Saturday, April 2, 2011

Koh Phi Phi

This is the sweet hostel we stayed at in Phuket before boarding the boat out to Koh Phi Phi. We are super posh! Luckily we had the place to ourselves.
This is Miles - from New York, who we met on the boat. 100% gay and full of personality as you can tell from this picture:)
Our first views of the island were totally stunning. The majority of it is jagged rock cliffs.
Here we are all with our new friends Miles and Denise ( a Canadian) One of the great things about traveling is all the cool people you meet along the way.
The main drag of Koh Phi Phi - I honestly can't express to you how we were feeling at this point. We were so stunned with how amazing this place is!
Our sweet hotel! We decided to spend a couple nights in a really posh place. This was perfect.
Amazing Pool!
Stunning view of the crystal blue ocean.
That night we saw one of many amazing sunsets.
Our travel group was really amazing as well. We all had a wonderful time together.

One of the first orders of business when we got of the boat was to touch the water.....perfect of course. About 90 degrees!
On day one we hopped on a boat to go scuba diving which was of course amazing. That beach in the distance is the beach they used to film the Leonardo DiCaprio film "The Beach" - totally stunning of course.
The diving was pretty amazing of course. The visibility was pretty bad since they had had some storms before we got there, but I saw a black tipped shark, a sea snake, a sea turtle and all kinds of interesting and unique fish and coral.
While we were swimming in our pool we caught a glimpse of this little monkey looking for left overs. Awesome!
We spent a whole lot of time in the pool, it was super hot so we couldn't lay by the pool for very long - thank goodness the pool was perfect.
Most nights we spent walking up and down the main strip where all the shops and restaurants and massage places were. It has such a relaxing feel about it.
This is just another view from our pool!
The view from our hotel window.
This is a huge banyan tree along the path in town.
We took a long boat 10 minutes down the island to Long Beach which is the long, white sand beach on the island. Check out that water....

We set up under this huge tree - the sun was of course super intense, so we couldn't be out in it too long without getting fried.
And of course, we HAD to get massages right there on the beach - amazing!
And lay in a hammock.....
This is Lune - the fruit shake lady we got our fresh mango, strawberry and pineapple fruit shakes from each day for $1. Amazing!
Doesn't Darci look cozy!
We got lots of relax and read time in. Darci and I are both covered up completely because the air conditioning was so good that we even got a little cold.....love good air con!
Darci had to go back early to get back to school so we said goodbye to her after a few days in the islands.
Several of the restaurants on the island would have fire dancer entertainment at night. Pretty impressive.
After a couple nights we downgraded to a little cheaper accommodation, still totally fine though, a little bungalow just outside town.
This was our main activity. Floating. This may have been my favorite part of the entire trip. Each day we would spend as much time as our skin would allow out in the water floating. We would never have to get out because we were cold, only when our skin was scorching. Another time when you want to have great friends around.At night the tide would go out pretty far so we could walk out far where the tide had been earlier.
We took a hike up to a lookout point to watch the sunset and encountered some monkeys on the way.
At first we were all excited to be seeing monkeys and then all of a sudden more and more started appearing and they were not nervous around us at all and got pretty close which made us nervous to the point that we decided to get out of their territory. Not before one grabbed at Rosey's ankle first though....crazy!
Another amazing sunset. One thing that was amazing was that the weather was predicted to be rainy and overcast the whole time we were there - not one cloudy day....blessing from heaven!


Foot massages! So incredible.

One morning we rented kayaks and checked out some quieter parts of the island.
We stopped on monkey beach - apparently it was too early for the monkeys since we didn't see any. Nice tire swing Mel :)
We also kayaked right by the cliffs and found some sweet caves. We saw tons of cool tropical fish.
Sweet cave! So that is pretty much the story of our time in the islands. No separation of days here, it all ran together in one big mush of wonder and amazement. One of the most beautiful places I have ever been!

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