Paradise Found!

This is a picture of the town. It sits on a narrow isthmus between two mountainous parts of the island.
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Koh Phi Phi is pretty famous in Thailand for being a beautiful tropical paradise.  When we first arrived, it seemed anything but that!  We left Ton Sai feeling a bit sorry to go.  Then, our boat broke down so we had to go back almost all the way to Ton Sai to get on a different one.  Finally, when we arrived at the dock on Koh Phi Phi we were in the middle of a pack of 200 tourists, backpackers, lost souls, and who knows what trying to struggle our way through the myriad salespeople.  Lots of hotels were booked full so we paid more than we wanted to for the first night just to get in somewhere.  Unfortunately, that somewhere was part of the main "town" on the island.  Town is an ugly string of tourist shops and aggressive sales tactics.  Also, there is an island-wide price fixing deal where all the shop owners got together and decided they would agree on prices so you can't get a better deal on anything.  Good for them, bad for us.

Osa on our balcony. You can see a fair amount of driftwood, etc in the foreground. The Tsunami hit hard here. Apparently it went right over the isthmus and wiped out the first level of everything.
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Things improved dramatically the next day.  We got a hold of a small hotel on a beach that was recommended to us.  After a short boat-ride we were there!  There aren't any roads to the beach.  The only way to get there is by boat or by an hour-long hike up the hill and through the jungle.  When we got there, there was a great family that owned and ran a string of 18 bungalows on stilts and they had a small restaurant set up.  Oh, and the owner's brother had a small bar that opened at 6 and closed whenever everyone left.  The atmosphere was so relaxing and friendly.  Almost like staying with people we knew already or something.

This is the restaurant at the beach. Right behind it is a steep hill and jungle.
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All around the island was a continuous reef so we could just wade out anywhere for snorkeling which we did a lot of.  We saw something new everyday!  One day we swam around a large outcropping of rocks to the neighboring beach.  It took about and hour to get there snorkeling but we were looking at fish and coral on the way.  The only thing on the beach was a drift-wood shack with an old guy who maybe was from the Czech Republic selling drinks.  Well, that and a group of about 12 Thai kids playing with a volleyball in the water and two European guys who had decided to hang out naked!  It appears that much of the island is surrounded by isolated beaches that are only foot-path accessible and therefore relatively undeveloped and isolated.  Another day we took some sea kayaks and went exploring around an outcrop of rocks the other direction and found a beach not unlike our own but slightly more built up.  Fun!

Long-tail boats are taxis here too. If you want a ride you just stand on the beach and wave down a passing boat and get on!
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Anyway, we had a great time there.  It was our final stop before returning to Bangkok and then back to the US for the holidays and life to begin.  Paradise Found!  It was really the perfect way to just kind of soak up the trip before the end...