On our first morning in Phuket our driver picked us up and we drove about half an hour to a Rassada Harbor. We had purchased the 3 in 1 Phi Phi Islands tour.
We boarded the boat quickly but then had to wait another hour for some other tour members who showed up late. The sky was overcast and we were worried that our “island paradise” would not be so picture perfect. About twenty minutes out on the water our hopes were diminished further when it started to rain. We were on the top of the boat, which was open, but with the heat and humidity a little rain felt nice.
An hour later as we circled Khai Nok Island the gods smiled on us and broke through the rain and clouds, shooting down bright rays of morning sunshine on our little island. Of all the islands we would visit this remained my favorite. The island seemed to be no longer than a football field with a small whitesand beach in the front. Our guide explained that we would only have 45 minutes on the island instead of the original 90 thanks to the few tourists that had shown up late.
We bounced down the plastic floating pier, grabbed our snorkels and headed to the unpopulated area just past the edge of the beach.
On our way there a five-foot long Komodo dragon swam up and ran across the beach. I didn’t have time to take a photo, but a minute later we were surprised with a visit from a baby dragon.
Although the water wasn’t crystal clear and the fish weren’t as colorful as “normal” due to our visit falling in the low season the snorkeling was still an amazing experience. The only other time I can remember snorkeling is as a child in the community pool, this was certainly worlds apart from that!
I had bought an underwater casing thing for this trip so I could try to take underwater pictures. The casing was more like a ziplock back with a lens cap. It was made for larger lenses, so it was hard to get a photo where you couldn’t see the circle of the lens cap on the side of the photo. The photo above and the next three were taken with Sam’s Fuji underwater camera.
The next two videos were shot with Sam’s underwater camera.
I wanted to stay all day, but our guide, “beer,” quickly rounded us up and we were soon on our long-tail boat again heading to the “big boat.” the skies turned gray again as we left kai island and headed back into the open ocean. “open ocean” is really a misnomer as for this day and thenext we’d be in oceanic national parks that had tons of islands in every direction, always no farther away than the horizon. In fact, this often turned into a sort of mirage as we could see the tall islands from far away but never seemed to get closer. About an hour after leaving Kia island we realized this was actually true and we were sitting dead in the water. Soon after we saw a long-tail boat heading for us and twenty minutes later two Italians who had boarded the wrong boat at Khai were back with us. The designer shirt, watch and hat wearing little man sat in front of us and proceeded to smoke a pack of cigarettes, taking breaks to retrieve his silly hat when it often blew off in the wind. His Italian girlfriend was clearly in a classic Italian-angry-woman rage, but kept largely in check as she was more conscious of her boyfriend/husband’s inconvenience to the rest of the tour.
lunch on the boat: fresh fried fish and other stuff. I think Beer is the guy in the red cap.
It turns our foreigners like to smoke. A lot. On our group tours this would always be a constant annoyance. No matter how small a a boat we were shoved into, no matter how many children (usually of their own) were around there was constantly secondhand cigarette smoke entering our lungs. The most brazen smokers seemed to be the persians and Europeans. Also worth noting that Americans were few and far between, even on a large organized tour such as this.
90 minutes later we had arrived at the next group of islands.
We first passed the beach where many scenes from danny boyle’s “the island” werer shot. Unfortunately we did not stop there and sam and myself were apparently the only poeple who had seen the film.
We circled around to the other side and sank anchor perhaps 100 yards from shore.
We hopped on another long-tail boat and went to the beach at Maya Bay where many monkeys were there to greet us.
The photo below is from Sam’s camera – proof that I took the above shot and not National Geographic 😉
After leaving the monkeys I had a few minutes to snorkel again behind the big boat. The snorkeling there was actually better than earlier in the day because we were hovering over a coral reef with many more diverse types of fish. I saw one fish that looked like eel but with a fish face and long nose. Unfortunately I didn’t bring my camera with me. Soon beer was herding us back onto the big boat. As I was showering off apparently a European tried to break off and take a piece of coral with him. The arrogant tourist protested and for a minute it almost seemed like beer was going to have to show him a demonstration of Thai kickboxing.
Next we headed past Ao Lohsama and A Bi-leh…..
Below is a photo of Viking Cave. I forget what they told us about these, but Sam got it on video… maybe you can make out Beer’s description in the video? Something about bamboo poles? …or you can read about it here.
When we were back on the boat and headed to Phi Phi Island the sun decided to hide behind the clouds again and never really returned.
Because of the Italian our time on phi phi was cut short to about 45 minutes. Sam and I walked to the other side of the island and waded out into the bay. Along the way we encountered two different crabs that hid in the sand. The first one just wanted to hide, but the second one wanted to fight and put up his claws, pinching me when I swooped in with my underwater camera.
After relaxing in Ton Sai Bay bay for about 25 minutes we walked through the little trinket and food village, buying some souvenirs and a nice yellow grilled chicken snack to eat on the boat.
It was around 8 by the time we were back in phuket and we were hungry again so we walked around until we found black canyon coffee, a restaurant chain in southeast Asia. I hope they expand to the states one day.
Our crappy hotel was right around the corner from the Hard Rock Cafe, which had this cover band playing every night.
