Tusnami!!!!! 6th Island

A few hours on a ferry saw us at perhaps the most famous place hit by the Tsunami in Thailand, but it was business as usual. As the ferry pulled up we saw more beautiful limestone hills and gorgeous, blue water with dive boats everywhere. I read that these boats drop their anchors on the reefs below and are slowly killing them but that's just the tip of the iceberg for the environmentally detrimental effects of this little Island. When we got off the ferry,

Little girl greeting us

Dave was amazed as he could see to the other side of the Island - something you couldn't do before the Tsunami for all the guesthouses. As we wandered around looking for a place to stay we saw some of the absolute destruction on this small strip of the Island where the town is. Although a lot of places had already been rebuilt, there was rubble and half standing houses everywhere. We realised that not everyone was poor here when our business was turned away 2 or 3 times when we tried to haggle for the price of our rooms. We found ot later that there are still really rich people on the Island who are the ones who rebuilt quickly. In the evening we walked around and saw beautiful resorts empty and damaged, blocks of land covered in broken glass, literally tonnes of rubbish in a pile, trees bent over and missing their tops - a mess. From what I could deduce the Tsunami had come from both sides and I found out later this was correct.

We attended a meeting for volunteers and watched people being assigned to clean up jobs. We found out that pile of trash had been 9 tonnes and only 2 were left to be taken by barge to Krabi. We were amazed at how fast everything was being rebuilt. From our research we found out that Phi Phi was severely overdeveloped before to the point where the King wanted the Island shut down as it was polluting several Island nearby. Now a building frenzy was once again taking place. I had lots of questions: did these volunteers even think about what they were doing? Why weren't any Thai people helping were they too busy or lazy?? Should we help out? I felt very skeptical, but felt awful for feeling this way too.

We hung out in a bar that was now a shack on a beach hit by the 6 metre wave. The tides were now different - lower. We went to another bar for a fireshow. It was amazing and there were 9 fire twirlers in total most of them doing poi. They each performed to a different song (mostly heavy or electronic) and each of them went crazy when the music got crazy. It was truly awesome.