After visiting the Big Budha we had lunch at Nark-Kird Sea View Restaurant on the way back down the hill. It had a terrific view of Karon Beach. The food was good and very reasonably priced (about 50 baht per dish).
I was intrigued by the color and size of these banana flowers. This one is more of a dark purple-red, but many are very bright red.
We asked our tour guide Sam about the flowers and as we were heading to Big Buddha we stopped at the restaurant and he asked the cook to find a banana flower, so that we could try banana flower soup. When we arrived at the restaurant after buddha our special dish was ready! We found this dish to be arawy (delicious in Thai!). The texture was similar to a cross of crab meat and artichoke. It was interesting to see something that was in the wild one minute and next in our plate! Highly recommended!