After a long stint of rain in Phuket (it actually rained so hard during the night that Kasia thought the next Tsunami was on it's way :)) we headed over to Kho Phi Phi. This meant a short 'taxi' journey followed by a 2hr boat trip across the sea. Still not sure if it was a taxi or just some enterprising bloke in an old nissan with his 5 year old son sat in the passenger seat...
Kho Phi Phi is actually made up of two islands, one a marine national park and the other open to tourists. There are no actual roads so everything is transported about in wheel carts.
There are also very few locals and everything is geared up for tourists. Stalls everywhere selling banana pancakes and tuna sandwiches as well as an incredible number of dive shops manned by annoying cockney dive instructors touting for business non-stop.
We stayed here in total for four nights which was quite a welcome break after pretty much travelling non-stop for the last couple of weeks.
On the first day whilst having breakfast we managed to get lumbered with some annoying russian guy who was travelling alone and determined to get us to join him on the sunset boat tour. Actually his first words were "Do you know where to see elephants in bikinis?" or something similar.. He soon got the impression that he wasn't welcome (first time Kasia has seen me be impolite to anyone :D) .
We did however sign up later for the Kayak and Snorkelling tour which looked quite good until we got onto the boat later that day to be joined by our old friend the Kosak. "Hallo!!" :D
The trip turned out to be quite good fun with Kasia getting her first try at snorkelling (which she already had listed as one of her favourite hobbies ;) ) which she REALLY enjoyed (after tugging at my arm in panic at the sight of deep water and half drowning me in the process). We'll be practicing again in
shallow water soon.
We also visited Maya Bay which is the beach they used for the film with soppy boy Leonardo. However, since it is part of a national park, we had to enter the bay through the other side of the island. The first part of this involved swimming and clambering through a tiny hole in the rock face. Easy enough you may think, but not when there's a metre high swell crashing against the thing!!
Finally, came the romantic sunset which due to the fact it was now heavily raining, we didn't sea and instead were treated to a meal of fried noodles on the top of the boat which was being tossed about in the high waves with a gale force wind blowing. It reminded me of that scene in "Jim'll Fix It" with the kids eating on the rollercoaster. There were probably more noodles on the boats captain than in my stomach!
I spent the next day scuba diving (after Kasia's snorkelling experience, she decided she would prefer spend the day shopping) at a couple of dive sites around the islands. It's 4 years since I last did it but after a few dodgy moments it soon came back to me and was good fun, especially as we saw a 1.5m Leopard Shark and 3 or 4 stingrays (not the ones that killed the crocodile hunter dad ;) ).
On getting back, I met Kasia and we decided to go for a
'short walk on the beach'. She was delighted clambering over the rocks for 2 hours until coming to a dead end where we were told the only way out was an hour hike up through the jungle over the hill inland. I'm not sure when the last person actually used the path, but it was obviously quite a while. A machete would have been more useful than the flipflops we were wearing. Still it was a nice view of the island from the top.
The nightlife on the island was also pretty good with plenty of bars and a couple of clubs serving the traditional buckets of thai whisky, coke and redbull whilst the local lads showed off their fire twirling prowess..
Loads more to write but it takes ages to upload the pics, so we're off to get some dinner.
Hope all of you are well! :)
