Welcome to "The Beach"

Friday, August 3, 2007
Ko Phi Phi Don, Thailand

Welcome to the beach.  Upon arrival at the pier, in Ko Phi Phi, *giggle*, we were mobbed, assaulted, harangued, cajoled and accosted with offers for rides in the longboats, hotels, dinners, diving.. you get the picture.  This GEORGOUS island that we had seen from the boat was just blown apart by this experience.  The governments promises not to let this part of the island that was completely leveled by the Tsunami in 2004 be overdeveloped again, was completely blown.  There were stalls two stories high on both sides of the street, blaring music, and all kinds of mayhem…. but we pressed on hearing that Long Beach was a slice of peace on the island.  But we were too cheap to pay the 80 baht ($2.50 USD) to get a ride out there by boat.  So we decided to hoof it out there!

Well, I will tell you right off.. a bad idea when carrying your backpack and even worse if your carying Gino’s 🙂  But he sucked it up and made a good show of the walk, not bitching at all.  It really was a beautiful walk afterall.

Then we get the fun part.  Finally we are at long beach.  Georgous sand beach, waves crashing, blue water, palm trees, nice little bungalows… but NO BUNGALOWS FOR US!!  oops… planning was never one of my strong points was it!  Anyway, we take the only room we can find and it turns out to be the room from the movie “the beach”.  If you’ve seen it you’ll remember the 8’x8′ plywood room with a plywood door and a padlock where the dude was murdered at the begnining of the show… I think we were staying in the leftover set room for that scene.  This is by the way the island where the beach was filmed so it was all too fitting.

Anyway, we were there, we showered, we swam and then headed into town for some eats.  WOW.. the food was AWESOME!  I had a whole fried red snapper with a pepper pineapple sauce and gino enjoyed some more curry and we both scarfed more spring rolls.

Now everyone knows what comes next right…. in unison… BEER!  Well after the long arduous trip to our shack of a room we felt we needed one or two.  Gino actually finally found some Jack and Coke and I of course stuck with my beer.  Somehow we got sucked into a REALLY BAD drinking game with some Scotts.  one thing leads to another and Gino had a GREAT idea.. since our CRAP room only cost us $8USD, why don’t we get anotherone with air conditioning and just have two rooms for the night.. BRILLIANT!  So that plan played out well and at about 3am we had some sandwidches and pankakes from the sidewalk vendor then collapsed in our “nice” rooms.

This morning, we were up at 7:30am (oops.. gino forgot the time difference between Hanoi and Bangkok and thought it was 8:30).  But had a GREAT walk back, the whole place was still mostly asleep so we had peace and quite for the first time in a long time.  THe walk was much easier as the tide was out and we were able to walk the beach … oh and we didn’t have 20 Kilo’s of CRAP on our backs.

I took off for my dive and gino camped out for a sunburn in his lounge chair.  Oh wait, he did get up long enough to get us a new room for tonight so we’re grand again.  My dive left a LOT to be deisired but the waves were huge and it wasn’t safe to take us to the good dive sites.  So I saw, snakes, and sea horses and yadda yadda yadda .. but good fish I hadn’t seen before so not a complete waste of time.  I’m actually going to dive in Ko Samui once more so I get one last chance for a great dive.  After the dive I fell asleep in the beach chair to the sounds of the waves… and the occasional long tail boat putting by.

Right now we’re goign to sign off as we are headed to dinner…. and beer of course.

More soon when we hit Ko Samui and our Marriott extravaganza!

Bill & Gino