During our stay in Ko Phi Phi we saw signs everywhere advertising a camping trip to "The Beach" - Maya Bay where the movie with Leonardo Dicaprio was filmed... the photos of the bay were amazing, and the description of the overnight trip sounded too good to pass up: tents, meals, a night on the island. We forked over the 1700 (about $40 US dollars) and signed up. Apparently we were the only travelers in Ko Phi Phi who thought the camping trip worth doing, because we showed up at 3pm the day of the trip and were told we were the only ones who had signed up. a little disappointed we wouldn't get to make friends, we agreed to go for a private night on the island... fortunately two young french girls ended up arriving just in time to come along, and the five of us set out with 4 tour guides for the island.
After some serious issues with miscommunication (Kor has a lot of trouble understanding the Southern accent/dialect), we finally made it onto a small, beat up boat, with our packs (they had insisted we keep our packs at their "office", Lo and I weren't about to leave our passports behind and had no smaller pack to bring our stuff, so we brought everything... this turned out to be a mistake, which the French girls made too, because we couldn't actually bring our packs to the island, I'll explain later). The boat we took to the island was brightly painted but in desperate need of a touch-up, and duck tape was used a little too frequently to make us feel comfortable. It did however, have a set of decent speakers tied to the front of the cabin, and one of the french girls hooked up her ipod so we could rock out to American pop music as we drove out to the island... The other french girl chain smoked the entire time we were on the trip.
our first stop was one of the inlets on the island for some incredible snorkeling. we also passed this wild cave where we were informed by Nemo (one of the guides with an accent so thick I didn't know what he was saying half the time), that these birds build huge nests up to 5m long in the cave and thousands of them live in the nests. furthermore, the nests are used as a delicacy food, it is called something like bird nest drink with rock sugar and it is kind of sweet and very expensive - we almost bought some today but opted against it since we think we understood that it is made from the birds' saliva. there was also something about butternut squash in the story Nemo told, i think, but i didn't really catch that part. Like his name, Nemo himself was a pretty funny guy, he was either smoking a cigarette, joint, taking a hit off a bong, or drinking some type of alcohol the entire time we were on our excursion, but I have to give him some credit because i came out of the water after snorkeling with a weird speckled sting on my spine (it was painful and itchy all at once, and really irritating me as I sat at the front of the boat watching the island go by while we searched for the break in the cliffs where we could enter to the Bay), and he put tiger balm ointment on it and rescued me from the pain/itch... i was so thankful, i couldn't even be mad about him sneaking up on me and grabbing my leg while snorkeling - I'm sure he does it to every traveler, and for him, it never gets old - (i screamed so loud, i was convinced for a second that i was getting eaten by a shark).
To get to the beach it was slightly complicated/mildly dangerous. apparently, because it was high tide the boat couldn't make it into the bay (that doesn't make sense to me either but I'm sure that was the excuse they gave), so we had to take a little dingy, two people at a time, to this steep wooden ladder slippery with algae and salt water. the driver had to time it between huge crashing waves so that we could scurry out of the bobbing dingy near the sharp rocks and onto the ladder to quickly climb the 20 or so feet to the crack in the rock where we could pass to the sand (whew! you get all that? chaos just like the experience :). between the three of us we brought only a small dry bag full of the essentials: bug repellent, tooth brush, and clean underwear... we had basically been living in our swimsuits since arriving in the south, and this adventure was no different. Our packs (passports and all) were left in the boat... Kor got some serious hell from me and Lo for getting us stuck in this situation. how he wasn't able to understand that it was impossible to bring our packs to the beach with us, I don't know, either way, it was pretty reckless of us to leave everything on a small boat floating unsupervised beside an island in the middle of the ocean, but we had no choice and in the end it turned out alright - we were very lucky.
Once we made it safely onto dry land, we hiked a short distance to "The Beach"... it is called Maya Bay and if you see the movie you will be seeing a very accurate depiction of what the beach looks like (watch the movie!! you'll see where we slept!!). we arrived just in time to watch the sun set between the steep cliffs on either side of the opening to Maya bay (in the movie they add a rock in to block the small opening and make it seem more isolated). it was gorgeous! we enjoyed the huge waves and body surfed a little, then Kor and I decided to swim over to a beach nearby and this random guy from England, Greg, joined us. Apparently he had been on a tour boat and had jumped ship when they were heading back because he wanted to stay for the sunset... a castaway!! he had nothing with him, no plan, no way to get off the island, and no idea what he was going to eat or where he was going to sleep. naturally, our group adopted him (after he worked out payment with our guides), and turns out he knows how to play hearts, so we welcomed him with open arms into our group (we shot the moon 4 different times that night, Lo, three times IN A ROW, and me the time after that... we decided it was the island - I don't think Greg will every play hearts with Americans again).
