Travelogue 2023/4 Satun (Thailand) - Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia)

Satun

We stayed for two weeks in Satun, that small town in a remote corner of south Thailand. This time it started less quiet and dusty than we were used to. The 27th Master Athletics Games were being held here, with participants from 13 countries - mainly Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Iran. For that, a grand night market had been set up with countless food stalls - nice - and a stage with loud music that blared through the whole city until late at night - not so nice.

During the first week, we shared our resort with 22 civil servants who had come from Bangkok to issue passports. Our receptionist had only just managed to keep a cabin for us. It was a young group who chatted very quietly in the evening before going to bed early.

There were also more foreign tourists in Satun than in previous years. Up to 10 a day. Because the boat to Langkawi only went once a day now, people from eg Krabi had to spend the night here instead of being able to continue the same day.

It didn't matter to us, we had wonderful days, where our main concern was where to drink coffee and where to eat.

There was no sleeping in, from half past six there was a concert of birds trying to drown each other out. One with bright melodies, the other with screams.

We took morning walks through a spooky mangrove forest, where crabs and mudskippers moved through the mud of tidal streams when the tide went out. We walked through the countryside with plantations of rubber trees and oil palm trees. We passed karst rock formations where monkeys were swinging between the trees.

Other mornings we had a choice of several nice coffee shops. Only the opening times were quite irregular so more than once we stood in front of a closed door.

For lunch we usually went to one of the two vegan lunch restaurants: Chinese buffet with lots of tofu and seitan dishes.

Twice a local friend took us out for lunch. Then we were picked up by a car with a driver and came to restaurants where we would not have been able to order something vegetarian on our own. Really something different.

In the afternoon we sat on our porch or by the pool. No shortage of animals there either. In addition to the various house cats, there were squirrels, iguanas, birds of prey, lapwings, sparrows and butterflies. A little further on was a large bright blue bird, not a kingfisher, but what was it?

At half past six the sun set and from the distance came the sound of several mosques, just out of sync. It seemed as if they were singing a quadrophonic canon. Moments later, the sound of thousands of crickets and a few frogs with deep bass voices began.

We cooked dinner at home a few times, in the kitchen of our resort. But my favorite restaurant is a curry restaurant where the waitress recognized us after three years, and even knew what my favorite dish was.

That was typical of the many heartwarming friendly smiley Thai we met.

From Satun to KL

In the last 8 years we have crossed the Thai-Malaysian border 6 times. Each time in a different place or with a different mode of transport. A new border crossing could still be added to the list.

The first stage was a very short one (as we also started with short stages in Kerala) of 40 km to the Thale Ban National Park. There we stayed in a beautiful spot in the shadow of the huge wall of a karst mountain. A stream with some waterfalls ran through the garden. In the garden there were coffee plants that had grown into trees and then had been cut back. The flowers smelled wonderfully sweet.

The owner had arranged a car for the next day to take us across the border. The car had both Thai and Malaysian license plates; the driver spoke both Thai and Malay, and he knew just about every border official and police officer we met along the way (and there were quite a few, but they were all equally cheerful and friendly).

We crossed the border at Wang Prachan, and were dropped off 20km further at Padang Besar station. There we took a slow train south. The local trains also run quite fast here, up to 120 km/h. But after fifteen minutes we heard a few loud bangs and the lights and air conditioning went out for a while. After that we barely trudged through the beautiful landscape at a walking pace. We missed our transfer and ended up arriving in Taiping two hours late. There had just been a tropical downpour. All we could do was looking for our hotel (which we still knew from 8 years ago, and luckily they still had room) and getting a bite to eat.

The next day all trains to Kuala Lumpur were already fully booked, so we had to take the bus. Unlike the train stations, the bus stations are located way out of town, so we lost a lot of time with pre- and post-transport. The bus itself was spacious and comfortable and took a nice route through the mountains.

All in all, it had been a couple of long and tiring travel days. But luckily we still had four days in Kuala Lumpur to recover. The pleasant hotel room with a rooftop swimming pool did help. So we had plenty of opportunity to enjoy the excellent coffee and food, and to explore hidden backstreets in this mega-city.

More

How the journey began: Amsterdam-Dubai-Mangalore-Kuala Lumpur by lowcost carrier and narrow-body

How we got to Satun: The Jungle Railway (MY) and Pattani Sultanate (TH), by train  

Practical information about Satun: Lily's Mini Travel Guide | Satun, Thailand | Border crossings Malaysia - Thailand

Travelogue 2019/3, Destination reached: Satun (Thailand)

Our final train ride southbound was to Hat Yai, the biggest Thai city south of Bangkok and an important transport hub. For Malaysia Hat Yai is what Amsterdam is for England: you go there for the weekend for everything that god and your own country have forbidden.

