This trip was brought to you by Dramamine.
It was Monday, October 14th at 3 in the morning. Alarms started ringing through our apartment. Unfortunately, I was already awake. It was going to be a marathon day and I was going into it without a moment of sleep. At 3:15am we called a cab and took off for the airport.
We arrived at the airport about 3:40am. We had no issues with ticketing, baggage, or security. All in all, the airport experience went flawlessly. The night before, we bought sticky rice with beans and bananas. That was our saving grace in the airport.
Snacks eaten, security passed, boarding passes in hand, passports checked, we headed toward our gate.
Upon settling in, we noted we had about an hour and forty five minutes before takeoff. I went off on an important mission: someone had put up a magnetic lure on a nearby PokeStop and I had a Magneton and a Nosepass in desperate need of evolving.
ALSO I was off to find some airport snacks. I found an open Burger King (it's hard to find even airport food here at 4am) and got us two tater tots. I can't remember the last time I had something smothered in American ketchup, hot, fried, and guilt-free. We were on vacation and the first expense after plane tickets were these delicious babies:
It was finally time. We had our boarding passes checked one last time, got a shuttle to our plane and boarded the little hopper down to Phuket.
We took a shuttle bus to a stairway leading to our plane!
The pilot got to go in first. Does that make him the FIRST first class?
The flight was an hour and five minutes of uneventful travel. Food and drink are not provided on small flights like this so we were all glad for our big breakfast.
We landed at the Phuket airport and had to answer the most frequent question of the trip:
None of us really wanted to spend much time in Phuket. It's a tourist and party destination, but it is the easiest place to travel TO in southern Thailand. So at the airport we decided we would make our way to Koh Phi Phi (also known as PP Island).
Koh Phi Phi (pronounced Koh Pee Pee) is an island off the coast of Phuket. According to Google Maps, it would have taken us a little over 10 hours to walk there. Nothing better than a 60km "walk" through the Andaman sea, right?
Just kidding. We hailed a Grab (Thai Uber) and got a ride down to what was supposed to be a travel place to book tickets. It should have been a dead giveaway that our driver didn't know where we were going to. In a place this relatively small, every taxi driver knows the majority of places. It's like asking someone in Winona where to get the best sandwich. (The answer is Acoustic Cafe.)
Anyway, he was incredibly annoying. We kept asking him where the most beautiful islands were, what his favorite islands were, and where he liked to go. His answers were rehearsed and boring: the party islands. He was also super annoying. He kept trying to turn off our route to take us to tourist locations so he would get paid more to wait around for us to look around. At this point, we were tired, un-caffeinated, hungry, and sick of this man. When he stopped for a smoke break, we all agreed we weren't tipping him much and wanted to get to our dropoff point ASAP.
He dropped us off exactly where we wanted and as promised, it was the middle of nowhere.
However, I remembered driving past a temple on a mountain a couple minutes back and we headed off to find the temple on the mountain!
The temple is about 60m above sea level and we walked STRAIGHT UP a mountain road to get there! It reminded me of running the golf course hill in high school. And we were doing this in full packs for vacation! We reached the top, passed the beggars, spun the PokeStops, and laid our eyes on Wat Koh Siray.
Wat Koh Siray is a Buddhist temple that contains a replica of Kyaiktiyo Pagoda, also known as the Golden Rock. The original in Myanmar is one of the most important Buddhist pilgrimage sites in Myanmar. The replica exists in Phuket because of the large population of people from Myanmar living in the city.
There were so many chickens and roosters at and around the temple!
We climbed up that mountain packs and all!
Almost to the top view!
Now we're at the top!
The Golden Rock
Looking out over the edge of Phuket.
We were so excited to see the sea!
A golden chicken. It reminded me of my cousin, Maggie. Maggie, if you're reading this, the golden chickens were all over the temple and I laughed and thought of you. Also, hello. It's been a long time.
When the Buddha is laying like this, he has reached his final enlightenment (death).
People put gold leaf all over the parts of the Buddha they can reach - especially his feet.
We checked three times. Snapchat spelled it wrong.
We had to document that we came here. However, we were not very Thai. We did not bring digital cameras, a dedicated camera person, OR a rice cooker.
And then we made our way back down. It was only 11am when we made our descent.
The views were sublime and the company was not shabby either.
We climbed back down and Roxi decided we should turn right an continue toward town.
This marked the first time on vacation that Roxi did not walk the middle path. We went in the exact WRONG direction for a mile and a half until we ended up at a dead end on a beach.
We called another cab to take us to the ACTUAL pier. In the meantime, we rested our packs on a table and looked out over a beach for the first time on our trip!
This cab driver was so much better! We referred to him as Roxi's "first husband of the trip". He got a touch lost getting us to the pier but eventually we made it. We tipped him. He was great.
We didn't already have tickets and discovered that the LAST ferry of the day was departing in twenty minutes. Amanda and Roxi were famished so they took off to find food while I hunted out how to get tickets on the ferry.
I found tickets for 1000B each that included both a one-way to Koh Phi Phi and another "any day, any time" return to Phuket, Krabi, Koh Lanta, or Ao Nang. I booked three immediately and went to find Amanda and Roxi with fresh fried fish sandwiches. Correctly, they had not ordered me one. I ate one bite of both of their sandwiches and I was STUFFED. Amanda put hot sauce on her sandwich and was entirely correct. As the pattern you will soon will see began to emerge: Amanda walked the middle path and made the correct decisions.
