Koh Phi Phi

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We crossed over the Malaysian/Thai boarder at the towns of Rantau Panjang/Sungai Koolok and caught a train up the east of Thailand. We planned to travel all the way to Suritani and then spend the night before travelling down to Koh Phi Phi but after about 4 hours we realised that the train was making very slow progress and we decided to jump off half way up our intended route at Phattlung and see if we could catch a bus directly to Krabi. Miraculously after only half an hour stood at the side of a dark dual carrige way and with the help of a couple of new Thai friends we hopped into the air conditioned comfort of a luxury minibus and arrived in Krabi at about 10pm. The hotel that we chose was nice and we caught up on the news with our first News24 in a while, it was only the next morning that we realised that the bed we were sleeping in must have had some sort of bugs because we woke up covered in bites, ugghhhhh. The others were all ok though so just bad luck, but again, ughhhh (itch itch scratch scratch).

The ferry across to the island of Koh Phi Phi was a wee bit choppy and Chris and Rachel who braved it outside got a royal soaking from the combined wave and rain action. The island was one of the places most badly damaged by the 2004 tsunami and immediately it is easy to see why the town was so badly damaged as it sits on a very low piece of land between two beaches, the wave apparently hit from both sides which is truly terrifying. most of the buildings in the town were destroyed and are slowly being rebuilt. It looks like about 2/3rds have been rebuilt in the 18 months since the wave hit but there is still lots to do. Luckily there are still lots of visitors to the island the money keeps coming in. P P is unbelievably gorgeous with high craggy cliffs and lots of sandy beaches. We decided to stay in the main town and got a couple of rooms halfway up the hill at the top of the town, near the bottom of the view point steps.

We quickly got into the Thai backpacker routine and in our first 12 hours we experimented with 2 of the most common activities, watching Thai boxing and drinking 'buckets'. One of the bars in town has life boxing every night, both between professional Thai boxers as well as visitors who volunteer to fight their friends in return for the aforementioned buckets. These are simply a novel way of drinking vodka and cokes, out of a bucket, with a straw. Not sure who came up with that one but it is big news throughout Thailand. Dangerous stuff.

On one of our days on Phi phi we went on a boat trip around the island, stopping for various snorkeling and sunbathing opportunities. We saw (but were unable to moor next to because of strong winds) the beach where the film 'The Beach' was filmed, this was very pretty but so are all the other beaches on the island. We also went to the beautiful Bamboo island which was lovely with amazingly soft sand. Another day was spent walking along the coastline to Long Beach, just for a change of sceen you know. The weather most days was hot and sunny although there have been serious down pours nearly every afternoon. On the way to the beach we spotted a large number of small hermit crabs so we decided to race them and see which one crossed out of a circle drawn in the sand the quickest. This also led to using the crabs to make important decisions by allocating one to each possible alternative, a sort of scuttling magic-8 balll.

After 5 nights on the island we had to make a decision wether to head to Bangkok or across to Koh Pha Ngan for the full moon party and opted for a few days in the big smoke before Rachel flew home, so here we are in Bangkok. html

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Photos

The view point
We climbed to the top to watch the sun rise, no we didn't get any sleep that night