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Published: November 28th 2008
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The boat to Phi Phi was absolutely heaving - in fact it turned out there were about 10 large boats going to Phi Phi at 8 am that morning. The way to board a boat in Thailand is firstly to clamber across however many other boats are moored up in front of it - it usually involves literally jumping half a meter or so from one boat to the next - the first time we did this it was quite strange but now we are getting used to it! We were unsure about handing over all our luggage but cheered up by free cake 😊
The crossing took about 2 hours - how on earth it can take that long when it's only 40k or so we had no idea, but it did. When we arrived Phi Phi was looking very beautiful, but extremely crowded - again there were hundreds of touts hassling us for hotel rooms. We had booked somewhere but weren't entirely sure where it was! We didn't want to pay someone to carry our luggage (Phi Phi has no roads so porters push your bags around, or in our case they would generally take both rucksacks one
on the front and one on the back!) so we set off on our own and luckily after about 10 minutes of wandering the backstreets we did happen across our hotel. We had been a bit short of choice on accommodation and had had to book a twin room but we were really pleased with the hotel and immediately booked another night there. Phi Phi has a huge range of accommodation (all overpriced for Thailand) but the very basic beach huts look pretty dodgy - not exactly tight on security and as we found out later in our stay, extremely noisy late at night!
We set out straight away to find a diving school and booked up a couple of dives for the next day. Phi Phi has reputedly the best diving in Thailand, second only to the Similan Islands, and we weren't disappointed. Having intended to stay for 2 days, we ended up staying for 10! The weather the first couple of days was amazing - absolutely boiling hot, way hotter than Bangkok, and very sunny. The diving was absolutely awesome and as we had heard from people who had come from 'The Other Side' (Koh Samui etc)
we decided to stick on the Andaman side and make the most of the good weather and the diving. Unfortunately almost immediately the weather clouded over, and even rained a bit, so we just made even more of the diving! We finished off our advanced PADI course with a multi-level dive, a navigation dive (compulsory) and an under water photography dive. By the time we left Phi Phi we had racked up quite a few more dives, seen some amazing stuff (very colourful corals, leopard sharks, lion fish, scorpion fish, barracuda, hundreds of black tip reef sharks (40 plus on just one dive!), frog fish, ghost pipe fish, SEAHORSE!!!!!, tons of great stuff) and we were advanced divers!
We spent lots of time at our second hotel, The Andaman Legacy, where we started in a beach bungalow but found the noise from Hippies Bar not 100m away too bad at night (unfortunately with diving comes early mornings!) and moved into the hotel. It was very expensive for Phi Phi but it was really nice and made a very comfortable base for our dives. We met some great people - Marvin, Jimmy and family from Sweden, the Ozzies (Shannon, Angie,
Jayman and Brice), lots of diving people and had a few good nights out when we didn't have to get up early for diving. Hippies and Carpe Diem both did fantastic fire shows most nights, were good for chilled out drinks in the early evening and it was funny watching everyone else get hammered on those bloody buckets!
We ate some fantastic food - most notably pad thai and green curries (Rich and I are hooked on these respectively). After 10 days we were more than ready to move on to Koh Lanta and to chill out a bit. We were also rather hoping that the weather would be better over here, but as I write now from our third day on Koh Lanta, unfortunately it has only got worse...
More on the next blog folks!
The Fryers xxx
(PS Bangkok Airport has been closed for the last few days as they are demonstrating Thai-style there about something political. The news today reports of bombs, handgrenades, shootings and all sorts but please don't worry, we are quite safely tucked away on Koh Lanta. Hopefully by the time we come home next week they will have sorted
themselves out or have got bored of demonstrating. If not, well, there are worse places to be stuck!)
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