Thailand was nice

---

As always, pickup from last entry, Bangkok. Following our already arranged travelplans we go picked up in Bangkok airport, driven directly to a bus and took off heading south. Time for islands and the first one was Koh Phangan.
Getting to that island proved a bit different that we had though. Complicated isn't the word but nor is easy. Interesting may suit it well. Basically, what we had thought to be one bus drive and a boat resulted in the main bus dropping us off somewhere with a lot of other people
and handed out some colored stickers that we were supposed to put on our shirt with no more information than that. From there we were visited by a shuttle bus once i a while asking for our destination and taking small groups of people to somewhere unknown,
going on for several hours.
When we finally got picked up by the shuttle we were taken to a pier some half an hour away from the previous waiting-point. Here we got given some more colorful stickers to put on and apart from that just told to sit and wait. Sitting there for a bit we realized that many of the other people sitting around waiting were the same people that had waited with us at the previous spot, but taken by a different shuttle, which obviously just took everyone to the same place. None of us knew anything about what were supposed to happen next.
Only thing we knew was the importance of a boat at some point to reach an island, so being on a pier we found it logical that the next means of transport would be that boat. After having waited for another couple of hours and several times havng been told just to wait for your 'sticker-color' to be called out
we were finally showed to another bus, that took us to another pier about 1 hour away. This time taking a lot of people with different sticker-colors into the same bus. At this pier we were suddenly rushed onto a boat, everyone that previously got separated and put into groups, now all in one go, and fast!
Here we were told to wait for the second stop of the boat, being Koh Phangan and it all worked out in the end.
Koh Phangan, famous for it's Fullmoon Parties and infamous for it's Phangan Tatoos.
Latter translates into wounds and scratches from falling on a motorbike and according to the many occurrences of this specific type of body-art, it almost seemed a popular sparetime activity amongst the visitors of Koh Phangan. Proved to be due to heaps of impossible roads, cheap motorbike rental and a steady flow of overeager tourists.
We stayed at a wonderful bungalow basically on the beach, though several hundred meters of shallow and burning hot waters before reaching anything swimmable easily put the pool in favour.
It didn't take us long to meet some nice people to hang out with and eventually attend the Fullmoon pre-party with. That was great fun and my first time of drinking out of a bucket.. and first lesson in keeping my distance to cheap Thai Whiskey! We had a good night out in any case and a day indoor the following day, not really enjoying that our heads were so tightly attached to our neck.
Suggested by the name, one could think that the previous nights party being the pre-fullmoon should result in the now current day to be the night of the Full Moon. It doesn't. Full moon was 6 days earlier and obviously, the fullmoon party isn't connected to such an irregular event that doesn't take weekdays and weekends into account. The party was on though and after a little persuasion of our bodies they agreed to go again.
As it is customary of a fullmoon party, you need neon-paint and everything glow-in-the-dark that you can possibly get your hands on so after having finished dinner, we set up a body-paint workshop, working our way through everyone in each of their own style for which Lea got put in command due to her vast skill and excellence earned through months of hard work doing face-paint in a kindergarden.
With that set, we continued drinking for a bit, then headed off to the party. Don't wanna go into details here but soon both Lea and I had to admit to ourselves that we weren't actually up for party again. Are we too old?.. already? or just lazy.. or maybe the party just wasn't our 'type'. We stuck to the last explenation and descided to find the Reggae tent which were supposed to be there somewhere but after 1½ hour of searching we finally found it closed and ended up calling it a day. Not much partying that night, it wasn't.

