To answer two questions that were posted in the blog comments recently, no, we were not affected by the Japanese earthquake at all, and no, we did not get to eat the enormous fish that Reed caught.
Over the last 6 nights we've stayed in 3 hotels, all between 25 and 100 yards from the beach, and all with air conditioning and pools. So lots of ways to cool off after venturing outside and getting overheated.
Our first full day in Ao Nang we took a 6-hour boat tour of 4 of the islands in the gulf of Thailand. Beautiful surroundings, and only $15 each for the tour. The islands around here are all similar, with towering limestone faces that often overhang the water because the lower portions are eroded by the tides. The secret lair of the Bond villain in 'The man with the golden gun' was amongst these islands, so if you've seen the movie, that is what they look like. That specific island is now called 'James Bond Island' and there are many Bond references, including a boat we saw named 'Jame Bond', Bond singular I suppose. In other movie references, 'The Beach' with Leonardo was filmed at another beach we visited. We watched it last night.
During our 4-island tour the water was every bit as blue and warm (mid to upper 80s) as we'd been told elsewhere. We rode in a long-tail boat (there should be some in these pictures), which held maybe 30 people and which is powered by what appears to an open car engine, attached to a 15 foot shaft and propeller. Effective, but noisy, particularly when there are many boats around.
We took our underwater camera snorkeling with us, and captured photos of a few schools of yellow snapper and a nudibranch before the camera started making violent clicking noises and bubbling. We checked the seals before taking it in, and it is rated to 10 meters, but regardless, it is now dead. We are on to our backup camera.
There were signs on some of the islands warning people not to feed the monkeys, but we watched fascination and curiosity win out as people promptly opened up their lunches for the monkeys as soon as they were spotted. These monkeys are fearless and apparently always hungry. As soon as people stopped feeding them they would run off in a group and scour through piles of unattended belongings on the beach. We saw one monkey find himself a bag of chips before running off. A neat feature of one of the beaches (Railay) was the food boats, which anchor to the beach and float in maybe 3 feet of water. You can buy meat on a stick, fresh fruit, crepes, drinks, corn, pad thai, rice dishes and more, all at reasonable prices.
The next day we took the ferry to Ko Phi Phi, an island in the gulf of Thailand between Phuket and Krabi. Our hotel was right in the middle of the main beach area so it was a 1-minute walk to get a $0.50 stick of roast chicken or a crepe off of the street. We'd seen a number of other towns in Thailand with lots of dogs everywhere (though surprisingly very few in New Zealand), but this was the first cat haven we encountered. Within a minute after getting off the ferry we probably saw 4 cats, and we saw more than a dozen on every walk during our stay, including some kittens that would follow us as we walked. On our last night at the island we ate at a nice restaurant right on the beach and had cats crawling around us and jumping up on the chairs next to us. They were cute and didn't appear too dirty. There were some dogs, and many chickens like everywhere else also. And, we saw our first monkeys in the wild, jumping around in some treetops as we hiked to a lookout in a remote area. March 12th was the half-moon, so there was a half-moon party outside our hotel that started at 8:40pm (I don't know why). There was free dinner and fruit, and fire dancers that twirled kerosene soaked balls connected by strings to today's hottest hits, Justin Bieber included.
Ko Phi Phi is a scuba diving destination with over a dozen dive shops, so we went out on the morning of our first full day. This was a lot easier than diving in New Zealand. You don't have to carry or clean up your own gear because we were paying guests rather than students, and wearing either no wetsuit (Reed) or a much thinner wetsuit (Annie) meant that we got to use 10-15lbs less weight on our belts.
Our first dive was almost an hour and we saw all sorts of neat life. Colorful fan and table coral, along with maybe 50 different kinds of fish. Yellow snapper, clownfish, moorish idols (think Gill from Finding Nemo), crocodile needlefish, flutefish, lots of types of wrasse (similar to something we caught in NZ), triggerfish, moray eels, shrimp, grouper, pufferfish (regular, yellow, and giant), and angelfish. Most of them just look right back at you when you invade their space so you can easily end up in the middle of a school. We also saw one green sea turtle eating, and a cuttlefish that swam over and looked me in the eye before darting off. We saw 4 more sea turtles on the second dive, most of which just scraped and ate vegetation off of the rocks as we watched them. Our divemaster also guided us through some short underwater tunnels, so it is good that we are getting more proficient with our buoyancy control. Breath in, go up, breath out, go down, sometimes surprisinly quickly.
From Ko Phi Phi we took the ferry to Ko Lanta, a larger island to the southeast. We are at the southernmost resort on the island, and the road (one of two on the island) gets worse as you travel south. This means that the final 2 miles to our resort takes about 15 minutes by car, where all the passengers bounce around as we climb over the dirt road that has ridges of rock running across it. This kind of road does get you well-isolated though, and this resort is quiet, with no boat traffic, crowds or car sounds. We've seen wild monkeys a few times here as well. We rented a moped this morning and drove on the bad road into town to get massages and pedicures (I was forced into the latter), which probably wasn't the best introduction to moped driving. We only crashed twice (both times at low speed, once with us not on the moped) and found that the two of us together was too much for both the suspension on every bump and the engine on 4 of the hills.
We dove around a group of islands off of Ko Lanta yesterday, and saw many of the same creatures, along with yellow barracudas, some rare pipefish and a baby cuttlefish that had blended itself perfectly into the mottled brown ocean floor.
Update on the lost items (toothbrush, toothpaste, antimalarial medication, a few other things) from my bag at the airport. I received a response back from the airline . . . no luck. I'd realized there wasn't much of value missing, and had already replaced the few important items, but was curious as to whether they'd be able to find anything. I thought the wording was funny, and imagine I would have received a similar email if I'd told Air Asia I'd lost a kilo of cocaine. I also like the listing of the places where the items could have been lost.
"Your drugs could have be mislaid at areas such as at check in, in the plane's cargo hold or even on the tarmac at Chiang Mai or Phuket Airport. I have double checked with the lost and found department at Phuket Airport and also asked colleagues to check with the lost and found department at Chiang Mai Airport. Unfortunately, I was not successful and I am sorry to advise you that I was unable to find any trace of your drugs."
Fruit and fruit shakes have been widely available on these islands and we've been consuming them in abundance to keep cool. And, they taste good. There is usually pineapple served with breakfast and we've purchased some fruit along the street including dragonfruit and some unknown apple type item. Today we had coconut, dragonfruit and mango shakes. We've also had watermelon, lychee, pineapple, honey/orange/cashew nut, and other shake mixtures. Low fat, high sugar.
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