerged karst caves, rock formations and some small muslim fishing villages. On the high cliffs of some islands swiftlets build their saliva nests which are illegally collected and used in chinese bird nest soup.

I was staying in the Phang-Nga Inn in Phang-Nga which I can recommend and did a full day tour with Kean Tours. Tickets are available for 700 Baht at the bus-station. It's worth it. Consider that the NP entrance fee is 200 Baht alone. What a rip-off, Thais pay 20 Baht. Anyway :-) We started eight thirty in the morning and there were only three of us, a couple from the UK and the dude. The tour was ok. The landscape absolutely stunning, but the tour guide was not really a guide. He was fisherman, which was fine. The beauty was that because of low-season almost nobody else was around. Only some kayakers and a lot of mosquitoes. So make sure you take insect-repellent with you. When we were eating the lunch our guide, i call him Ahmed, dropped us off at a very small stretch of beach and we got our lunch packet.Khao Phat Kung. Fried rice with prawns. Prawns are used in a lot of dishes here in Thailand, as there are so many shrimp farms around.

After lunch we visited the James Bond Island which looked cool, even though James Bond relocated back to England twenty years ago. There are lots of tourist shops selling shells which actually supposed to be underwater, not above.

After visiting Kho Ping Kan (now James Bond Island) we visited a muslim fishing village and I wont tell if it was more a fishing village or a mass-tourism -food trap.

The trip was definitely very good and you should not miss it.

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