Dinner was delish! food always tastes better outside. Rice and veggies, and then later toast and fish for a midnight snack. After dinner they brought us each buckets of some type of alcohol - i think it was maybe a coke and rum mixture, with some original redbull added - did you know redbull was created in Thailand and it has amphetamines in it? im thinking not anymore, but the drink was shady regardless, and we all enjoyed it anyway :) they literally served it in colorful buckets with handles and straws, the taste really wasn't half bad. we drank while we all played card games, the guides included, though they didn't really speak English, they were able to get the gist of games like Egyptian Rat Screw and Presidents and Assholes, both of which we played as drinking games like the good ole college days ;) I was attacked by a huge brown biting ant during one of the games... seriously, the stupid little aunt chomped into my leg near my hip and the pain was excruciating!! i frantically whipped it away at least 4 times before it finally let go. jaws of death that little sucker had, and my leg soon had a growing welt paired with sharp pain that not even tiger balm could fix. The next couple of days I had a red irritated spot on my leg about the size of a golf ball, accompanied by serious muscle pain deep to where the bite had been. this ant meant business. it was painful to walk up and down stairs for the next two days. damn.
our chain smoker french girl friend brought us down the to beach after cards to look at the glowing sea plankton. i was under the impression that they would glow in the water when agitated, but despite looking for them with Nemo early that evening, we hadn't found any biofluorescence in the water. Chain-smoking french girl figured it out, she scrutinized the waves as they washed up on the beach, until stooping to pick up something we couldn't really see. when we got close we realized that her finger was glowing blue. a small circular creature that was glowing bright in the darkness of the beach, so far from lights/civilization. cool!! and kor was pretty convinced that when he peed in the water a while earlier, the ocean had glowed where it was disturbed. before bed we walked out onto the single dock to lay on our backs and watch the sky illuminate with flashes of lightning. it is amazing to be so comfortable running around in a swimsuit at midnight on an island in the middle of the ocean. and it's a good thing it was so warm, the trip was advertised as providing tents, turns out all we got was stinky (seriously very terribly horribly stinky) sleeping bags.. thin sleeping bags and these random decorative pillows that looked unfit for the goodwill sale rack. we slept on mats under the overhanging cliff just up the beach, which was an incredible location, but it was a windy night and by the time morning came around we were all coated in sand and I think it's going to take me a few more showers before I actually feel clean. I made sure to dig myself a divot (if you ever sleep the night on sand, don't just lay down, dig yourself a little spot in the sand and it will cradle you comfortably all night!! - Lo didn't get this memo), and overall I slept pretty well - though I did wake up once to Kor trying to tell me about how he had seen a ghost, at which point I told him he was freaking me out and to go back to bed and tell me in the morning (I got the full story over breakfast about his ghost, I'm pretty convinced Greg, who he was sleeping next to, was the ghost, but whatever, Kor is convinced the island has powers, like on LOST... I will say, we have one photo on Kor's camera where I'm pretty sure we're all sleeping on the beach in the middle of the night, and I maybe think the ghost took it, if I believed in ghosts that is).
After breakfast (toast that tasted like gasoline, with butter from a costco-sized tub that looked about a year old, and instant coffee power mix), we hopped into one of the long boats and left early. the tour is supposed to head back in the late morning, but we needed to return to the mainland by 8:30a.m. to catch the ferry to Phuket, so we had to go back across the oceans with our packs (they had spent the night unattended on the bigger boat and survived - luckily no pirates off of Ko Phi Phi, Thailand), in the small boat that got tossed around violently on the huge waves. when we left the bay the waves were so big the bow of the boat was changing altitude by at least 15 feet with each wave, it was wayyy more wild than riding the bull on a rafting trip or anything like that. Lo and I were holding on with both hands giving each other the "holy shit!" look and I was seriously wondering not if we were going to tip, but exactly when (sorry ma, i know this blog is probably a little wild for your tastes but in the end I'm so glad we went on the trip, it was such a great adventure!!). when we made it out away from the island the waves finally settled down a little, at which point our driver (cigarette in mouth as always), decided to abandon his driving to do some work on the boat - in order to steer another one of the guides stood up on the front of the boat and leaned side to side to keep the boat going in a straight line. that was an experience... no hands!! I wouldn't go so far as to say we were thrilled about the alternative driving technique.
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