We had a quick pitstop at Ao Nang, a seaside town on the mainland. From here we would split up and take busses to separate parts of Thailand, Grace was headed east to do her diving course and I was headed north to Phuket airport and onwards to Vietnam.
It wasn’t quite as plain sailing there as I’d of hoped, as I arrived to find my flight to Thailand and my flight home to the UK had been cancelled so I spent the first half a day in Ao Nang contacting airlines and chasing refunds so I could rebook my flights. but after a tense few hours I managed to rebook everything. The rest of the afternoon we spent chilling by the pool and we headed out for one of our last few authentic Thai curries in the evening, then on to a bar where they tried to sell us magic mushroom milkshakes and weed, but we settled for a few rounds of beer pong with some people we had met instead.
The next day we decided to visit the famous Railey beach a small peninsula only accessible by boat with interesting rock formations and beautiful beaches. We got into a boat taxi which was a merge if a traditional boat with an engine on a stick propelling us through the water. Unfortunately for us it rained most of the time we were there, but in-between we still managed to walk to all four of the famous beaches and we spent a good hour watching people rock climbing up the side of a cliff face.
We returned back to the mainland and then packed ready for our busses the next morning.
We started off on the same bus taken to the local depo and then had to wait for our separate busses which ended up taking about an hour. In that time I managed to accidentally lure in about 10 cats by opening a bag of crisps and then had to spent the next 5 minutes fighting them off, much to the amusement of the other people waiting. Eventually we said our goodbyes and got onto our busses ready for the next part of our adventures. This part I’d be without my chief navigator so I had decided to book onto a tour.
I’ll tell you all about it soon, lots of love, Alice x
Leaving got surrounded by cats who wanted my crisps
For our next two weeks in Thailand we had a very chill time, mostly spent between different islands and beaches, we had planned to move on to Malaysia but once we reached nearer to the boarder we found out that although Malaysia was technically ‘open to tourists’ it was only if you flew in, land borders were still closed. So we instead maximised our beach time which was super relaxing for us but not so exciting in terms of blog content. So I figured rather than a blog on each place, I would just amalgamate them all into one post.
We flew into the famous Phuket and had booked a couple of days here but we were left unimpressed, it felt a bit like we’d stepped into Magaluf, drunk people on the streets and every restaurant selling food ‘just like home’. Luckily we had really nice owners of our BnB who couldn’t do more to help us and showed us where a less touristy beach was so we mainly just chilled there for two days before getting the ferry to Koh Phi Phi. The owners were again super cute and got us a free local breakfast of fried pork and sticky rice for the journey which was delicious.
Our second stop Koh Pho Phi was also very touristy but luckily a bit nicer, we stayed in a cute little hostel run by a couple and their two kids who we made the mistake of playing with on arrival and then had to give piggie backs every time we saw them after that! On our first day we headed to the beach, suprise suprise! It was really cute a quiet but within half an hour of being their we saw a storm roll in, we thought we could wait it out and spent an hour watching the thunderstorm over the sea. Once it calmed down a bit we made our way back to the hostel in the rain, which was actually a nice change from the heat!
In the evening we went for dinner and then drinks along the beach front, every bar had some sort of fire show going on, dancing and juggling with flaming batons an even playing long distance catch with them, throwing them over the head of the audience. I was less than keen on being sat under that and realized I was getting old when I was thinking about how maybe health and safety standards weren’t so bad after all and were needed in cases like this! But Grace reassured me they knew what they were doing.
As possible as that may be I still didn’t volunteer when it came to the audience participation part of the show, it involved a woman holding a cigarette in their mouth while they swung chalices of fire closer and closer to her until it lit the cigarette. After that it was a ‘how low can you go?’ competition under a burning stick, that I did get dragged into. It turns out the answer is ‘quite bloody low’ when the alternative is being burnt on the face. For each height round we completed we were given a shot and after a few rounds we decided to stop as fire and drunken people seemed a dangerous mix….that and it turns out were not super flexible..
Our fears about drunk people and fire were not shared by the bars entertainment team, who brought out large skipping ropes on fire and let whoever would like a go the chance to skip between them. This went about as well as you would imagine, several drunk people got singed and one quite badly burnt before it was put away.
The next morning we went on a boat trip around a few smaller islands, stopping to snorkel around a place called shark point where we did indeed see some small white tip sharks, monkey Island where we also say Monkeys and when we asked what type of monkeys they were we were told ‘local monkeys’ and this was our go to response when ever we saw monkeys after that!
