Thailand, Koh Phi Phi: Islands of Jaw-Dropping Beauty

We found Nemo when snorkelling around the Koh Phi Phi islands
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We said goodbye to Malaysia with slightly saddened hearts, knowing that we would not be visiting the country again on this year-long trip of ours. We were, however, excited about entering country #5 out of 17 during our travels - Thailand. Despite enjoying Malaysia profusely, we knew it was time to venture further north and also change the pace of our travels. This led us to our first Thai destination, the island of Koh Phi Phi.

To get to Koh Phi Phi, we flew on Air Asia from Langkawi (Malaysia) to Phuket (Thailand) via Kuala Lumpur. Our flight arrived in the late afternoon on the island of Phuket and we therefore had to stay overnight before catching a ferry to Koh Phi Phi island. We stayed in Phuket Town at a place called Phuket Backpacker, which was very nice, clean and modern, but we felt a bit like cattle being herded from place to place. Perhaps they were being a bit too efficient with the numerous guests staying there, but we were happy to only have booked one night there.

We haggled the price with Ben and ended up getting him to throw masks, snorkels and flippers into the deal

The viewpoint on Koh Phi Phi Don island delivered a spectacular view of the two main beaches and town
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We didn't have much time when we arrived in Phuket, but we spent what little time we had sorting out a Thai prepaid SIM card for Kyle's mobile and also enjoying the first Thai meal of our trip. We made a pact to avoid eating any Thai food until we actually arrived in Thailand, and it was very difficult keeping this pact when we were in Malaysia as Thai restaurants seemed to be everywhere. We knew that a month in the country would present many opportunities for some great food, and waiting until we arrived in Thailand was worth it as we feasted on some new and favourite dishes of ours on the first evening in Phuket.

The island has been rebuilding itself since the 2004 tsunami and is doing an excellent job
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The next morning, we were "herded" out of Phuket Backpacker and onto a minibus before we were taken to Russada Pier, where a ferry to Koh Phi Phi island awaited us. The ferry ride was very nice, it was a large boat with air-conditioned sections as well as an open-air section where you could sit outside in the sun. The company rewards its travellers for paying so much for ferry tickets by offering free tea, coffee, soft drinks and cakes, so we tucked into quite a bit to make sure we got our money's worth. Getting our money's worth seemed to be a repeating theme for us in Thailand - travelling around the country has been much more expensive than when Kyle visited several years ago, and the Thais seem to be making the most (or taking the most) of tourists from western countries.

One of the beaches at Bamboo island, with pure white sand and crystal clear turquoise water
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There are two main islands in the group of islands known as Koh Phi Phi. The bigger and main island is called Koh Phi Phi Don and is where you will find everyone visiting the islands. The smaller of the two islands is called Koh Phi Phi Leh and can only be reached by boat on day trips. Maya Beach is located on Koh Phi Phi Leh and was made famous by the film "The Beach" with Leonardo Di Caprio. There are also several smaller islands nearby including Bamboo Island and Mosquito Island. All of these islands are located in the Andaman Sea which at this moment in time is possibly our favourite body of water. The water was very clear and a beautiful shade of turquoise and there were many living coral reefs located around the islands. However, our favourite body of water may change when we reach the islands off the east coast, situated in the Gulf of Thailand.

There are many interesting rock formations on the islands making up the Koh Phi Phi island region
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The ferry trip to the islands presented us with wonderful views of the islands, with many limestone rock formations jutting up out of the sea. We were astounded by the beauty as we approached the two main islands. The hot and sunny weather was perfect all week and helped fulfill our desire for tropical paradise. The only drawback of the weather was that the bungalow we stayed in at Phi Phi Don Chukit Resort was boiling hot every day and night - the small revolving fan on the ceiling of the bungalow did not offer much in the way of cool air. We are hoping that this will have been good training for Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam as we will be travelling to those countries in their hottest part of the year.

This is "Chicken Woman" - each night she donned a hat made of aluminium foil and did a funny chicken dance when cooking
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Koh Phi Phi Don is still rebuilding itself after being devastated by the tsunami. Most of the island has been rebuilt but there are a few areas which are still undergoing construction. Also, the island is not without its problems and the resort we stayed at had water problems causing the water in the bathroom to keep cutting out. Some of the most crucial times we needed showers were met with a completely dry tap, and resulted in a couple of cranky guys. At this point, we should mention that Don Chukit should not have the word "resort" anywhere close to its title. We certainly know that the 1100 Baht (around

Ton Sai Bay on Koh Phi Phi Don island is the main landing area for boats and is also a good place to get a water taxi to a nearby beach or island
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£16 GBP or around $30 USD) we spent on the bungalow each night did not and was not expected to deliver much in the way of a resort. The price did include a large breakfast, though, and the place was one of the cheapest places we were able to find when booking accommodation online. A word of advice for backpackers and other fellow travellers would be to find accommodation when you arrive, as online accommodation in Thailand seems to be double or triple the price of several places of accommodation when you arrive somewhere (we have since found this be true almost anywhere in Thailand). On the ferry, we met an American named Ashley from Austin, Texas, who ended up buddying up with us on some great snorkelling trips around the Koh Phi Phi islands. She normally turns up to a place and finds somewhere to stay at that point, and by doing this she managed to find accommodation costing 800 Baht or less each night.

