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Published: March 14th 2009
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I was still angry when I finally got up at the real 5.30am alarm.
It didn’t help that our pick up, due at 6.10am, didn’t show until 6.45. That did us out of an extra half hour in bed!
We got into the minibus a bit annoyed at the lack of apology from the driver. After driving all the way to Patong (and hour round trip) we discovered the people he should have picked up there weren’t there (maybe they’d been tempted to go back to bed!). We drove back towards where we started, picking up another couple before settling into a very long journey onto the mainland towards the Ko Similan islands.
When we arrived at the tour office we’d already been travelling for three hours. We were loaded onto a speedboat with a lot of other people and told it would take an hour and fifteen minutes to get to our first stop.
We tried to relax and enjoy the journey, but everything felt really disorganised. We’d done enough trips to know how it should work, and everything from the calling of names, to the offering of drinks was being done in a very haphazard
way with people being overlooked and missed out everywhere.
The first stop was snorkelling right off the boat at island number 5 in the chain. We all got in and the water was lovely and warm - a nice change from Western Australia. There was some pretty coral and various fish to look at so we tried out our underwater camera, fresh from its service at the Olympus shop. There were lots of other boats around so we were given a limited area to swim in. Once I’d exhausted it and realised there didn’t seem to be any outstandingly unusual fish I got back into the boat.
Afterwards there was a panic as the guide thought she’d lost a member of the group. We knew she hadn’t as the person on her list hadn't called out when she was doing the register at the beginning of the trip, but she wouldn’t listen to us and spent a terrified half hour searching for the guy. Eventually she gave up and we left for the next stop, island number 4. (Who knows what would have happened if they really had lost someone?!)
This time we were visiting a beautiful
white sandy beach that was being lapped by aqua waves. It was idyllic, or it would have been if there weren’t already a few hundred other people enjoying it.
We were told to go and relax while lunch was prepared. It felt great walking out into the water and floating around looking at the beautiful scene around us.
A few minutes after taking a dip we were told to come for lunch. It seemed that we were the last ones to be called as we were directed to a table with a group of people who had already been sitting and eating for a while. Most of the shared bowls of food they’d been given were now empty so we only got a few scraps of fish, some boiled rice and a few vegetables. I didn’t fancy the look of the chicken knuckles so it was a very light meal.
By this point in the day I was annoyed with the whole trip, It had taken us a total of 5 hours to get to the first stop, we’d had a terrible lunch, had missed out on the free breakfast at our resort and hadn’t been offered
any coffee, cakes or fruit all morning (which usually comes as standard on all trips we’d done so far and we’d done A LOT!). I was starving, tired and wasn’t in the mood for being rushed from place to place.
We just got settled in on the beach again as we'd been told to relax until 2pm, but at 1.30pm we saw our guide walking along the beach talking to people off our boat. She walked straight past us without saying a word, but when we saw most of our boat group collected together on the beach side we realised we must be leaving earlier than expected. It was a good job we’d noticed otherwise there is a good chance we'd still be there now!
I was tempted not to bother getting in the water at the next snorkel stop but decided to anyway as I knew if I didn’t it was bound to be amazing.
Typically the snorkelling wasn’t very good after all. There were a few fish, but very little coral, and the tide was so hig - and the water so murky - that the visibility was poor.
The boat then took us
to view 'sail rock' before dropping us on another white powdery beach. The sand felt soft like flour underfoot and the water was so clear it looked like a swimming pool.
Matt decided to attempt to walk up to sail rock despite the fact we were only there for twenty five minutes. I spent my time on the island poised with the cameras waiting for him to appear in the distance by the rock and willing for him to hurry up as I knew our boat would be coming to collect us any time. Eventually he showed up on the hill in front of me and waved for me to take some pictures. There was just enough time for him to climb back down before boarding the boat.
After cautiously eating some strange green sponge cake in a packet we started the long journey home. Everyone on board apart from Matt and I managed to go to sleep. We had a hilarious time watching people sleeping with their mouths open. A tiny Chinese boy sitting next to me kept dozing off and then waking himself up by falling over. I spent the whole journey trying to prop him
up.
When we arrived back at the tour office we were impressed to see they’d taken the photos taken on the pier at the start of the day and printed them onto a plate. It only cost £3 which we didn’t think was bad at all for the effort so we had to buy it. It was very tacky but we thought it was hilarious to see us smiling back from a plate!
We got into the minibus with a group of other people at sat waiting for the driver to return. We waited and waited. Forty minutes later he finally got in and set off.
The journey was death defying as ever. We almost died at least a couple of times. The closest was when he decided to overtake someone on a blind corner, only to find something coming the other way. It was getting dark so wasn’t the safest time to be on the roads, then to make things worse it started to pour with rain. I was convinced we were going to have an accident this time.
The hours ticked by slowly as we dropped people off one by one. It was 8pm
when we finally pulled into our resort and I was so relieved to be out of the vehicle that I didn’t care that it was raining heavily.
We dropped off our things and headed to the restaurant for some dinner as we felt like we'd been starved all day.
My only intention for dinner was to eat until I felt full so that I could go to bed. I felt as though I’d been travelling for hours and hours. In fact we’d spent 10 hours of a 14 hour day trip travelling to and from Similian. It was as long as a flight to LA from Heathrow so it was no wonder we were tired!
When we got back to our room at 9.30am we did a bit of packing, but it wasn’t long before exhaustion took over and I hit the pillow getting the best nights sleep of the trip so far.
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