Our next stop was the famous Maya beach where ‘The Beach’ with Leonardo DiCaprio was filmed, it was absolutely beautiful and somehow we managed to turn up at lunch time when the place was almost empty. The beach has only just reopened after it was almost destroyed by tourists and you are now not allowed to stay for more than an hour or enter the sea further than your knees. A rule that is enforced by and angry man in camouflage sat in the bushes who jumps out and blows a whistle at unsuspecting tourists. But the efforts have worked as the beach is back to its pristine condition. We also stoped at some beautiful coves the way back but the show stopper of the trip was right at the end as we returned in the near darkness, we headed to a known bioluminescence spot and got into the water to swim with them.
It was one of the most surreal things I have ever experienced. We were in water in total darkness and the water was the same temperature as the air so it just felt like floating in nothingness and then as soon as you moved your legs or arms quickly the water around you sparked in a green light it was an incredible experience that I can’t do justice with my explanation. But I was pretty knackered after 30 minutes of thrashing around so was glad that was the last stop of the day.
The next day Grace went scuba diving and I headed to the beach with a girl called B from our hostel and later made some other friends at the hostel too. In the evening we all decided to head out to a Mai Thai bar. The bar had an absolutely brilliant marketing technique, it hosted professional Mai Thai events (Thai Martial arts/boxing) in the early evening to draw in a crowd of tourists and then got them drunk with cheap promotional offers and then charged them for a chance to fight each other in the ring so that the customers became the entertainment for other customers. I mean if you have to put up with drunk fighting tourists you may as well contain it and make a profit out of it!
We discovered after a few rounds that size seems to be the biggest contributing factor in who wins. A fact we tried to impress on one of the girls in the group Yasmin who had done many Mai Thai classes in the UK. She was convinced her experience would outweigh her tiny stature. She was unfortunately paired against an Israeli girl who not only was twice her size but was on her post military service gap year. Twice her size and with military training, Yasmin never stood a chance but was gracious in defeat at least.
After the bar we headed down to a party on the beach and me and grace shared a ‘bucket’ cocktail, basically what it sounds like a cocktail in a small bucket normally used to make sandcastles. It was lethal, we probably only had a quarter of the bucket each and it nearly kills us. Worst hang over of my life and I vaguely remember a very fun night that involved riding an electric rodeo bull and lots of dancing. Safe to say the journey to the next ferry the following day was a struggle. One Grace kindly immortalised in photos for me!
Next was a short two days in Koh Lanta, we booked onto a snorkeling trip but unfortunately there were jelly fish everywhere. The guides assured us they weren’t dangerous but they seemed reluctant to get into the water and when they did they sent one guy to move the jellyfish he did it with a long broomstick, not a good sign. Our worries were confirmed when a family came back covered in long red lines over their arms and legs where they had swam across some. Luckily they didn’t hurt them to bad but we still weren’t to keen to get in the water after that so it ended up being a scenic boat ride.
The jelly moving stick
That evening we went to an outdoor cinema with people from the hostel, we ended up being late as on our first attempt to leave Grace slipped and fell face first into a big pile of mud. I think I deserve some sort of medal for contacting my laughter to under 3 minutes and not taking any photos! We eventually made it to the cinema just as the film was starting for a free cinema it was really good nice outdoor seating and we watched the Disney film ‘Big Red’ although we had to stand for what we dubbed the ‘King’s trailer’ which was a weird promotional video of the king that everyone stands with their hand over their heart for. It’s also played in public twice a day at 8am and 8pm and everyone freezes in the hand on heart position until it’s over. Which was very creepy the first time it happened and we had no idea what was happening.
Our next island was Koh Lipe, it would be the last we visited together before going out separate ways so we decided to book a nice beach hut and make the most of it. Unfortunately, things got on on a bad foot as the whole island seemed to be swarming with a plague of mosquitoes and I had managed to book a hut with no air-conditioning, seeing as we were seating just standing still that was never going to work. So I had a stressful hour of negotiating an air-conditioned room while Grace took herself off somewhere quite to refrain from hitting me.
After that we had a nice relaxing week and our luck improved…. mostly. I brought out the mango wine I had brought a few weeks ago and carried around since to celebrate our last few nights, execpt it apparently needed to be drunk sooner than that and when I opened it it just exploded on me and to room! Other than that our days were relaxing and uneventful apart from on our walk to dinner one night we were down an alley and came across what I can only assume was a big black dog, but all we could see were big eyes staring at us in the darkness and heard a low growl. We managed to skirt by and not get eaten so it could have been worse! At one point grace also decided to adopt some local kittens and lure them into our hut which was very cute at first until they found their way under an unused cupboard and scared out three cockroaches we were happy not knowing were there previously!
The taxis on the island More delicious Thai food
After our few days of relaxing we headed on to Ao Nang a seaside village on the mainland ready for me to get a bus to Krabi and fly out to Vietnam and for grace to fly to Koh Tao.
