James and Cat’s Jazz-tastic Journey!

Well, since our last post we have been on a mega journey! 

We left Chiang Rai on the 13th… we got a four hour bus to to Chiang Mai, where we spent a couple of hours playing pool and at 6pm got on a night bus down to Bangkok.  We arrived in Bangkok at 6am the following morning, checked straight into a cheap hotel and SLEPT!!  We spent one uneventful night in the BKK then jumped on ANOTHER night bus down to a little town called Hat Yai.  Well, we first arrived at Surat Thani at 6am, then it was another four hours on a mini bus to Hat Yai! 

The plan was to head into Malaysia, spend a few nights in Kuala Lumpour then travel over to the Perinithian Islands on the East coast, for James to do his diving.  However, after the mammoth amount of buses we’d take in the last few days, we just couldn’t face any more!  We only have two weeks left before we fly back to India and we decided we didn’t want to spend it on a bus!  We did however need to  do a visa run, so when we arrived in Hat Yai, we jumped on a another mini bus that took us to the border and we succesfully negotiated our firs visa run…. on arriving at the border we were approached by a man with a motorbike who charged is the equivalent of about 90p to drive us over the border and bring us back…. deal done!  It only took about ten minutes, but now we have another 30 days in Thailand… if only we could use them all! 

We spent a night in Hat Yai, and planned what we were going to do next.  We eventually decided, after much deliberation to head to a little island called Koh Phi Phi (Pronounced Pee Pee, hence the highly amusing blog title) off the Andaman coast, this was the island that was worst hit by the tsunami.  It seemed perfect, a chance to put something back into their economy and help the place back on it’s feet in our own small way and James could do his diving.  So today we got a bus from Hat Yai to Krabi , then a boat over to Phi Phi. 

The island is MAD!  It in no way needs any help from us in geting back on it’s feet… it has them firmly planted in the tourist trade already!  The place is flourishing, which is good for the locals but not so good for us… it’s the most expensive place we’ve been in Thailand, worse even than Bangkok.  There’s loads of ‘two week tourists’ here, wheeling their enormous suitcases to their luxury resorts.  We’ve found ourselves a reasonbly priced room, relative to the rest of the island, but double what we’d usually pay.  James has also decided not to do his dive course here, as it’s 40 pounds more expensive than on Koh Tao.. which is where we think we’ll head next, maybe in a couple of days.

We have had some VERY bad luck however… on the night bus from Bangkok to Hat Yai we were robbed.  I had my phone stolen from my bag and there was about 30 pounds missing from the wallet.  James also had his credit card stolen from his bag (and the gits have tried to use it) … excuse my language, but, THEIVING BASTARDS!!!  Sorry, had to get that off my chest! 

So that’s what we’ve been up to, sorry this is quite a brief blog, but like everything else on the island, the interweb is very expensive, so I’m afraid I’ll have to cut this short.

We’ll let you know of any further developments… you should take a look at a map though and see the travelling we’ve done over the past few days… it’s a hell of a long way!

Bye for now
Much Love
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This entry was posted on Saturday, May 17th, 2008 at 6:56 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.