Kyle and Dan standing on Hin Khom Beach at Ton Sai Bay
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There was a swimming pool at a true "resort" next to ours. On the first day we were on the island, we thought to keep the momentum going by sneaking into this pool (reference Kuching and Langkawi Malaysia journal entries) as we were getting really good at this. We were successful on day 1 on the island but on day 2 we were completely busted. This may have been because three people walking in seemed more conspicuous than two people (we talked Ashley into trying this with us on the second day). Also, since we were able to use the same pool the following day in order to test the underwater digital camera case we bought for the trip, we think we'd like to pass blame to Ashley for not getting into the pool to swim on the second day. We certainly won't give up trying to use nearby pools whenever possible!

Bak Hao Bay was beautiful and serene, with only one resort on the entire beach - orange juice was pricey though!
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Koh Phi Phi Don is full of Swedish people. When we stayed on Langkawi island in Malaysia, a guy named Joel warned us that everyone on the island is Swedish and blonde. We didn't think much of it at the time, as we thought he just meant that the island had several tourists from Sweden. After spending a couple of days on Koh Phi Phi, we agreed with Joel as we noticed that the island was completely made up of tourists, and most of them were from Sweden. It made us feel that we were transported to some secret Scandinavian destination, and it seemed that the percentage of Swedes definitely outnumbered the percentage of Thais! Despite the excessive number of Swedes, the island was very quaint and friendly, and there were no cars on the island. You could walk anywhere in the main part of the island within 10-15 minutes.

We gladly accepted this man's offering to wash our feet, as it beat us having to do it ourselves
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On the island, we tried out a restaurant that had been mentioned in Lonely Planet called Papaya. the guide was correct and we liked the food so much that we ended up having 3 meals there before leaving the island. The owner of the restaurant was very friendly and all of his family help run the restaurant. One evening, we witnessed his cute little 2 year-old daughter receiving her nightly whitening cream ritual, which is quite common for many kids we have seen in this country. Some of the food we have enjoyed includes green curry, penang curry, Thai pancakes with Nutella and spicy papaya salad. It was the first time either of us had papaya salad, and although delicious, it was super spicy (we found out the next day just how spicy it was).

The beach at Bak Hao Bay had beautiful turquoise water
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Snorkelling or diving is a must when visiting the Koh Phi Phi islands. We decided not to invest in a diving course and therefore opted for a snorkelling trip of some kind. Ashley was involved in deliberation after deliberation on how we should organise the trip and ourselves, and we ended up settling on hiring our own longboat and driver, Ben. We haggled the price with Ben and ended up getting him to throw masks, snorkels and flippers into the deal. We had planned all of this with a couple of other English guys whom Ashley knew. In true English fashion, they ended up drinking too many buckets of Thai whisky, red bull and coke until 4:00am the night before our tour, and didn't wake up to join us. We were pretty peeved as we and Ashley had to pay extra money to cover their portion of the costs, but the day more than made up for it. One thing that we both have taken from this travel experience, which was actually worse than it may seem when reading this, is that we are going to do whatever we want to do and try to limit other people's involvement if there is any chance at all of others flaking out. It's a shame that Ashley had to return to Austin soon after we met her; otherwise, she would have been good to include in our plans for further excursions.

Our boat driver Ben threw some bread in the water when we stopped for our first snorkelling trip - little did we know how many fish there would be!
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Everywhere on Koh Phi Phi Don, you can book a day snorkelling trip for 500 Baht per person (around £8 GBP, or $14 USD). These tours, however, are on a set schedule and every boat operated by the tour companies on the island follow the same general route. Therefore, you are faced with lots of people snorkelling in the same place at the same time. Ashley came up with the brilliant idea of following the organised tour route backwards so that we could miss all of the traffic at each site, and this worked like a dream. We were often some of the only people snorkelling in a given location.

