Nick’s world tour

In a grubby hotel room on the Kao San Road, I encounter a pair of French tourists and a weird suicidal guy who gives us a map to paradise on a nearby island. We swim to the island, and narrowly avoid being spotted by marijuana farmers. Soon encountering an idyllic group of former tourists, now settled down to the good life …

Sorry, I was getting confused by the plot to the awful film, The Beach.

In reality, it was a nightmare 24hour journey from Bangkok via the wrong coast (still not sure of the logic in sending all the buses for the west coast via the east), and then a speedferry ride later… everything is good as I arrived on Koh Phi Phi.

It’s a beautiful island, white sandy beaches and jungle covered limestone hills. It’s also a building site, as they are still rebuilding from the events of Boxing Day two years ago (though some of the new buildings and their contents would be better suited to the Spanish Costas, and not some paradise island in the Andaman Sea…)

I stayed in a bungalow in the jungle, a few minutes walk from the beach. This had the added benefit of being a designated emergency shelter too, should you feel an earthquake and take notice of the Coca-Cola sponsored signs on the beach advising you to run for the hills.

Unfortunately, only one day out of the five I’m here is nice and not stormy. It sounds like the world is ending, when the roof our your bungalow gets bombed by coconuts every night in the rain storms! In between these, I managed to do a bit of sunbathing, went swimming with the fishes (not in the Godfather sense though!),

 and climbed up one of the big cliffs on Ton Sai beach.

The snorkelling was good, and the water significantly warmer than the air, so many fish you couldn’t see where you were going. I was suitably impressed when we went rock climbing: did a load of 20-30m high grade 5s, but couldn’t quite finish the 6a+. After 5 hours, grabbing onto a stalactite with two hands whilst swinging upwards was beyond my aching arms and fingers. (I must admit I have no idea what any of these numbers mean, but they sound impressive, and must be good as we thought we did well when we did grade 4’s on the climbing wall at Sportspark in Norwich. And the view was much better here, too).

Apart from that, I managed to get a stinking cold, and a few days later when I stopped sneezing, decided to leave the island- and come back another time when it’s dry season!

This entry was posted on Friday, September 15th, 2006 at 6:55 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.