Tuesday 16th 2009 Na Thrang

---

Tuesday 16th 2009 Na Thrang
For once a trip we were going on wasn’t starting at 7am so we were picked up at 8.30 on our minibus and Bobby V from Virginia introduced himself straight away. Drove around and picked up the rest of the crew and went down to the harbor to get on our boat. Seemed a little like Ko Phi Phi again though with about 20 tour boats loading up but wasn’t too bad in the end because not all them were heading out, I’d say high season has more Vietnamese in the ocean than fish. Met a couple of nice people mainly by hanging on Bobby V who likes to talk to everyone in a 50 m radius, some lad.

First stop was an aquarium which was actually pretty impressive, no messing around with loads of tanks of only vaguely interesting fish, they had about 30 tanks with your highlights, big turtles, massive grouper, a very active shark tank with black and white tip reefs and a leopard shark, and a couple of cool eels of various sizes. They also had big outdoor breeding pools which had shark and turtles and some bigger fish.

Next stop was for snorkeling on Mot Island which was very disappointing, there was some very dull coral and a handful of fairly basic fish and worst of all was the gear, no fins and the worst snorkels and masks straight from the 2 Euro store. No-one really bothered staying in the water for too long there. They then served us up lunch which wasn’t too bad, it looked like a more impressive spread than it was but it did the job and started having a few beers from then. We had a decent group on board, mainly English and kiwis and Singaporean who were all up for a laugh so afterwards the crew set up this makeshift dance floor and set up a drum kit and a few guitars for the funniest live performance ever, it was brilliant, they got some of the passengers up to do some performance. They had the Americans sing back street boys and the kiwis do the haka, luckily though myself and Mary were spared having to do the siege of Ennis. After this they threw this bizarre floating contraption into the water with a guy in the middle of it with a couple of bottle of cocktails and you had to grab a life ring and swim out to him for their happy hour. Pretty bizarre but good fun. That was the basic crux of the trip, not the most scenic of trips but was ok craic for a while although Mary wasn’t too impressed with it.

We got back and headed back to Lanterns again for some dinner we could rely on before heading out to meet some of the people from the trip for some drinks. The infamous Bobby V had arranged for everyone to meet in the not so suitable and very dead at night Louisianne, we arrived down an hour late but found no one. We weren’t too bothered and headed off for a drink on our own in a place called Why Not? where we ended up meeting Bobby and some other people, looked like he hadn’t even stayed with anyone form the trip. Had a good night drinking buckets of very tasty and cheap cocktails there with some Norwegians and Israelis.

---