We visited many islands on our Koh Phi Phi boat trip
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On the tour, we first circled Koh Phi Phi Don and stopped for a morning swim and a walk around the beach at Bak Hao Bay. Then we stopped off for a while at Monkey Beach where we saw a few pregnant macaques. At first, we thought they were just really fat from people feeding them all the time, but we soon discovered that the monkeys we fed were with child, or with monkey actually. After leaving Monkey Beach, Ben took us to Bamboo Island and Mosquito Island, and then on to the beautiful and spectacular Koh Phi Phi Leh. Our favourite snorkelling bay on this island was Loh Samah Bay but Pileh Bay was quite nice, too. Around this island we also saw Viking Cave and Maya Beach where they filmed "The Beach".

We think this rock formation in Nui Bay looks like a camel
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On our first snorkelling trip, we thought that Loh Samah Bay offered some of the best snorkelling we had ever done and we highly recommend this area to others reading this journal entry. On our second snorkelling trip, a couple of days later, we found out that snorkelling at Runtee Beach was even better. Our driver Ben brought bread on the snorkelling trip and when we stopped, he threw some pieces into the water to attract the fish. The fish really attacked the pieces to eat it as quickly as possible and get their fare share. Ben was quite sneaky at one of our stops and managed to tie an entire piece of bread into the back of Ashley's swimming costume (that's a "swimsuit" for the Americans reading this). Ashley was very surprised when she entered the water and was suddenly "attacked" by loads of fish. Nice one, Ben!

As the tide went out, many of the islands' rock formations jutted out into the air, creating overhangs like this
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After enjoying the day and trip around the islands so much, we all decided to hire Ben for another few hours a couple of days later in order to snorkel at Runtee Beach where the water was too choppy on the first trip we took. The corals there were expansive and of such a huge variety that we saw lots and lots of great things. For this trip, we finally sorted out the underwater digital camera case we brought to take pictures with and were able to capture some great photos which are posted in the photo album for this journal entry. We will be looking to improve our underwater photography skills at Koh Tao when we venture onto the eastern Thai islands.

The isolated beach at Nui Bay is a paradise to be found only by boat
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We mentioned above that we decided only to snorkel and to postpone diving this year. Even though it is really cheap to get a PADI diving certification in Thailand, we have to make our money last for the entire year, and it would be too tempting to keep doing dives after we were certified. However, if any of our friends or family are reading this and has any sort of sympathy, we would gladly take donations in order to achieve our PADI certification in the South Pacific or Australia when we are there later this year...

Kyle, Ben and Ashley discussing future stops on the Phi Phi islands tour
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Upon arrival at Koh Phi Phi, the prices for food and drinks, accommodation, travel and internet seem a bit steep, but islands typically are more expensive than mainland and northern Thailand. You may feel a bit fleeced at times, and sometimes you will be. For example, Kyle experienced this first-hand in an internet cafe when the owner, a very unfriendly Thai woman, charged people for internet usage (2 Baht per minute) as well as additional charges if you wanted to do anything else on the computer, such as burn a backup CD of photos. She wanted to charge an extra 100 Baht just to burn a CD, even when Kyle had his own CDs to burn and could do this on his own with no help from the owner. Since Kyle was not using the internet and was only backing up CDs, he didn't feel that he should have to pay both fees. Anyway, the computer was of such a poor standard that it didn't even end up working well, and after 30 mins Kyle decided to quit after thankfully backing up one CD. The woman tried to charge an excessive amount (something like 160 Baht for the 30 minutes of usage and to burn a CD) and Kyle refused to pay the full amount since the computer did not work well and stopped him from completing what he wanted to do. Kyle ended up paying the woman what he though was fair, and that was money to cover the usage. The woman got extremely mad and was shouting at Kyle, and when we left, Kyle got a nice kick in his backside to push him out of the store.

Dan and Ashley hopped in first at this snorkelling stop to see where the action would be
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We went down the street a little further to another internet cafe with better computers, and the owner of the cafe said that we only need to pay for usage if we are burning our own CDs. He would not charge us to burn CDs if he does not do this for us. Our advice on this matter - people will try to rip you off as a tourist, so shop around and clarify prices before doing or buying anything!

Each day on the island, the tide went out quite a bit in the afternoon, sometimes so much that you could walk over 100 metres in the sea, with no water. It was very strange to see the water receded so much. On our last morning on the island, we met up with Ashley and hiked very steeply uphill for 30 minutes to the viewpoint on Koh Phi Phi Don where we beheld spectacular scenery around the two main beaches on the island. We also saw a very large lizard crawling around the rocks, which was cool! We had to leave shortly after lunch and were sad to leave Koh Phi Phi, but we will definitely be back to spend more time on the islands in the future. Our next destination, Phuket, was to be reached by ferry and this time we got free drinks, free pineapples slices and free biscuits ("cookies" to the Americans reading this).