Koh Phi Phi, July 21-23, 2008

Trip Start Jun 05, 2008
1
14
18
Trip End Ongoing


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Where I stayed
Pearl Paradise Resort
(Chiang Mai hotels)

Flag of Thailand  ,
Thursday, July 31, 2008

We arrived on Koh Phi Phi (pronounced like 'pee pee') in the afternoon of July 21, and we were a bit unsure about which part of the island to stay on. There is a pretty extensive tourist town there that stretches along a tiny isthmus, but the beaches there are less spectacular than elsewhere. Koh Phi Phi is best known for Maya Bay, where the movie "The Beach" was filmed, but it's expensive to stay there and you're only allowed to be there for one night. Ultimately we opted for Long Beach, which is a five-minute ride away by longtail taxi boat, where there are fewer things to do but a nicer and much less crowded beach to swim at. We checked into the Pearl Paradise (P.P.) resort, where the three of us shared a spacious bungalow near the beach. It was the first bungalow we'd stayed at that was made entirely out of bamboo, which was an experience--I was pretty sure that certain segments of the floor would give way if I stood on them for too long.

The next day we headed into town via taxi boat, where we wandered around doing some errands. We happened to strike up a conversation with some people in one of the dive shops, Barakuda Diving, and semi-impulsively decided to go scuba diving that afternoon off Koh Phi Phi Leh, a smaller, rockier island just next to the bigger Koh Phi Phi Don island, where we were staying. We were planning on doing two dives, so they offered us the option of using one of our dives to get our deep-water diving certificates and we accepted. The first stage of diving certification (called "open water") allows you to go down to 18 meters, and the next stage is the advanced certification, for which you need five dives in different specialized areas, including a deep dive. After our deep dive on Koh Phi Phi, we're now one dive closer to being advanced divers, and we're also certified to go down to 30 meters anywhere in the world. On our second dive our instructor took us to a reef where there are a lot of sea turtles, and it was amazing to get to swim right next to them. It made our diving experience on Koh Phi Phi really memorable.

We spent the rest of our time on Koh Phi Phi snorkeling and swimming in the unbelievably beautiful water, which practically glowed bright turquoise. Unlike the eastern Thai islands, where the tide is high at night, on the Andaman islands the morning and afternoon are the best time for swimming, so we availed ourselves of it. But with our time with Charlotte swiftly running out, we had to move on quickly and after just a few days we found ourselves on a ferry once more, this time to Railay, a peninsula jutting out from the Krabi province of southwestern Thailand.
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