Just before we bore you, our time on Phuket and Phi Phi was mostly spent on the beach, it was about time too lol!!!
Friday 18th December
We flew into Phuket very late last night and when we finally got to our youth hostel, the place was all shut up for the night :( it took us half an hour to find a staff member (even though she was fast asleep and had forgotten we were getting in late). But very quickly settle into our basic £4 a night room!
When morning came, we thought it best to hire a moped for the day as Phuket is a big island and taxis are expensive on it. We chose a beach about 15km from our hostel called Kata Noi Beach. It was quite an upmarket resort. We had an expensive all you can eat buffet lunch in one of the resorts, then we headed onto the beach.
Phuket is meant to be one of the best place in the world for snorkelling, so we hired some snorkels and headed out. There were quite a few fish out there but there werent a huge amount of tropical fish, but it was good fun never-the-less.
Chris ended up spending about 4 hours in the sea snorkelling and came out like a wrinkly old man!
Here are a few pictures from our time on the Kata Noi beach:
We headed back to our moped and were going to go to Phuket town to investigate our ferry for the next day to Phi Phi, but as we approached the moped, we both realised that neither of us had the key to it and did not have a clue where it was. We searched everywhere, but to no avail. And when we checked our rental agreement, there no telephone number to contact them.
So our plan to save money by renting a moped backfired as Naomi had to take a taxi back to the rental place to get the spare key and then come back to the moped where Chris was waiting (just in case someone had stolen the key!).
So having the life and fun taken out of the evening, we ate in Kata resort at a very nice thai restaurant and then headed back to the hostel early to prepare for our early departure the next morning.
Saturday 19th December
So at 7.30am we were in the car that belonged to the hotel heading to the port to go to Koh Phi Phi Don Island. However, our hotel staff seemed to not have a clue which port to go to, and after a worrying half an hour of “are we even heading in the right direction?”, we got to the ferry pier.
It was a 2 hour ferry ride on quite rough waters! Naomi was not enjoying the journey due to her motion sickness, however she quickly recovered as soon as she saw the islands that make up Phi Phi. Just immense rock formations and cliffs surrounded by emerald blue waters!
And then we rounded the last of the great pillars of rock and cliffs into the harbour, and the white sands of the beaches and the crystal blue sea came into view and we knew we were in the right place. Amazing doesnt even describe it and the pictures below dont do the harbour justice!
We docked and found our transfer to our hotel. But it wasnt until we were walking through the main part of town that we realised we would be walking the whole way. Koh Phi Phi Don is a majority walking street island. There are some bikes and mopeds and very few cars, everyone just used there feet. It was like heaven to us as it was the first place we werent being pestered by tuk tuks and motorbike guys!
It was a good 10 minutes walk into the hills to our bungalow hotel, which was situated next to the water reservoir for the town. However, there had been no rain there for so long that the reservoir was completely dry and had been for a while! The bungalow was pretty basic, and water was restricted to certain hours due to the draught. But we didnt care. We were in paradise and would most likely be spending very little time indoors!
View from our bungalow and view of the hotel at night.
We checked in quickly, donned our bikinis and headed straight to the beach. We had walked past Dalam Bay on the way to the hotel so we thought that would be easiest. But when we got there, it was absolutely rammed with backpackers and youngsters. But it was mid afternoon by that point so we chose to stick it out, especially as it was beautiful in the bay.
We did what we did best and headed straight out into the crystal waters. There were a few small fish but nothing to really talk about and there was no point snorkelling. The sea was so salty that you could float in the water very easily. It was just a nice chilled out afternoon on the hot beach!
Something that we did not know about Koh Phi Phi before getting to the island, was that it is almost like the south east asia version of Ibiza. Every other building is a bar and the beach turns into one big party come midnight every night. As it was Saturday, we thought we’d head out for some food and see where the night took us.
