Phuket and Koh Phi Phi

I arrived into Phuket late on Nov 10th. When I went to find transport to my hostel I was surprised to find that no one was going to Phuket they were all going to Patong? I waited and waited for more people to fill a minibus to Phuket but after an hour I gave up a found a really nice taxi driver to take my the 45 mins into town for 400 baht ($11.00). He was so excited that I was English speaking. He had bough some CD's but didn't know the artists. So the whole trip he kept putting in the CDs so I could tell him who they were. Guns and Roses, Areosmith, Nirvana (I felt a flashback to dances at Norwood Park). He seemed pleased. 


Once at the backpackers I settled into my 10 person dorm room (that I had all to myself :D) and hit the hay. The next morning I was pleased to see the sun shining and quickly threw on my bathing suit grab a book and caught the Phuket bus to Patong beach (since it sounded like the place to be). No sooner did the bus pull away did the monsoon rain start. I have never seen rain like this. The streets were flooded in only a few minutes. You couldn't see 1 foot in front of your face. I was drenched. I tried to hide in some shops but got really tried of them aggressively trying to sell me stuff so I caught the next bus back to the hostel and watch bootlegged thai movies all afternoon (yes the kind of movies that shake, have a big afro in the middle of the screen and really odd subtitles that are in no way related to what is being said).

I was hopeful the next day would bring better weather. Beautiful sunny morning, so I bused it to Karon beach. Beautiful beach however again it started raining the second I got off the bus. Then I remembered something Ant Dureau (my GM at Vodafone) said. "Don't wait for the rain to stop, learn to dance in the rain" So I did just that. I went swimming in the monsoon rain. If I was going to be soaked anyway might as well enjoy it. The water was so warm, it was great. 




The next day I was off to Koh Phi Phi island to do camping on Maya Beach, the beach made famous by the movie "the beach" with Leonardo Dicaprio. The beach was amazing, the camping was fun. But while we were snorkelling someone on the crew stole my money! 1000 baht ($33), now $33 bucks is nothing to cry over but that was all the money I had on Phi Phi. No credit cards etc as we were told only bring what you need. So I had NO MONEY to get the ferry off of Phi Phi back to Phuket. The other's on the tour each gave me some baht, but I was still short. I turned up at the ferry office and turned on the tears (travel tip number 4, cry!) they took what I had and gave me a ticket to Phuket :) Once on the mainland I now had to walk over an hour to get back to the hostel as I had no money for a taxi. I'm not sure the lesson here as I couldn't have taken the money snorkelling with me and if I had a credit card they would have taken that as well and that would have been worse. Phi Phi was still amazing and the weather has been glorious since!

Last night we were taken by the hostel to a real Thai night market. We sampled different thai foods, including crickets, grasshoppers, maggots and worms. Yummy! Okay not really but not as bad as you think.




Tomorrow I'm off to Koh Sok National Park and then Koh Samui. 


More pics from thailand here