Hello fellow travelers! Today I’ll continue through our travel around Prachuap Khiri Khan. On our second day here we decided to visit the beautiful Ao Manao beach and meet some of the cutest monkeys there are.

Ao Manao Beach

This beach is not as simple to reach because it’s part of the Wing 5 Military Airbase. To be honest it looks a lot more like a closed resort, rather than a military camp. They have a golf course, massive beach line, beach bars and restaurants and even some water activities like rafts, banana boats etc. The name of the place is pretty interesting as well - if my Thai translation is right it means 'I want lemon'(just another fun fact).

Before we went to the beach though we first wanted to see these rare Dusky Monkeys our American friend kept talking about. We free roamed a bit and then decided to ask before wandering too far. Turns out the monkeys were on the opposite side of where we were so we hopped on the car, went through another barrier guarded by the military and got to this place that was the home of these cute animals.

Dusky monkeys are an endangered species and quite rare to see. Here it seemed they had a fairly safe environment. Not many people knew or were interested to come here, so it was pretty quiet for them. There were 2-3 other people when we arrived but they were just leaving. After that it was only us and the monkeys.

They seemed pretty used to humans. The people before us had a bucket of fruits and veggies they were feeding them. I guess it's natural for them to get food from humans since they didn't move from these set of trees here.

These monkeys were so much calmer and nicer than the macaques at the temple. They also had 2 babies. The babies of the dusk monkeys are yellow/orange in color until they grow up so it’s quite easy to spot them amongst the rest.

These next two photos I'm quite proud of. The little baby kept posing for me and the framing on these two was just perfect.

These babies were a lot more playful than the macaque ones that just hang on to their moms. They swung on other monkey's tails, roamed around on their own and seemed quite curious.

I also found this one sleeping like that. I wonder do they ever fall while sleeping like that.

We spent quite some time here with the monkeys, taking pictures. After awhile though it was time to go get something to eat at the beach and enjoy some beach time.

These are quite common here in Thailand. People actually dislike them a lot and they often cross through our front yard in Bangkok. We found this one on the way to the beach so decided to snap some photos.

Once we arrived at the beach we got ourselves a table under the shades of the trees and ordered some Thai food. The tables, chairs and everything is quite old. It reminded me of Hua Hin in this regard, but only there aren't any horses pooping in the water and the beach is much much nicer.

These inflatable belts were free to use from anyone. A lot of people were taking them and floating around in the sea.

This definitelly is the beach that I've seen the most Thai people in. Not only that but it was midday and plenty were enjoying the water. That is usually not the case anywhere else I've been to.

These were the water rafts and banana boats. The guys had a lot of work on that day because there was always some group using them.

To be honest we did get on a raft as well. I didn't really want to because my back hurts and I knew it was gonna be a bad idea. Speed boats is what caused the pain in the first place. After a lot of convinsing I said 'okay let's do it'. Worst idea I've had all weekend. Because I am the heaviest I had to stay up front with absolutely no support for my back which made the experience even worse. Midway through I couldn't bare the pain no more and decided I'll just jump out and swim towards the shore.. or float. I picked a spot somewhat near where our stuff were and abandoned ship. Obviously injured myself from the impact with the water as well, because when you jump our at high speed the water feels like concrete.

I didn't know I had this until people all around started asking me what happened to me. I didn't feel any pain or anything until the next day so I was quite confused. It was the vest that I was wearing that left the mark when I fell into the water. Looked scarier than it was.

The beach is so huge and you can usually go anywhere on it. The middle part which is quite big still is where the small bars and restaurants are so that's where the most people stay. There were plenty of people on the far sides as well though, just laying bellow the trees and enjoying more of nature.

We spent pretty much the whole day here. It was a pretty fun place and if we exclude the little raft accident I'd say it was perfect. It is just amazing how many nice places there are in Thailand that almost no one knows about. There aren't that many hotels or anything in this town and it is mostly locals that were around. I saw one other foreigner in 3 days. Would definitely try and explore more of these smaller more secluded places. Next week though I have another trip that came at a short notice - going back to Koh Lipe. Can't wait for that but first I have a bit more of Prachuap Khiri Khan to show you. That is coming somewhere in the next couple of days so have a look out for it. Have an awesome weekend in the meanwhile and I'll see you then!