The one with the beach from The Beach.

For the record, I hate ferries, or boats of any kind, really. It always happens that just enough time passes between the ferry trips of my life that I forget this fact only to realize it when I'm already out at sea where I have no option but to suffer through the trip til we reach land.

So in the future, if it comes up, remind me that I don't want to take the ferry. I'll be thankful.

Upon disembarking from our ferry, we arrive in Ko Phi Phi late in the afternoon with no place to stay, so our first task is to find a hotel. We'd scoped a few out online, but we have no clue how to get to them on the island. We see a free longtail boat at the pier to take us to one of our prospective places, so we decide to check it out first. After a brief inspection, I give hotel "A" the thumbs down, and we set off back towards town in search of a new place.

Since we arrived at our location by boat, we had no option but to follow the coastline back toward the pier. Unfortunately, the beach was only nice and sandy for about half of the journey and a series of rocky entrapments for the other half--if you're picturing giant, slippery rocks with no handholds and tons of terrifying looking black creatures scurrying in and out around your feet you'd be dead on. J and I were both wearing our big backpacks and balancing our carry ons as best we could while we climbed. We were slipping and sliding our way across the rocks when the inevitable happened, J's feet went out from under him as he attempted to cross a particularly treacherous rock. Backpacks and carry on went in separate directions, as did his left foot, which struck one of the large rocks, and the rock hit back. Hard.

Poor J still had to walk a really long way to get into town, through the saltwater and the sand, which isn't fun on an open wound. He left a nice trail of blood behind us, like Hansel and Grettle, vampire edition.  We finally found a hotel to settle into that was located two doors down from the island clinic, and the doctor there was wonderful. He was so friendly, and we assume he had some kind of medical background.

He's splinting the toe. Very official.

Even though J wasn't supposed to get his foot wet, we still went snorkeling on the last day of our stay. We rigged up this high tech system to block out the Andaman sea.

It didn't work, obviously, but at least we tried.

Joel was quite a celebrity during our stay in Ko Phi Phi. I tried to get him to tell people that the bandages were from a shark attack, but he wouldn't. Anyway, on our snorkeling trip we went out for about 5 hours on a little longtail boat and saw all these beautiful islands and bays, including Maya Bay, the island paradise where they filmed "The Beach" (with Leo Dicaprio).

The Beach

Panorama from the beach looking out on the bay. In the movie it looks like those rwo rock cliffs close in the bay, but they don't.

Views from the boat...

We flew back through Bangkok (after a second installment of the dreaded ferry) on our way home and spent the night at a hotel close to the airport for convenience. Little did we know there was an all-out bazaar waiting for us in the parking lot. I'm happy to report that we were the only Caucasian people in premises, and that people gleefully and openly laughed when they saw us walking through the stalls. We amassed a feast for our dinner from about eight different vendors who all seemed delighted to have us as patrons. We arrived home very late on Saturday night, and have been enjoying being here in what's starting to feel more like a home, since then.