Spending the next couple of days inspecting the beach and water quality and comparing Khmer massage to Thai style (Thai is preferable), we headed off again,
leaving the Gulf to cross over the country from east to west placing us in a town called Krabi.
First 2 days there were wet to say the least. 48 hour of intense pouring down made us consider to go back the way we came. Asking people about usual weather conditions this time a year didn't help either as most thai people doesn't really pay attention to the weather and pretty much all agreed on this beeing the norm on the westcoast and that it probably wouldn't stop for weeks.
After a couple of days the weather suddenly proved them wrong though and we found the energy needed to move on to our next destination, Koh Phi Phi Don, which is another quite popular island in Thailand and famous for fantastic diving locations. At this point though I didn't intend to do any diving and only snorkel if I got pushed in the water.
The island was fantastic and the hotel we found was a perfect match. Small bungalows just next to a private and whie-sanded beach, neatly furnished, fans, mosquito nets and heaps of different soaps in case you want a different smell for each day of the week. It was even fairly cheap due to the tourist low-season.
Only problem with the otherwise perfect hotel was the powersupply being delivered by a quite unstable generator resulting in powerfailure every now and then, having the worst consequences during the night where we were quite dependent upon the fan being on full power not to overheat. Otherwise eating in a candlelit restaurant only boosted the atmosphere.
Getting around on the island was either done by long-tail boats from beach to beach or through small jungle-tracks criss-crossing through the island which during the night would be lit by some sparsely placed lightbulps on a powercord hanging from the trees, also connected to the generator...
First trip at Koh Phi Phi was a full day snokel-trip at some nearby islands and even though I wasn't too inclined to go snorkeling myself, I couldn't help taking a look here and there and eventually ended up actually liking it. One of our stops were at a beach called Maya Bay which is also where the movie "The Beach" got recorded.
That evening both Lea and I felt like treating ourselves rather well and went on for a dinner of lobster and white wine. Not bad at all!
During the following 7 days we met some of my friends from New Zealand, got overselves each an SSI Open Water diving certificate, watched wild fireshows in the night, spend many an hour at our private beach drinking mango lassis or reading books from hammocks spread out along the beach and went to bed each night under the mosquito net with the fan on full power and listening to the waves breaking...
Also during one of the fireshows I even managed to win a bucket full of Whiskey and Coca-cola by limbo dancing under a rod on fire and I still have my eyebrows! Furthermore we had a good talk with a local tailor from whom I ended up buying a custom made, fully tailored and dusty red corduroy suit for no more than 750DKK,-. It's pretty damn amazing and I'm looking for every opportunity to wear it though I haven't had any just yet.
I could have stayed at that island for a very long time! but eventually we had to move on, as there were still many islands on our itinerary and who knows if they are even better.
Next move was back to the mainland at a place called Railey which is kind of an inverted peninsula and as with all the other places, it was beautiful! Getting there from Phi Phi was a bitch though. We got told to go with a ferry that could take us straight to the spot with only one stop. Proved that the ferry didn't go past that first stop and it was a mess proving to people that we already payed and find people who were in the system that could take us to our destination for free (because we already payed).. ended well though and we got some new american friends that were having similar difficulties..
We stayed at Railey on for a couple of days as it had no actual activities apart from big stalactite caves and cats all over! the stalactites were great though as they were made of some light stone that if you found the right ones, could generate some amazing sound and I spend a little while running around trying to find some that had the same key, until Lea got too embarressed 😊
After Railey we moved on to our last thai island called Koh Lipe. We had it recommended by some guy I met in New Zealand and it was supposed to be an amazing diving spots as well - which we were both eager to test now that we had our licenses.
After arriving there we quickly found out why no one else had talked about it though, as it was nearly completely deserted.
We could conclude that it's obviously a pretty busy place during high-season as there were a big town with everything one would need as a tourist but at the time we were there, almost every single shop were closed in an almost throw-everything-you-are-carrying-and-run kinda way. Ghost town describes it pretty well and the massive amount of cats and dogs running around seemingly without owners only added to that feeling. Spooky to say the least. We had a whole and extremely beautiful beach all for ourselves though. That's got to count for something, hey?... But not enough so we left again after 2 days that almost felt wasted.

Next move is Malaysia so here ends our travels of Thailand. Great experiences, heaps of awesome food and no upset stomachs. I like Thailand 😊

---