Now’s as Good a Time as Any

Hehe, Phi Phi…

August 14th, 2007 by Greg

Getting to Koh Phi Phi was a relatively painless but long journey involving several buses, two boats, and an overnight stop. Krabi Town, where I made my stopover, is a sleepy little place used mostly by tourists as a stopover for a number of beach areas and islands in the immediate vicinity. I didn’t get a chance to do much more than eat, sleep, and have a shower. Early the next morning I got on a bus which took me to the ferry to Koh Phi Phi, the island I’d heard so many good things about.

On the boat who should I run into again but Marcelo and Johnny, as well as a Dutch guy they had met, Yves. They’d just made a similar journey to mine from Koh Tao, but instead of a nice hotel bed for the night had been crammed into an overnight ferry on the other side of the peninsula. When we arrived on Phi Phi, we found a guest house with 4 single open rooms for us all, at much cheaper than I think any of us were expecting, and settled in. In other words, we went straight to the beach.

I spent just shy of a week on Koh Phi Phi, and did hardly anything. The whole time is a bit of a blur looking back on it, not because I was drunk the whole time or anything (though there were a few late nights), but more because, with the exception of two days, pretty much all I did was lay on the beach and swim in the crystal clear water. There are no cars and only a couple motorbikes on the whole island, and the relaxed atmosphere of the small town that exists solely to cater to tourists was the perfect vacation from my travels.

Koh Phi Phi consists really of two islands, Phi Phi Don and Phi Phi Leh. The big island, Phi Phi Don, is where all the accommodation is and most of the easily accessible beaches, while Phi Phi Leh is mostly a collection of huge limestone rocks with a few pristine beaches tucked into various spots, including the one made famous by the move The Beach, Maya Bay. I spent the second day doing a couple dives off of Phi Phi Leh, which were absolutely beautiful and probably the best spots I’ve seen yet. I had hoped to do another day of diving at a wreck somewhat west of the island, but they needed at least five interested divers to take a boat out, and even when they asked at all the shops around the island to try and combine a trip, the most we could get together on any day was three. It just wasn’t meant to be.

After diving, the next few days saw me falling into a small routine of checking if there was a boat going to the wreck, eating, laying on the beach, and enjoying the local nightlife scene. The bars were pretty fun because there are only about 4-5 on the island, and the crowd of young people follow a fairly set pattern visiting them. The place to start is the Reggae Bar, where drunk westerners get free drinks for jumping into a boxing ring and beating each other up. While I didn’t participate, it was fun to see how poorly people fought after a couple buckets of booze. Next up was the Apache Bar, a huge dance club with several levels going up the bar like huge steps. One night they had a Ladyboy Cabaret show there, hilarious and disturbing at the same time. Finally around 2 am all the bars on the island shut except one, the Hippy Bar, where everyone meets at the end of the night to party on the beach until the sun comes up. Needless to say after nights like those, sleeping on the beach was about all I (and everyone else) could manage the next day.

Marcelo left two days before I did to make his way home via Bangkok, and the following day Johnny and Yves headed off to another island, Koh Lanta. Since I was alone for my final day I decided to take it easy the night before and do a longboat tour of the island. We went around to several beaches and did some snorkeling and more laying around in the sun, including a stop at Maya Bay, made famous in the move “The Beach”. We finally called it a day when a sudden massive downpour made laying on the sand not the most inviting prospect.

The next day I took a boat back to Krabi, where I would catch a flight to Singapore and meet up with Juliana to see Malaysia together for a couple weeks.