Phuket, Phi Phi and first few days in Malaysia...

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Wow, it feels as though its been a long time since we were in Bangkok! Nearly a month a go, we left there and since then, we've been down to the island of Phuket for Christmas and spent New Year in Kho (Island) Phi Phi, before deciding to take a small trip down to Malaysia, where we are currently, in Kuala Lumpur, the capital! We took a very long 14 hour bus ride down from Bangkok on the 22nd December, made all the more uncomfortable by the fact we had to sit down all the way - no sleeper buses with beds like in India anymore! 😞 We stayed in a place on the west coast of Phuket called Patong for Christmas, which was fun as we were staying in a hostel full of other backpackers and could take advantage of the nightlife that was on offer, as well as the beautiful (but busy) beach. However I didn't really like the area, as Patong is really just a big tourist resort catering to holidaymakers, so wasn't very interesting. Christmas day was nice though, as me and MJ had bought a few things and made stockings for each other to open in the morning so it felt semi like Christmas day - very strange to be spending boxing day on the beach in 30 degree temperatures though!! After Patong, we headed to the east side of the island, to Phuket Town for the period in between Christmas and NY, which is a lot less tourist oriented. We enjoyed renting a scooter and exploring the inland and more the east coast - including visiting the Big Buddha, a massive marble Buddha sitting on top of one of the many hills surrounding the town - the ride to the top took it out of our little scooter, but it made it! Inside it was essentially a busy shrine and temple, but it also makes for a brilliant view of the town and the coast when its not cloudy and misty - which was the case on the day we went!! After Phuket, we took a ferry and headed west to the islands of Phi Phi, a much smaller island than Phuket, but just as busy it seemed!! Although Phi Phi Don (the main island) is an absolutely stunning island with white sands, clear water, tropical fish, mountains, etc, the main village (where visitors stay) was basically completely designed for tourists as its become one of the most visited islands in Thailand. Due to this, all there really is in the pop up village (as we started to call it) is countless restaurants, tattoo parlours, diving shops, guest houses, bars and clubs, which although was fun, seemed really strange and completely artificial. However, New Year was a really good night, as we'd met other people staying in our guest house and spent it in a party on the beach, dancing on the sand and in the sea 😊 Whilst in Phi Phi, we also visited a few more of the stunning islands that its made up of, including the island that the film The Beach was filmed on. We snorkelled and saw some amazing fish, so colourful and interesting, and also swam above coral and reef sharks - I was pretty happy with myself for trying it as I normally hate going in the sea with fish etc!!! After spending a few more days in Phi Phi, we headed over to Krabi, on the mainland on another ferry. Here we spent another two days in Krabi town and rented a scooter again, riding through the most beautiful scenery, with limestone cliffs rising up intermittently and rainforests up in the hills and mountains. We visited Khao Phanom national park, where we canoed though big limestone caves and saw little fiddler crabs in the mangroves with their one large claw, strange! We realised that we needed to do a visa run as our 30 days Thai visa had nearly ran out. So instead of wasting money on a package from a tour operator that just returned us to the same point after a quick stopover at the Burmese border, we decided to take an early trip to Malaysia instead! Whilst on couchsurfers, we befriended a guy that said we can share a couch in Kuala Lumpur, so instead of taking another long trip down straight to Kuala Lumpur on another overnight bus, we stopped off twice and slit up the journey into three. We first got a bus to Hat Yai, close to the Malaysian border, a large commercial centre where we stayed a large, salvation army style hostel (extremely basic)!! But it was all we needed so we didn't mind. The next day, we got a train to Alor Setar, where we needed to get off the train to get our free 90 day Malaysian visa before completing the journey. After changing our bahts to ringgits, we were ready! We only stayed one night in Alor Setar, another large commercial district, before heading down on a bus to Kualar Lumpur. We've been here for 5 days now, and have been enjoying exploring the bustling capital with our couchsurfing friend Hassan. We've been on a few pub crawls and have met a lot of other lovely people since being here, so will probably stay a few more days before moving on! Anyway, that's all for now, will update again soon!

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