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Published: March 23rd 2012
I need to get this off my chest before I go into any further detail:
I SWAM WITH SEA TURTLES! Wait, turtles in plural? Oh yeah! Not just one but two gorgeous sea turtles within a 20 minutes span! My life is complete.
But to start at the beginning: We embarked on our snorkeling adventure at 7.30 o'clock down at "The Adventure Club". A Swedish guide, Lucas, handed us wet suits and told us that we would go to four different spots. As I put on the wet suit, I felt a weird itch on my thigh under the suit. When I scratched, I heard a crunching sound. Uh oh. I lifted the wet suit at my leg and watched in horror as a half-dead cockroach fell to the floor. Talk about being traumatized. Don't mind cockroaches, unless they're in my clothes - especially a very tight wet suit!
Having changed into the wet suits, Lucas led us to a local fishing boat. The weather was perfect at 8.30; the sun was out but not burning hot, and the ocean was a perfect turquoise.
The first place we went snorkeling was where I had the double encounter
with my favorite animal. Sea turtles are such graceful animals. I am still completely in love with them. The details on their shell, their cute faces, big flippers - wow!
We also saw a lot of colorful fish, anemones, and corals. Lucas had an underwater camera and took pictures of us and the animals.
The second place we went to, Maya Bay, is where "The Beach" with Leonardo Di Caprio was filmed. The sand was extremely fine-grained. A certain fish eats corals and poops them out as this special fine-grained sand, and because the corals have a UV-filter, the sand was cool instead of burning hot like normal sand. Pretty cool!
Then we went on a second dive close to some big rocks. Kia, as the only one, saw a moray eel. We also saw a scorpion fish, which is poisonous and hard to make out because it's camouflaged as a rock.
At the third place, Viking Bay, Kasper had one of his life-long snorkeling dreams come true when we spotted a couple of baby sharks. Around 1 meter long, they were pretty shy and didn't stick around for long, but were still awe-inspiring. Next time
I want to go diving with "real" sharks.
After four hours of snorkeling, we went back to the island for a well-deserved siesta. The whole family was asleep within half an hour of getting back to the hotel. It's been an intense 4 days with lots of new experiences.
At 5 pm we were on our way again, this time to a view point on one of the mountain sides. I know I complained about the stairs to the hotel cabins, but they are nothing compared to the billion stairs we had to climb to get to the view point. Good calf workout!
At least it was work the exercise. The view was amazing and the sun set a nice end of the day.
We are going back to Phuket tomorrow. I think two nights on the Phi Phi Islands was perfect. We've done what we set out to do, and it'll be nice to get back to the mainland.
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