Pee pee in Phi Phi

At breakfast we saw a young oriental (Japanese? Chinese?) couple in swim gear, and I bet Leia they would be on our Phi Phi tour with us. Sure enough, a van picked the four of us up from breakfast to the speedboat pier, where we were given snorkels and rented flippers for 100 baht.

Our tour guide today was Mr. Lucky (not to be confused with the limo driver pronounced Mr. Laggy.) He either had a megaphone implanted in his throat or unnaturally powerful lungs, because all the boats in the area heard when he shouted, "MY FRIEEEND! YOU MUST KNOW! [Tour details go here.]" He shouted at the same volume on the speedboat, so pretty soon our ears and heads ached.

The speedboat was modeled on the cabs with two rows of padded benches down its length for people to sit on, with piles of life vests in the middle, and a tarp overhead. It could carry 55 passengers, and was almost crowded with "only" 40. The prow was crowded with only half a dozen people.

Our first stop was Maya bay on Phi Phi Leh, where a bad movie "The Beach" was filmed. It's a stunningly beautiful beach with white sand and clear emerald water, sheltered by limestone cliffs and totally crowded with hundreds of tourists all day long. We took our hula hoops and I cleared us a little zone on the beach by accidentally throwing mine at anyone who came too near.

There is a bathroom about 200m inland, through a beautiful path in the jungle vegetation. We went to pee there first thing. Near the bathrooms we saw a jungle cat, that is to say a pretty tricolor kitty with a bell sitting and frowning when approached.

We swam and hula hooped for about an hour on Maya beach. When Leia hooped she was such an attraction that people took pictures of her. (Leia comments: "Do I look like scenery to you?!")

After the beach we stopped somewhere to snorkel, and both of us were annoyed with the poor equipment we rented. My flipper had a hole in the heel, and my goggles were broken so they were too loose and my nose kept filling up with salt water. We did see some fish and coral, but by the end of that snorkel excursion, we both swallowed so much salt water we weren't feeling great. We got orange sugar-water on the boat to wash the taste away. Leia doesn't think the snorkeling here is better than in Eilat. The tour was actually supposed to snorkel somewhere else on Phi Phi Don, but they changed it around due to weather conditions.

From there we took the tour boat to see the mouth of Viking Cave (pronounced "Wiking Cave" of course) inside which vikings painted longboats, and swiftlets build nests of saliva, which are harvested by Asians for bird's nest soup. We then stopped for about a minute at Monkey Bay (near Monkey Beach) where a colony of macaques come out of the trees when the speedboats swing by to feed them bananas and chips. Sadly we didn't disembark or get to interact much with the monkeys, but someone from our boat gave one a little bottle of orange soft drink. Those monkeys are probably diabetic by now.

We tourists docked at Phi Phi Don for a buffet lunch in a large communal area. I guess it was all right food, but hyped up to be much more than that, and we didn't eat much. We've only had one worse meal in Thailand, and that was Japanese! It showered rain while we were at lunch, and we didn't go to the beach there or do anything but try to recover from our guide's booming voice. ("All food, FREE! Watermelon, FREE! BANANA! FREE! PINEAPPLE-" "Wait, how much?" "FREEE! Drinking water, FREE! And also me, free.") On the beach where we had lunch there were also a couple of beggars with monkeys (Leia points out: Really cute monkeys), but we didn't take any pictures with them to avoid promoting monkey begging.

Our last stop was at Khai island, a tiny bit of sand with nothing on it but a bar and a jet-ski rental spot. (Leia adds: three cats, soon to be more because one of them is pregnant.) This one was much less crowded, and we had about an hour and a half there. The first thing we did was rent a jet-ski for 1500 baht, the price of a tour ticket for us, for 25 minutes (I talked him up from 20.) Leia was afraid to drive it, because she was worried she'd total it. (She says the contract intimidated her: "If you damage the jet-ski, you buy it; if you fall off and die, we don't know you, NO INSURANCE, this isn't even our jet-ski." I don't think it's actually even legal to drive a jet-ski in Thailand without a Thai skipper's license.) I steered and we had a lot of fun skipping over waves with the jet-ski and circumnavigating the tiny island, which you can walk across in under 30 seconds.

There were corals by that island too and we could snorkel, but it started pouring rain just about when we finished our jet-skiing and went to see them, so we had to take our things under the bar roof. Before that I still dropped a few pieces of pineapple in the shallow water and was soon surrounded by striped fish. (I was a little intimidated. Fish: "Picture with fish 200 baht! Look at fish 20 baht.") Leia is angry that they don't preserve their reefs here at all: big shards of coral were all over the beach. Rather than go back out to snorkel in the rain as some people were doing, Leia and I enjoyed a Mai Tai in a pineapple, and a Pina Colada in a coconut, respectively.

The places we visited were beautiful, and the price was not bad at all, but overall we were not so content because group tours are not our thing. We returned to the hotel to shower and had the hotel staff drive us to the fish market for dinner again.

We walked around the fish market for a while looking at fish tanks in restaurants, wondering if they would let me soak my feet in them to have them exfoliated by crabs. We ended up eating at the restaurant right next door to Chokun Seafood. These seaside restaurants are very expensive even for Phuket. We ended up spending over 700 baht, twice what we spent last night at the restaurant next door, for practically the same meal. We shared a large plate of tiger prawns (500 baht) and a serving of pork fried rice.

We decided to walk back home instead of calling the hotel shuttle to pick us up. On our way to the resort we stepped into a massage parlor where we got Thai massages. This was one of those massage places where they give you a foot bath and robe, and rice tea after. The massages were very relaxing, maybe felt even better because we hadn't had any in a few days, and both of us nearly dozed off. We debated how much tip to leave before deciding they'd earned their hundred baht each: my masseuse sounded like she was working pretty hard.