The Fabulous Islands

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The last few days we have spent at Ko Mook and Ko Rork, a couple tiny islands in the Andeman Sea off the west coast of Thailand. We had to take boat rides to get to each one, and the water was the most incredible emerald green, and went went fairly close to shores lines most of the way and the visibility was so excellent you could see the coral on the bottom and all the tropical fish. It was so tempting to dive right in! And the beaches, the sand on them was the same consistency of flour, perfectly white and so fine.
There was not a lot to do these days other than enjoy the beach and the mid-30's temperatures. Perfect days ended with spectacular sunsets, I had to hold myself back from filling the rest of my memory card with sunset pictures. Apparently the sun rise is also good, but being that it was at 6am and these were days which I could finally sleep in, I must admit I missed all them!
On Ko Mook there were some really fancy hotels too (a whopping $200 a night which is a lot here but gets you a chain hotel room at home in the city - incredible!) that were little villas right on the beach. You could pay $6 and use their pool for the day, which I did one afternoon just to not be covered in sand and salt for a couple hours, it was right on the beach and had the pool chairs and fountains and a swim up bar, the others in the group were teasing me about being posh but I thought it was worth $6 after the way we have been roughing it!
The two nights we spent on Ko Rork, a national park island with no infastructure, were interesting. They only have bathrooms and anyone who stays overnight has to pitch a tent and camp on the beach. Problem was it was a long weekend here right before we arrived, so they had had far more day visitors than usual and all the water from their underground system was used up! This meant the sinks didn't work, no showers, no way to even flush the toilets! So it was a pretty rough 2 days. Also, it was pretty hard to stay in tents when it was so incredibly hot, and none of the others brought sleeping mats so they had a very uncomfortable stay, while I was so glad I had gotten one from MEC before I came.
The other interesting thing about Ko Rork was that they had monitor lizards on the island - they looked a lot like the komodo dragons, only apparently are a little smaller. The large ones must have been 5-6 feet long, and they would hiss at you if you got too close. I wouldn't have minded then, BUT they are disguisting creatures, they eat the garbage and we found them in the washroom a few times, slurping from the disguisting toilets (you could always tell when this happened because there would be a scream and some hapless female would come running out and one of the guys would have to go in with the broom to chase it out.
What I did really like about camping though was having the sound of the ocean waves on the beach right there to fall asleep to, and our guide had brought his guitar and would play and sing at night and he was so good, also very nice to fall asleep too.
I did a whole bunch of snorkelling while on these islands, it was the best I've even done and it was right there for you to wade into off the beach. Tons of clown, angel, parrot, puffer fish and others I can't name. One day the boat took us out a bit farther to a few site, and that is where I ran into a bit of trouble. The 2nd spot we went too i didn't notice the strong current and was just going along, then when I finally lifted my head the boat was a little more then a speck in the distance! I was not wearning a life jacket either cause it's easy enough to float and paddle around. So I started swimming to go back, and found that I was getting tired fast and not getting to far ahead, more just keeping up with the current. I looked around and only saw one other guy in the same situation, and he was not too far from me and was wearning a life jacket, so i figured I would go and grab onto him if it got really bad. Finally the boat saw me and waved to see if I needed help and I called them over as I kept swimming for them, and when I finally got to them I was so tired I could barely pull myself in the boat. I was feeling like a complete moron, and then noticed there were two other girls even behind me that I hadn't noticed earlier! I would have to label that as my close call for this trip, yikes!

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Comments

[Ellen]

GOSH....
This latest entry sounds both gorgeous and scary - Lizards in the washrooms???? Sounds like the bears here in the mountains! Glad you didn't get swept away with the current. Hopefully that is your only close call!!! Keep posting!