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Published: March 25th 2009
8th - 14th March
Arrived in Phuket after 1hour flight on a plane with only 15 passengers. Met up with Ashley, one of my friends from University who now lives in Thailand, and stayed at her house at Bang Tao beach. There's lots of beaches around Phuket but it's very much package tourism central. We hired a bike, for which you are required to give a hotel address but as we didn't know the details the company were happy with "Ashley's house", "Room 2". Visited various beaches including Kamala, Surin, Karon, Patong etc. The beaches are very nice with golden sand and clear waters, however certain resorts are a bit too built up for example Patong which is basically like Benidorm. Greg got a tailor made suit in Patong, very good quality for a good price, I think since the incident at Bangkok airport tourism has been affected quite badly so you can barter for a good deal. We spent a few days with Ash and also looked after Geordie the cat while she was away with work.
14th - 17th March
Arrived on Koh Phi Phi and found somewhere to stay just in time for the storm, went to
Hippies bar for many drinks and no food. Was a fun evening of entertainment but one of those that you regret in the morning. Hired a long tail boat to go to Phi Phi Lay famous for beach where "The beach" was filmed. We went snorkeling just off the boat which was amazing, just like swimming in a big fish tank. We saw lots of different fishes of many different colours, I got my finger nibbles by an angel fish and we saw a barracuda shark.
17th - 18th March
Arrived at Railey beach in Krabi, very beautiful beach on a peninsular surrounded by mountains and beautiful green water. The place is popular with climbers for obvious reasons and is very chilled out and relaxing. Our accommodation was a little basic with a toilet you had to flush with a bucket, so that gave us a good enough reason to spend as little time as possible inside.
We spent a day trekking between the different beaches including Pharanang beach and caves, famous for Penis cave where wooden penis statues line the cave as some kind of fertility shrine. We also climbed over a mountain to reach Ton Sai
beach with is the main hang out for climbers, this involved a little bit of difficult trekking where I fell over and hurt my hand.
Later that day we hired a canoe to paddle out into the ocean, just as Greg past me some money to hold so it didn't get wet he rolled the canoe over tipping me and all the money into the sea. But that wasn't the only soaking we got, as once out into the sea a storm built up and a violent wave capsizes the canoe which then became a struggle to get back on. Wasn't that funny once it started to rain. We made it back safely and then went for a little swim in the storm.
Evenings entertainment included eating Deer and Ostrich with James and Kristina from Birmingham and drinking at the last bar, with live shows including a snake to hold, fire show, Thai boxing and snake teasing. The snake teasing was pretty mean basically a guy pulls a cobras tail to make it hiss at him. Got the overnight ferry to Koh Pha-Ngan. Basically a ferry with loads of mattresses on the floor, not quite what we were expected but
managed to sleep ok, until the storm.
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JOHN
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