Wow, the suspense was killing you, Im sure. But dont you worry, Im back to fill you guys in on the rest of our trip-- or at least until I feel like I've written and posted enough for today (this is much more time consuming that I thought!!)
Anyways, where was I? Oh yeah, WERE HERE IN PHI PHI!
Beautiful right?? We havent even left the pier yet! We didnt know a lot about the island before we got there... Im sure the locals have more interesting things to do, such as, stare at their amazing backdrops of scenery rather than build a proper website with current information :) So we were amazed to see how compact and easy to get around this island was-- they dont even have cars there! Everyone bicycles around and if they have anything heavy to maneuver they use carts that they pull around. Someone from the hotel was at the pier to greet us, packed our luggage on one of the carts and told us he would meet us at the hotel with our things. Our
hotel (Phi Phi Cabana Hotel) was only a 2 minute walk from the pier, so it was super easy to get around. The pier view was the front of our hotel. The whole village is on this skinny little isthmus (a narrow strip of land connecting two larger land areas usually with waterfronts on either side-- thanks wikipedia!!) You can see from the picture- pier on the left, beach on the right, and village in the middle! The first thing we did once we got there was change, taking extra long as we admired our view and went out into the village to get some lunch!!
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| Front of our hotel |
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| village street |
While we were out for lunch I spotted a lady carrying what I think she thought was her child but in reality it was a monkey dressed up in overalls and a Tshirt, they were picking out crabs together for dinner :) Strange! Already at this point in the trip I realized how much I LOVE thai food! It is soooo delicious and the food over there is so cheap that we just ordered waaaay too much food just to try out a bit of everything! We could literally get a whole meal with appetizer and two beers each for $18! It was great! After a very yummy lunch we went to the beach for awhile and decided to rent a kayak for a little bit to the other side of the beach, Sunset beach! There, Brian found a pretty good sized crab and somehow managed to pick it up! He was very proud of himself :) hehe As you can see from the picture- a big ole rain cloud was forming as we were enjoying ourselves out on this little secluded beach. Unfortunately, the only way back was the way we came- on the kayak. Less than halfway back to our hotel the rain started coming down hard!! It was crazy and I was freaking out! Brian kept assuring me that if I calmed down about it, it would be just like that scene from the Notebook (good effort, Brian) haha Once we got back we dried off and enjoyed the view from our balcony while waiting for the rain to stop. That didn't take too long- so we got to enjoy a lovely evening at the village with lots of food and drinks!!! While on the beach earlier we made plans to head to Maya Bay in the morning on one of those cool looking long tail boats! Maya Bay is a very popular place to go because that is where they filmed the movie The Beach with Leonardo DiCaprio. (hmm I wonder if I was sitting in the exact same spot on the beach as LEo??! THAT would be cool!) After dinner, we called it a night.....
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| Beautiful view from the hotel :) |
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| Mmmmmm PAD THAI! |
GOOD MORNING PARADISE! We were so excited to head out on the 3rd morning for our boat excursion. We left around 730 or 8 in the morning (the time change had us feeling more like it was 1030 or 11) plus the guy who was taking us out on the boat said mornings are best, because the places we were headed are less crowded from people taking day tours. First of all, I loved being in this cool old looking Thai style boat. Brian said they just rigged up an old car motor to these boats haha but regardless it looks so neat and almost iconic for the area! Also, it is so amazing because the water is soooo flat, no waves at all- Ive never seen anything like it! (I guess that's also why we were able to kayak!) Some areas the water is dark blue, some areas is completely clear like pool water, and some areas it is bright turquoise!! Here are some pics of the route to Maya Bay.............
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| on our way, looking back at our hotel |
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| brian checking it out |
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| so hard to pick just a few pictures when they were all so spectacular!! |
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| Almost there!!! |
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| Brian enjoying the boat ride!! |
Just pulled in. Thanks for driving, Adam :)
We took so many more pictures but I had to narrow them down.... So we pulled up to Maya Bay and it was absolutely beautiful!! There was really not too many people there, which surprised me! I would have thought such an amazing place would be packed all day! And maybe it gets like that later in the day but for the time we were there we had lots of the beach to ourselves!
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| view of the beach we swam out to |
Soooooo amazing! After hanging out on the beach for awhile we decided to pack up and have our sweet boat driver take us to the next location to do a bit of snorkeling!! It was beautiful and we had such a good time. We snorkeled to this little beach then when we came back Adam, our boat captain, had some bread to feed the fishys! Brian decided to feed them while he was still in the water so he was swarmed with tropical yellow and black fish! It was so cool.... I tried from the boat and the moment I got the slice close to the water they were hopping out to get it- I freaked and dropped the whole thing in... oh well :)
Next up was Phi Ley bay which was on the other side of this island. (there are actually 2 islands that make up the Phi Phi islands but only one of them is inhabited. The one we were touring around this day was not! By this time in the day we started to notice that there were many other bigger boats coming around. We were feeling pretty lucky because most of those boat have about 100 other people on it and have strict times when they need to come in and head to the next place. Phi Ley bay is another beautiful area with crystal clear water where we just hopped out (it was very shallow in some areas) and Brian did a bit more snorkeling while I lounged in the boat!