This time we only stayed for lunch. With a mini-van we crossed over to the west side of Thailand, the Andaman coast, where it is warmer and sunnier.

In Satun we received a warm welcome in our guesthouse / resort. 

Home sweet home

This was our fourth time in Satun in five years. And we still find it delightful. How come? It’s a combination of many things.

The resort where we stay is beautiful. The cottages are designed tastefully and maintained well. Comfortable bed and plenty of space. A private veranda overlooking the well-tended garden. The pool is great to cool down in the afternoon. 

Usually It’s not crowded. On weekdays but a few houses are occupied, during the weekend more. The visitors are a mix of Westerners living on Langkawi and Malaysian and Thai families. Almost always quiet people. The staff is always nice and helpful.

The resort is located on the outskirts of town, between cow pastures and tall palm and tamarind trees. When the sun rises, there's an incredible noise of birds and insects, accompanied by the call for prayer in the distance.

It’s a 15 minute walk down town. Satun is a small town, with several restaurants that we like. Rich, creamy Thai curry in one, spicy Malay noodles in another, English pizza at Bobby's, one of the few expats living here.

Almost every walk in town we experience something new or unexpected. We discover a new street of a new store, we have coffee in a new coffee shop, we see cats sleeping in the strangest places, we see a snake zigzagging across the road, we see a new construction project of a dilapidated corner.

Outside the city you can make the most beautiful walks. Alongside rubber plantations and fish ponds, or through the mangrove forests. In a rubber plantation we saw trees with the cups filled with fresh rubber. Normally they are emptied early in the morning, or you see old neglected trees.

Walking through the mangrove forest we came as close as 8½km to the Malaysian border. As the crow flies. With impenetrable mangrove, swamp, delta and jungle in between. It would be 80km by road.

We made two trips out of town. The young lady who made us an ice coffee 5 years ago, and who made an impression because of the mindfulness and love she applied to that, had moved a few times and now had a coffee stall 30km away. It was lovely to see her again.

Our receptionist invited us for a trip to a fishing village that until recently was only accessible by boat. Now you drive 10km through mangrove forests on a wide and winding road. The hamlet is a different side of Thailand: simple wooden houses on stilts, life here is hard and shabby.

We spoke two volunteers who worked for a year in a similar village. That’s tough: nobody speaks decent English, never eating good food, completely depending on yourself.

Meanwhile it got hotter every day. Especially the sun became increasingly fierceful.

Red Bull

The only thing that can give you a boost in this oppressive heat is an iced coffee. Specifically one with condensed milk ánd coffee milk ánd milk powder. It is refreshing and energizing at the same time. The combination of caffeine, sugar and milk fats apparently has this special effect - for hours you are wide awake.

The recipe for Red Bull is derived from this.

You may think that Red Bull comes from Austria. No, it is a Thai thing, but the inventor had an Austrian partner for the global marketing. That has proved successful, one might say. The Yoovidhya family is one of the richest in Thailand.

I’ll take the "original version" - sometimes with milk and sometimes black - but always with less sugar than the Thai do.

Chinese New Year

Some Thai cities, like Ayutthaya and Trang, have a prominent Chinese population and CNY eclipses public life for weeks. There are markets, fairs, stages with music and shows, parades with dragons and drums, everyone wears new red clothes, and meals are put on a table for their ancestors.

Much less so in Satun. Still, a lot of red lanterns dangle throughout the city. Many businesses are closed for a few days or a week, so the already quiet city seems almost extinct.

People are broad minded here, which is prooved by Muslima’s wearing red CNY dresses.

Cats and dogs

In general you can say that cities are feline territories, and the countryside is canine territory. That is why in Asia, when you take a walk out of town, you always need a stick. Cyclists tell me they go right for the calves. If you are going to cycle here, a rabies vaccination is recommended. Then you have 48 hours instead of 24 hours to find the life-saving serum, if you get bitten.

According to this classification Satun is a town - just. During the day, you see  cats walking around, or sleeping on the sidewalk in front of their house / shop. They push their head against your legs and let themselves be stroked under their chin and purr.

But after 8 o'clock at night, when it is dark and it gets quieter, the dogs take over the streets. Packs of dogs roam, and where you could easily pass a sleeping dog during the day, now they bark at you. The first gets the next started, and before you know it you have a whole bunch coming after you. They are not completely wild though: if they come too close, it is usually enough to raise a finger (literally) and then they back off.

