Where's Leo?
Trip Start
Oct 17, 2007
1
14
19
Trip End
Mar 14, 2008
Koh Phi Phi,
Thailand
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Anyways, enough of that. Phi Phi is hyped up as one of the most beautiful islands in the world for a reason... Because it is. The beaches are some of the best, finest white sand I've seen and the mountains and the overall shape of the island itself are beyond explanation. Just perfection. I'll put up some of the photos soon and hopefully they'll capture even one hundredth of how nice of a place it was.
That being said, it's also expensive, hard to find accomodation and pretty over-crowded. But nobody likes whiners so we still had an amazing time. Our first day over there we went on two Scuba dives and they pretty much blew our previous diving experience out of the water. The clarity of the water and just the abundance and diversity of the sea-life was just amazing. We saw a few turtles, we found Nemo, anemonies, jelly-fish, puffer-fish, cuttle-fish (weird bastards) and some pretty weird-looking coral and tons of other stuff as well. There were also a lot of what are called "swim-throughs" which are basically just these narrow passage-ways through rock formations that you swim in one hole and out another. Some of them were so completely packed with schools of fish that you couldn't see your hands even if you put them a few inches away from your face. To end our second dive, we also got to go into a pretty massive cave for our decompression stop and then exit through the roof into the sunny skies above. Just awesome.
Next day we went on a tour over to Phi Phi Leh island which is the uninhabited, sister island of Phi Phi Don island where we were staying. We stopped at monkey bay and got to feed a bunch of angry, aggressive monkeys. Then we went snorkelling and kayaking around a few amazingly picturesque, protected lagoons surrounded by razor-sharp mountains. Then probably the highlight of the tour was getting to stop at THE beach where they filmed "The Beach." Again there's a lot of hype about that beach, but once you're there you can really see why. During the day it's pretty brutal how packed it gets, but we were there a bit before sunset so there weren't too many people and the light was perfect for taking some nice photos. So we tossed the frisbee around for a bit, took a few really cheezy photos and then took off. I kept expecting Leonardo DiCaprio to pop out of the jungle or the water somewhere, but he never made an appearance... To end the trip, they served us dinner and anchored right in between two small islands so that the sun set right in between them and then took us home. All in all well worth the $15 we paid for the tour.
Next day we had to leave the island, but I realized that I hadn't yet gotten the mandatory postcard photo from the mountain viewpoint of the perfectly symmetrical bays with the mountains rising behind them. Karl went to snorkel with some sharks which I had already done the day before so the trip was a bit of a solo adventure. I got lost a few times and took a really awkward way of getting there through the jungle (I later found that there was a perfectly straight-up staircase that would've taken 10 minutes up instead of an hour and twenty!!! On the way up I had to make an emergency squat in the jungle and then when I got up I thought there were some branches on my neck, but it turned out that it was a branch with about 200 massive red ants making a nest of my head. After screaming like a girl for a minute and jumping all over the place trying to get them off of me I got myself under control and found the viewpoint. By that point there was only a half-hour until our boat was supposed to leave so I took my pictures, had a water and took off down the stairs. When I got back my skin seemed to be growing bubbles (I didn't even know that was possible) because of the 38 degree heat. We made our boat though, no big deal.
Pairs of sandals lost or destroyed: 6.
Next stop, sleezy Phuket.
