With the excuse to practice the freediving skills that we learned on Koh Lanta, Ferda and I spent a week at Ao Niang Resort on Koh Kradan. I had read that Ao Niang has some of the best beach-accessible snorkeling in Thailand. It’s the best I’ve seen, but that doesn’t say much. There was enough in the water to entertain us for a week. The coral’s not great, but I have lots of lousy photos to give an idea of the creatures you might see underwater at Ao Niang.
Above ground is kind of pretty. Here’s Ao Niang Beach with the resort bungalows.
There is electricity from 6pm to 6am, and it’s cool enough to sleep comfortably with a fan and mosquito net. Here’s an average or slightly high tide.
By the end of the week the moon was full, and getting in and out of the water at low tide was a bit difficult. At low tide you can easily walk to the main beach at Koh Kradan, and at other times you can take a trail that’s shorter and easier than we expected. We walked over there one day to check out a beach on the west side of the island (Ao Chonglom) — hot, no shade, no breeze — and have dinner at the main beach (facing NE) where there are many resorts.
More competition did not seem to make the food any cheaper or better. Thankfully we were happy with the cooking at Ao Niang. They sell 19l bottles of water as well which is useful.
But really what we did was snorkel — every day for seven days, usually about four hours/day. We did wait for rain squalls to pass a few times. The shade and breeze (usually) at Ao Niang Beach (facing SE) made it comfortable to hang out.
There are lots of moray eels. Sometimes it seemed that every time we dove down, we’d find one — or even two! Photos were difficult. Here’s a honey comb moray,
a giant moray with a cleaner wrasse in its mouth,
and a small moray that I haven’t been able to identify.
One of the funnest things was finding so many nudibranch. Mostly it was the beautiful colorful — black and white with orange bumps and orange rhinopore — Phyllidia varicosa. Again horrible photos — I ought to get a nice underwater camera:
The other nudibranch we saw frequently was the Phyllidiella nigra, but that’s little more than a black smudge in the photo. We found quite a few crab and shrimp.
It’s always fun to play with (the more photogenic) anemonefish.
I don’t think I’d ever seen red saddleback anemonefish before.
It was fun to dive down and swim among large schools of fish, mostly stuff I couldn’t identify. Closer to the surface were schools of silver moony,
blue stripe snapper,
or even red tail butterflyfish.
For the first time in Thailand I saw razorfish
and spadefish.
The copperband butterflyfish sometimes let me get quite close,
as did the pin cushion stars (!).
We also saw a couple rabbitfish species,
Titan triggerfish, at least three species of puffer, damselfish, lionfish, angelfish (including a juvenile blue ring!), giant clams, powder blue tang. This photo’s lousy, but it might be enough to remind you if you’ve ever watched a juvenile sweetlips dancing.
Bye bye, fish. See you next time.
And bye bye to beautiful Ao Niang Beach as well.