We boarded the ferry and chose to keep our bags with us and not under a tarp with the other luggage. I chose seats at the very back of the ferry facing forward. There were only bench seats on the top. One long bench across the back (where we were) and long benches going up the sides of the boat. We were above the main cabin of the ferry and never actually wandered below.
Before the boat even left, it started to sprinkle. The few people who were above deck quickly scampered below. We stayed up top. Now we basically had the entire top of the boat to ourselves. The rain lasted maybe 5 minutes, we claimed even more space, and then it let up.
Bye, Amanda's Bitmoji. We're heading off!
Jesus, Amanda. Way to walk on water. #ShowOff
Ok. Now we're all in boats. It's all good now.
People slowly began to emerge as the sun came out stronger than ever! About 90 minutes into the ride, we started to see the islands appear in the distance. The looked like towering cliffs rising from the water. It was incredible to see the shrubs and trees clinging to the sides.
This is the southern Phi Phi Island.
This is what the islands look from above. We went swimming in there. But that's a later blog post. HA! You're going to have to wait!
This is the outside of the main portion of Koh Phi Phi.
As soon as we round that tip, we're there!
Problematically pretty... and the tourists have found our haven.
Ok. We landed on Koh Phi Phi.
We then had to go through the "entrance". This was two men getting 20B from every single tourist coming to the island. They are doing this to "promote ecotourism" and "help save Koh Phi Phi".
Reusable water bottles on hand, we were so ready. First off, it was already 3pm. We needed to find someplace to stay before town got hoppin or WORSE: everywhere was full.
We went to a coffee shop, ordered drinks, and settled in. Roxi and I started researching places to stay while Amanda looked for things to do. Eventually I found the PP Golden Guesthouse. We got 2 nights of stay in a room for four people for 1360B (45$). We left the coffee house and walked the streets until we found our hotel!
Fun fact. Do you see the roads on those photos? That's it. Those are all the roads. That walk is 1km. There are almost no mopeds on Koh Phi Phi both because the roads aren't roads: they're more like single lane walkways that during high season are packed with people.
But we were there during low season... which means it was only packed sometimes!
We made it past all the stalls of items and up the hill to our hotel!
We got an amazing room. The balcony looked out over the main part of the town. We got one queen bed and two twin beds. Naturally we shoved all three of them together into one giant bed, each got our own blanket, and had an epic slumber party!
Then we were off to find food. There was a Mediterranean restaurant near the pier and we all thought we could find something there to satiate our hunger.
We were correct. Fistuk Restaurant had the best pita I've ever eaten in my life. We got a pita and hummus plate, falafel, Roxi got her own falafel plate and Amanda and I split a chicken schwarma pita. We also inquired into how much a bottle of water would be. It was 30B. Hahaha... absolutely not. To refill a water bottle at a refill point should be about 1B/L so paying 30B for it seemed extreme.
We soon discovered that Koh Phi Phi does not do refillable water. They do single use water bottles.
That's right. They took 20B from all of us when we got to the island to "Save Koh Phi Phi", but they had no refillable water stations. The only option for water was to buy bottles, drink them, and throw them away.
That's right.
No recycling.
Throw them away.
*sighs deeply*
But now it was the early evening and we were debating what to do on our full day the next day:
After a spot of debate, we decided on a guided snorkeling tour. We didn't want to do the full day (8am-7pm) so we opted for the shorter adventure (2pm-7pm). There were a couple reasons we decided on this:
1. Amanda needs prescription glasses and there were no prescription goggles for her to rent on the island. We weren't sure if she was going to be able to see anything the whole time we were out and about.
2. We are delicate Minnesotans (ok, Amanda and I are) and we burn so easily!
3. I hate getting up early. Ok. Actually I really wanted to do the early tour that went from 6am-2pm, but that one only runs during the high season...
It mostly came down to #1. If 1/3 of our group wasn't going to have any fun, maybe we should only spend half a day doing it.
So we went back to one of the places to buy tours from. Originally when we got to the island we had stopped by this place and the lady working there had been friendly but not pushy. The theme of our adventure was "reward good behavior" so we went back to Pew and got 3 tickets for the next day's afternoon. We also asked her if there was anywhere to fill our water bottles on the island... she laughed at us. However, she did send us down the road to the locals store where water was the cheapest.
Tickets in hand, we needed two last items: a hat for Ms. Amanda and a waterproof bag to hold necessities. Fortunately we had gotten waterproof phone cases already so we managed to save a lot on those. We bought them at the local hardware shop in Min Buri for 30B. They were selling them on Koh Phi Phi for 200B!
We found a little 5L waterproof bag very quickly and after some brief bartering in Thai (if you barter in Thai with Thai numbers, the shopkeepers will get you better prices) walked away with it for 300B. We ended up talking with a lot of other foreigners over the next few days and the cheapest anyone else got one that size was 375B. One man paid 475B for the exact same one as mine, so I was feeling pretty good.
Then we wandered and found the perfect "vacation Amanda hat".
If you're imagining Vacation Terry from Brooklyn 99, you are on the right track.
Four shops later we had the hat and we were tired. I hadn't slept since the night before last and all three of us were getting to be cranky zombies.
Once inside our room, we turned on the air conditioning and passed out.
By the time we got to bed it was around 11:30pm. We had been up and TRUCKING since 3am. But we could hear the ocean outside, the windows were closed so the monkeys couldn't get in, and we were ready for a full day the next day!
I wish I could say I slept like the dead, but the air conditioner worked too well and SOMEONE stole all the blankets.
*looks at Amanda*
That's all for now! Catch the next blog post to find out what happens on day 2!
No comments:
Post a Comment