The cats have withdrawn further, you can still see them sleeping here and there, but they keep still.

Travelogue 2015, week 5-6: The Crossing (Malaysia - Thailand)

The Far North

The Thai Phusam festival is celebrated much more vigorously in Malaysia than it is in India. Our hotel was fully booked and we had to leave the final day of January. The tourist trail would be the ferry from Penang to Langkawi, and from Langkawi to southern Thailand. The business route would be the highway to Hat Yai, the central city of the peninsula, in the area advised against by the Foreign Office. But we preferred to stay as close as possible to the west coast of the peninsula anyway. That’s how we ended up in Alor Setar, way off the beaten track.

Alor Star is a city in limbo. In some ways it is a large village, with stray dogs instead of cats, plots of green waste land, detached wooden houses on the approach roads. At the same time huge buildings are constructed, like the second highest telecom tower of the country (actually very stylish) and the ugliest concrete shopping malls and parking garages. It was poignant to see how the immigrant labourers lived, in shanty camps of corrugated sheets.

When we approached Alor Setar in the bus, we saw a blue dome over the skyline, with typical Iranian tiles that are uncommon here. No Iranian mosque was mentioned in the travel guide, and we couldn’t find it, until I looked for “blue tiled dome” and found the website of the company that designed it for a rich local business man. The design was inspired on Iranian mosques and the ultimate version thereof: Samarkand. They had flown in Iranian materials and Iranian craftsmen to build it.

We had to take a taxi to get there. The place was surprisingly big for what a private person built. Two wings from the main building created a fore square with fountains. The white mosque with the blue tiled domes was impressive indeed.  It was in the details, like the carpet, chandeliers, woodwork and floor tiling that you saw it had not had unlimited funds like say the Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi.

It was most interesting to walk around this deserted place – it was a Sunday morning, and here the weekend was Friday – Saturday.

The Crossing

All started well. We hauled a taxi to the bus terminal and got on a bus to Kangar. It was a medium sized bus taking the country road. Long straight roads along canals with rice fields in the background. We made good progress, not stopping for boarding or disembarking passengers.

At Kangar bus terminal we inquired for a connection to Kuala Perlis, where boats to Thailand should leave. No busses, they told us. It turned out: no busses here, but they departed from a parking garage underneath a shopping mall in another part of town. That sounded too unsure, so we took another taxi. That dropped us in front of the customs building in Kuala Perlis. Classic: you had to go through immigration in the building to get to a fenced off part of the quay.

The officer would not stamp our passports: he said we’d have to find a boat first. Outside were four wooden cargo ships (about 2x12 meters in size). One of them was being loaded with large bags of rice or wheat. We gestured to the loader. Yes, he’d go to Thailand. No, he wouldn’t take us, he was cargo.

The other boats were idling. After a while a guy showed up who spoke some English. He yelled to a man aboard one of the idling boats. Yeah, he’d go to Thailand if the boat would fill up with passengers. Or if we’d charter it. The price for that was a bit steep though.

Slowly it dawned on us there was no (longer a) regular service from here to Thailand. Neither was there a stream or even a trickle of tourists or locals using this route. We started to wonder whether this would work out…

Obviously, nothing was happening any time soon at our quay, so we walked balk into town and found a place where we could get some lunch. And consider our options. It didn’t look like the boat would fill up with passengers.  Back to Kangar would be a gamble too. The only overland road this part of the peninsula went through a salt water swamp and national park, and it wasn’t clear whether there would be traffic, let alone a bus or a minivan.

Best choice would be to charter the boat. But we didn’t have enough money for that, and we had already discovered not all, not at all, ATM’s are linked to the same network as the Dutch banks. And this small town seemed to have two ATM’s only. But we were lucky: one of them did the trick and we had money in our pockets.

Back to the quay. Now it was totally deserted. All boats were gone. Nothing happened…

A little further downstream I could see another quay with boats similar to the ones that had been at ours earlier. But that was there and we were here. I decided to have a look. I could leave our custom’s area through a back gate. Through some cargo shed I got to the other quay. There was not a lot happening either, but there were boats and one of them was being loaded with insulated fish storage boxes. A guy who spoke some English came to my help. He shouted to the guys on the boat. After a while the conclusion was they were willing to take us.