Then we checked out Viking Cave-- I really am still not sure what this is or what they are up to in there... (but thank god for wikipedia-- There they have a thriving bird's nest soup industry, hmmm still not sure what that means, more please wiki: apparently this certain kind of cave bird produces a saliva nest (ew) and is a delicacy and one of the most expensive animal products consumed by humans) STRANGE.
Our last stop was Monkey beach! After our trip in August to Singapore I was pretty excited about seeing more monkeys! We werent really sure if there were actually going to be monkeys there-- we never even saw any at or near the village (you would think the little scavengers would go over there considering it was on the same island as all the people!) Sure enough, there were tons of monkeys!! A whole family of them! My favorite was a sweet little fam with a tiny monkey baby who was still breast feeding his mommy and the daddy was right there the whole time, even started combing through the mommys hair (for fleas or something but it was still sweet) Brian got a bit up close with one of them :)
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| Two monkeys on the beach :) |
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| This little guy wanted the shirt of Brians back! |
After all the adventure for the day we decided it was time to head back, get some lunch and hang by the beach! It rained for all of 30 minutes this day, as well. Apparently this is necessary for a tropical location to stay beautiful and green! Then we watched the sun set while drinking a few beers :)
We then got ready for another delicious Thai seafood dinner! It was a really nice outdoor restaurant (minus the millions of stray cats wandering around-- but I guess thats normal around there because they are everywhere!!) We then walked down the beach where there was tons of beach party action going on! There were light shows and tiki torches and we couldnt resist stopping for a drink! We stopped at one bar which was about to start a fire hula hooping show (or something like that!!) when I spotted some guy holding a monkey-- sorta like the lady who was cradling one earlier.... next thing I know the Thai owner of the pet monkey took him off that other guy and onto me!!! The monkey wrapped his super long arms around my neck and his super long legs around my waist and nuzzled his little monkey face into my chest! He was soo cute. The owner told me he liked to be cuddled-- although he wouldnt let us take any picture :( Guess I'll have to store that one in the old memory bank. Later after I gave him back, as I was walking by the monkey reached out to me again for me to hold him -- I think he liked me :)
This is what the little guy
looked like-- just wearing
clothes hehe
I'm not sure a day can get any better than that one!!! Life is good-- and we still have 3 days left of our journey!!
Ill catch back up more tomorrow!
The fishing gear was a round contraption with fishing line wrapped around and at the end it had about 5 or 6 hooks with little bait on each one. You will see- its a bit ghetto but still fun! We drove around for awhile dragging the hook along. I loved being on the front of the boat but after awhile I started feeling a little sea sick :( The captain finally decided that Brian was NOT going to catch anything this round so stopped to snorkel! The water was absolutely amazing but I was still a little scared to post up in the middle of the ocean to swim (Jaws has scarred me for life)! So... I didn't snorkel too long (plus apparently the motion sickness does not go away when you actually get in the water) Once Brian got tired of snorkeling and had successfully convinced me to pull his favorite snorkel maneuver - the hold your breath and dive down to get up close and personal to something (in this case a large coral which would close its mouth (??) when anything got close) we packed up to head to Bamboo island. I think he was being sweet and knew I wasn't feeling great so stopped much earlier than he would have preferred. Bamboo island was PACKED! I am pretty sure this is because the group day tours were at their first stop (and that the day before at Maya bay we just got lucky to be there while it was empty) The water here was AMAZING! It was soooo crystal clear! Since I was feeling a bit nauseous we went to a small snack area (they had camping on bamboo island so they had a tiny snack bar) and got a sprite and watch all the people on the beach (so funny watching people taking pictures of themselves jumping with a peace sign haha) and after a short time I was feeling back to normal so we got to enjoy the beach ourselves! Once we got up we realized that everyone was moving out and on to their next adventure so we got the beach all alone!! It was wonderful! 
