Ko Phi Phi Don, Thailand
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Today we had a great snorkel trip to Phi Phi Leh from a long-tail boat with yet another cheerful Thai guide. Thai people are so friendly it's refreshingly contagious. We swam with sharks in clear water that turned out to be right in front of the beach where we are moving today. Very encouraging as we were hoping to do some snorkeling on our own the next couple of days. Then they took us over to a beautiful lagoon at Phi Phi Leh where we could get out and swim though there wasn't any coral so snorkeling wasn't very good. I've always wanted to swim in a lagoon and this was my first real lagoon to experience. Then they took us over to a sea wall where we chased down some bigger sharks but, I thought the coral and clams were actually more interesting. We saw some of those huge clams that get three feet or bigger in size. Wow, those were impressive. Also, discovered boring clams that come in beautiful purples and pinks and colors in between. These clams seem to bore into the coral until they are embedded in the coral and all you see is the opening where the shells come together
. Hard to explain, you have to see the pictures. We also saw a number of different kinds of sponges and fan coral, though the guide said the water wasn't as clear as it usually was because we were at full moon and and the high and low tides were effecting the clarity of the water. So, I didn't get any good pictures of these but, our guide took video of our trip and we bought a copy of it. He gave us a great price for the DVD. What a bargain that trip was. We went to two other locations to snorkel and then to another lagoon with a beautiful beach and lunch which was part of the trip. After lunch we stopped at a beach inhabited by long tail macaques. The guide saves the leftover fruit from lunch and we get to feed it to the monkeys. As we were pulling into the beach another boat was pulling out and they realized that one of the baby monkeys had jumped onto the bow of their boat and then was afraid to get off. The guide on their boat was trying to get the monkey to get off the boat but, he was afraid it would bite him, so he didn't want to get too close to it. They finally had to go back toward shore until the baby decided it was shallow enough to jump off and swim to shore. Our guide was already in the water and decided he wanted to video the monkey swimming back. The monkey got scared of him being in the water in front of him so, it jumped onto the bow our our boat. He hung out their for a while and finally got the nerve to jump back into the water and swim for shore. He was a pretty bold monkey and was soon back begging for fruit
. All of this, a half day trip, for 650 Bht ($22) each. What a fun day that was.
We moved down to Long Beach which is far enough away from "the village" that it is much more quiet and peaceful. It has maybe five or six resorts with bungalows and three or four restaurants, no souvenir shops of tattoo parlors or that sort of stuff. However, the air conditioning in the room we stayed in the first night wasn't working so I got really hot that night and there were tiny mosquitoes in the room and unbeknown to me, I got bit all over while I was trying to sleep. the next morning I woke up covered in welted mosquito bites because I had an allergic reaction to them. Talk about miserable, I looked like I had some horrible disease. We walked to the village to find some benedryl but, never did find any. I also had to check on our reservation for the hotel we planned to stay at when we go back to Bangkok and all the Internet access at Long Beach was down. When I checked my email, I found panic email from the bookstore relating to some changes they needed for the newsletter and ended up working on that for a good portion of the day--actually considering how long I was gone, I figured I was doing pretty good with just one panic email. When I got back to Long Beach Dave and I rented snorkel gear and went snorkeling. The cold water kind of soothed all my bites. It took a couple days for the bites to stop being inflamed
. I spent most of that time in the water. We also moved to a different bungalow where the air conditioning worked. Being too hot just made the bites worse. While we've been on Ko Phi Phi the average temperature has been about 92 degrees and high humidity. Snorkeling was really good on Long Beach and we had great fun in the water, despite my lovely bites. :-)
We also discovered fruit bats at the restaurant on the far end of the beach that evening--Dave was ecstatic! I had hoped we would see fruit bats on this trip because Dave really wanted to see them. All in all, Ko Phi Phi has been great to us and we are so glad we decided to head to this island.
