We're down with Koh Phi Phi (yeah you know me)

Kitch made out of coconut shells in our bungalow.
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Our Lonely Planet book said that this was the prettiest place on Earth, so we had to stop by and check it out. It was in fact very pretty. We got to enjoy doing many of the things that people enjoy doing on pretty beaches, like laying out on the sand and swimming in the pristine ocean.

Interestingly, we did not do a lot of other things that other tourists were doing here. For example, we were not living in a fancy-schmancy resort, or celebrating a very expensive honey moon.  We also were not spending our evenings in the main town, which at night transforms into a spring break party scene, complete with buckets of drinks and rows of bars named after Bob Marley songs (all blasting the latest Pop and R&B, of course).

Pretty beach
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In fact, this island seems too small to service all the tourists who want to visit. It was one of the places that was seriously affected by the 2004 tsunami, and supposedly the infrastructure is being rebuilt in such a way to accommodate the more and more people who keep coming.  Despite this, there are no roads and you have to clamber across rocks (and all too often piles of trash) to get from one place to another.

All that said, we did have a lovely time. We rented a kayak to explore some of the would-be secluded beaches (if not for all the motor boats taking slews of other tourists there) and we even ventured to snorkel around a bit, which is supposedly THE thing to do here.  We tried our first durian, the notoriously stinky fruit that people either love or hate (we enjoyed it). We stayed in an impossibly kitchy (and surprisingly cute) bungalow that perched over a semi-private patch of sand.  It was good.

Sealing the durian in multiple bags, but it still smells!!!
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Still, although we had been in Thailand for over 3 weeks at this point, we still didn't feel like we were actually in real Thailand… after all, a solid 10 days were spent in silence, and the rest was spent on beaches which felt more like a Walt Disney Thai-World theme park than an actual foreign country.  Too bad we had to rush up north to buy presents and get over to Cambodia to meet the folks.