We went and got our exit stamp. Then via the quay and the back gate back into the country, through the cargo shed and via another wooden boat onto ours. We climbed into the wheelhouse, well, it was more a wooden dashboard built around a car steering wheel that was connected by a long axis with the diesel engine in the hold. The captain sort of knelt around it and off we went. First slowly out of the river, then faster into the open water. The Andaman Sea. We had a strong headwind and white foam capped the waves. As long as we had a steady speed, the boat was stable. Whenever the captain turned the gas down, we wobbled and swayed. No fun. In the distance we saw Langkawi’s silhouette and closer by some smaller islets of lime stone rock covered with jungle.

After an hour in the deafening noise and exhaust fumes we reached land. In a river mouth a concrete jetty held two large ferries. We were dropped off at the foot of some steps leading up. Some forms, photos, passports, stamps – and we had entered Thailand. The terminal was a more serious business here, because it had ferries to Langkawi, ticket counters, shops, dual time clocks and an exchange bureau. We changed our ringgit for baht, so we had some pocket money.

Taxi and motor-taxi drivers told us there was no transport into town. Soon enough they were proven wrong, when a songtauw pulled up. That is a pick up truck with two benches in the back, usually riding fixed routes. This one had a lot of cargo in the back that it had to drop first at another, smaller jetty 1km upstream. Here were some cargo vessels similar to the one we had arrived on. After the drop he took us into Satun town. We had a spectacular view over fields, a river, a huge rock forming a mountain, the same way these lime rocks form islands in the sea.

At had been 8 hours, very exciting at times, and we had to recover from it all.

The Deep South

We had dinner next door. No vegetarian dish on the menu, the waitress spoke no English, miscommunication between staff and management – welcome to Thailand. Still we managed to get a decent green curry.

We sat outdoors and watched Satun go by. It really had an end-of-the-road or frontier-town feel to it. There was no through traffic as there was just one road connecting Satun to the rest of Thailand. The deep south has a Muslim majority, and we saw more headscarves here than in Alor Setar. The Malasian people had been very friendly and helpful enough. Over here t was more laid back and everybody radiated that legendary Thai smile.


The Gleam Resort has ten bungalows in a neatly kept garden with a swimming pool at the end. The rooms are well designed and maintained. It is immaculately clean, the room is pleasant and the bed is big and soft. The veranda has a couch made of an opened up oil drum. Decoration is inspired on America in the ‘50’s and yaughting.

The place was very quiet. In the middle of the night there was absolutely no sound at all – no dogs, no church bells, no traffic, no generator, no a/c, no nothing. Call to prayer was the first sound in the morning, followed by early birds and crickets.

This was one of the most beautiful places I ever stayed. Sure, some hotels have better equipped rooms, but they are less tasteful. Some resorts are surrounded by spectacular nature, but they are too isolated. Some places may have both, but they would be so expensive we wouldn’t feel at home.

It was so comfortable, so green, so quiet – and yet so close to town you didn’t feel locked in. You could just walk into town for lunch or a shop. And that town was pure Thai, with just the occasional foreigner.

It was doubtful we’d find a place as good as this further north, especially since it would only get more touristy, and that is usually not to our liking. So we decided to stay longer. Much longer.

Some mornings we’d take a walk into town or into the surrounding countryside. The most spectacular walk took us into mangrove forest, just a km from home, and beyond some fish ponds to a small hamlet.

Lunch we had daily in a small veg restaurant. Every Thai town has one, but it can be hard to find. First, to get across the question, given we don’t speak Thai. Second, not many people know it. Third, to understand the answer, given they don’t speak English. Fourth, to actually see it even when you stand in front of it. This was a tiny place in the corner of a shed. What gave it away was the red letters on yellow background. They always have those. The food was delicious, varied, healthy and dead cheap.

For coffee we had our regular spot too. A small bamboo take-away stall with a young woman hidden behind the counter. It was a delight to see with how much care and attention she prepared every order. A spoonful of this, a dash of that, stirring, mixing, pouring it into a huge cup or bag filled with ice, packaging it in a paper bag. She wasn’t very talkative. Below her gleaming scarf she had thick painted eyebrows and eyelashes black as night.

Afternoons we’d sit by the pool and read. By now the skies were blue and it was about 33 degrees. Celcius.

For dinner we alternated between home and town. The food wasn’t as superb as in Malaysia, and ordering could be difficult, but all in all we were quite happy with it.

Some night we went to an open air pub that had a stage and a house band. They were pretty good. The singer liked to do covers of Western songs, from The Carpenters to Adele – not easy. She was accompanied by a guitar player and a percussionist. And then there were five staff, whose main task was to fill up our glasses with coke and ice cubes from the side table. So there were us two, the three musicians and the five staff…