After dinner, we decided to head to the Irish bar to watch Man Utd play! We pulled up a pew at the bar, and just as we were about to order, Naomi looked over the bar, and sat on the other side, were two of her brother’s best mates from home, Gary and Sam! They were at the tail end of their big travels. So we watched the footie (with disastrous results!) and headed to Rolling Stoned bar for some live rock music.
A very good but very drunken night ensued and by 2am, after a lot of dancing and singing, we were heading to the beach, minus Gary and Sam as Sam was escorted back to his hotel lol! We literally spent 3 minutes on the beach, realised we were not in the right frame of mind for the madness that was going on and headed back into the hills to our hotel!
Sunday 20th December
After a lie in and a lazy hungover morning, we decided to find one of the quieter beaches on the island that has some good snorkelling. The staff at our hotel suggested we walk to Long Beach on the east coast of the island, saying it was about 30 minutes walk from the hotel. What they didnt tell us was that this was across rocky, hilly coastal paths that could have lead anywhere. But the whole walk made it a bit more authentic!
When we got to Long Beach, we searched out the cheapest snorkel hire and then asked them where the best snorkelling was. That was our destination for the day :)
The snorkelling on Long Beach was the best we have ever experienced. You only needed to step knee deep into the sea and there were tropical fish all around! We saw fish in abundance and tropical fish we had never seen before, including the beautiful angel fish and rainbow fish.
We headed back to the hotel as light fell, and got ready for what we planned to be a quiet night with a couple of drinks and early to bed. However, we met a couple from Huddersfield at our table in a very traditional Thai kitchen restaurant called Papaya. We were prewarned that the we would have to wait a while for our food, as there were so many people at the restaurant, and only one stove, but it was well worth it! The funniest thing about the restaurant was that they kept their pet cats in the fridge to keep them cool in the heat (see below right!) which Chris thought was a brilliant idea!
We headed on to a bar with a muay thai boxing ring in it. But this was not for normal matches, this ring was for drunk people wanting to get a free bucket of cocktail and beat up there friend for the crowds entertainment. Very wrong but very funny! Two western girls got up to fight, but one of them was useless so it made the match a complete mismatch and somehow it got called a draw!?!? The weirdest match of all though was the 3 year olds who fought (see the pic below). On a level of wrong, it was way way way up there! Could not believe it was even allowed, and worst off, they were as fake as a WWF wrestling match!!!
Now at this point, we were both a bit stuck. We had not intended on a big night out, so had not brought the funds for one. Our friends were heading to the beach and wanted us to join them. So we decided to do the free bucket run. Literally different bars on the beach give free buckets of cocktails away at certain times, but you must have a flyer to be able to get it. We got as many flyers together and just worked our way round the bars for free for the rest of the night. God knows what was in most of those buckets, all we know is it was a very good cheap night!!!
Fun on the beach (check out Chris’s squiffy eyes lol!)
Monday 21st December
We spent most of the morning recovering and chilling out in our hotel. We had a lot to do on the internet and neither of us was really feeling up to going out in the sun, especially as we had a long ferry ride back to Phuket in the afternoon.
So we caught the 2pm ferry to Phuket, and on the journey back, thought it would be a good idea to try to find some accommodation relatively close to the airport as we had an early flight the next morning. There is only one airport hotel in Phuket, but the airport is right near to a beach called Nai Yang. So we told our taxi driver to take us there and find us a “cheap cheap” place to stay. We stayed with a lovely muslim family about 1km out of town.
We walked into Nai Yang in the evening to find some food, and we really thought we had hit the back end of nowhere, until we walked through a alleyway. When we came out the other end, we were in the loveliest beach resort. Everything was so classy, but there were so few tourists around and everything was so reasonably priced.
We settled into a thai restaurant for the evening called Baan Ra. Everything about this restaurant was impeccable. The service, the food, the price, the setting! Everything! It was like a silver service restaurant, but for £3 a main course. We would highly recommend the place.
We would also recommend Nai Yang as a place to stay, we just wished we had more than one night there (and pictures as we went out for the evening without a camera!).
Naomi and Chris
xx
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