When we left Bamboo Island we tried our hand at a bit more Thai style fishing ....and this time we caught some!! Well, mainly the boat driver did, but between Brian and I, we got 5 or so (I only actually got 1 but had to include myself!!!) Brian even got two on one line :) We were pretty excited because before we left for the day the main Thai man who we have been talking to said whatever we caught they could cook up for us that night! We didnt realize the fishys we would catch would be so small but they didnt seem bothered by it! We then headed back home and I have to say, the view of our hotel from the ocean is amazing-- I get so excited just go go back to it! One thing that we could not help but notice was the fact that at about 230 pm when we got in-- there was NO BEACH. It was MIA. Luna (our friend who we rented everything from) told us that it does this all the time when the moon is big and when it is a full moon the tide goes back even further. I cant imagine it being even further back-- we had to walk about 100 yards from where the boat had to drop us off to get up to where the beach normally was! Ive seriously never seen anything like it! (I didnt know they moon had anything to do with the tide to tell you the truth)
We got back to our hotel, cleaned up a bit, then decided we wanted to get out and kayak to sunset beach once more! It was kind of last minute but Brian somehow knew the sunset would be beautiful and he was correct! As soon as we got there they was a man gathering the trash from the few beaches in the area... and when we saw up close, his kayak was in fact a huge piece of styrofoam!!! haha it looked so much nicer from far off! The sunset was amazing and we hung out for awhile enjoying our drinks (yeah we brought some massive drinks with us!!) before we trekked back the (kinda scary and dark) route to the beach where we ate our delicious fish! They just grilled them and served them over rice-- with a super yummy (although spicy) thai sauce. The we left and had a few drinks on the beach where they had fire and lots of places to sit along the beach. All in all, another amazing day!!!! 
When we left Bamboo Island we tried our hand at a bit more Thai style fishing ....and this time we caught some!! Well, mainly the boat driver did, but between Brian and I, we got 5 or so (I only actually got 1 but had to include myself!!!) Brian even got two on one line :) We were pretty excited because before we left for the day the main Thai man who we have been talking to said whatever we caught they could cook up for us that night! We didnt realize the fishys we would catch would be so small but they didnt seem bothered by it! We then headed back home and I have to say, the view of our hotel from the ocean is amazing-- I get so excited just go go back to it! One thing that we could not help but notice was the fact that at about 230 pm when we got in-- there was NO BEACH. It was MIA. Luna (our friend who we rented everything from) told us that it does this all the time when the moon is big and when it is a full moon the tide goes back even further. I cant imagine it being even further back-- we had to walk about 100 yards from where the boat had to drop us off to get up to where the beach normally was! Ive seriously never seen anything like it! (I didnt know they moon had anything to do with the tide to tell you the truth)
We got back to our hotel, cleaned up a bit, then decided we wanted to get out and kayak to sunset beach once more! It was kind of last minute but Brian somehow knew the sunset would be beautiful and he was correct! As soon as we got there they was a man gathering the trash from the few beaches in the area... and when we saw up close, his kayak was in fact a huge piece of styrofoam!!! haha it looked so much nicer from far off! The sunset was amazing and we hung out for awhile enjoying our drinks (yeah we brought some massive drinks with us!!) before we trekked back the (kinda scary and dark) route to the beach where we ate our delicious fish! They just grilled them and served them over rice-- with a super yummy (although spicy) thai sauce. The we left and had a few drinks on the beach where they had fire and lots of places to sit along the beach. All in all, another amazing day!!!! 
The next morning we lounged on the beach for awhile (the past few days were packed- from the time we woke up till late at night) then decided to do a bit more kayaking :) We were really into the whole kayak thing if you couldnt tell hehe. We just went along to Monkey beach again -- Brian bought a few bananas because he thought it would be fun to watch them eat them! And let me tell you, it is true- monkeys love bananas haha! They were actually a little scary because the wanted to bananas so much they stole the entire bag out of some guys hands and ran off (we were not the only one with this idea!)
Next we went just a few minutes away to some caves (not sure if they are technically caves but they were some sort of crevasses) The tide was low enough so that we could go in and check it out. The water was beautiful, I even took a picture from the kayak to the coral underneath! It was really neat! We could see straight through to all the tropical fish! It was like we were snorkeling without even being in the water (great for me!!!) I decided I wanted to get back before dusk this night-- too scary-- so we soon left for the hotel so we could change and go to one last delicious thai dinner before we had to leave in the morning :( We did not want to have to leave and even considered changing our flights but it was too complicated!! plus we missed brody!!! 
The final morning we rushed around getting everything packed before we had to be on our 9am ferry boat back to Phuket. (I think we packed in record time!) We just relaxed the whole way back- enjoying the scenery but without taking any pictures. It was kind of nice to just stare out and the beautiful islands without the worry of capturing the right shot! We then got into our taxi (remember we decided NOT to do the mini bus excursion!) and got to the airport around 1130. Our flight wasnt until 5pm but the ferry only leave a few time a day and this was the only one we could get without cutting it too close! So we dropped off our bags at the airport and saw a few sights in Phuket before we flew out! We stopped at 2 different religious places (I cannot tell you exactly what because our cabbie did not speak english..) One had a giant hindu man on top just a' loungin on the building. (you should have seen me trying to describe that to the driver... lol) 
