With Gemma finally feeling better and us feeling happy from making some elephant friends in Chiang Mai, we were ready to board a flight back down towards Southern Thailand, with our first stop being Krabi. Gemma was excited to be able to get involved with more activities now she was feeling well, so we signed up for a kayaking tour in a secret location (as advertised by our hostel).

So it would appear the secret location kayaking tour wasn’t so secret after all, given that we bumped into hundreds of other people at the location we went to, but nevertheless, it was enjoyable to be back on the waters and paddling around.

It was the end of Songkran, which is Thailand’s main holiday, where they celebrate the new year. Because of this, there were lots of locals out enjoying the water. They were happy to see us and help steer us in the right direction.

Inbetween all the crowds, you occasionally got a little bit of space to paddle through the jungle like environment, although it never took long before you hit a river traffic jam!

The next day we headed to Railay Beach, which is touted as one of the more picturesque beaches in Krabi.

On the section of beach we were on, rather than having lots of shops/shacks selling drinks and food, they instead had boats which came up towards the beach that you could wade out to and buy refreshments from.

After staying in most nights for the last couple of weeks whilst Gemma recovered, we were now keen to go out and have some drinks with fellow backpackers. We had anticipated making a few friends at the hostel and making our way out to a bar for a couple of beers and some wine, however when we went down to the social area, the reception team were keen to tell us everyone from the hostel would be going out on the Krabi Pub Crawl that evening. We weren’t really feeling up to something quite that strenuous so made our excuses, however, the hostel crew were not willing to accept this, and were ultimately able to bend our weak wills. So we agreed to go out for a couple of drinks, wearing the required uniform: a vest proudly advertising the pub crawl.

We took it relatively easy and didn’t participate in all of the encouraged games, but after our talks of experiencing ‘shotgunning’ in our post about Castaways in Vietnam, we managed to capture part of the pub crawl taking part in this ancient ritual (in case you were in any doubt about how it works).

Although we didn’t stay out too late, we hoped this experience would prepare us for the next leg of our journey: Koh Phi Phi, which is known for being one of the relatively lively islands of Thailand. We had been advised by several people to sign up for Blanco’s Boat Party, which operates every day and takes you to some of the more picturesque spots close to Koh Phi Phi. Alongside that, they provide a buffet lunch and unlimited drinks throughout the day. By this point, we had a reasonable idea what to expect from a boat party, but had also been guaranteed that they spend the majority of the time seeing beautiful sites! So we signed up, and crossed our fingers!

To offset the fact we knew the island could be quite a party driven place, we booked ourselves into a hotel five minutes away from the party stretch of beach. We had a nice quiet room to sleep in at night, and Gemma was excited to see they had a resident cat who spends all day sleeping in reception.

We decided to have a relatively quiet night on our first night in Koh Phi Phi, we needed to brace ourselves for the boat party the next day. We went out for some excellent Turkish food at a local restaurant, and the Turkish staff were astounded by the fact Gemma could exchange a few words with them in Turkish (which she picked up from her 12 visits to Turkey to visit her friend, Indy, over the last decade or so). We decided to take a quick stroll to the meeting point for tomorrows boat party, as we wanted to make sure we got to the right place on time. It turns out the meeting point is right in the middle of the party stretch of beach, where one bars music and party environment blends into the next bars. It was all very loud and exciting, we just hoped our boat trip tomorrow really would take us to interesting sites and not just be one big party.

The next day, when we turned up at the prescribed location for the boat party, we were immediately impressed by how beautiful Koh Phi Phi is during the day. It is obviously more than just a party island (it is hard to imagine these two videos are from the same location).

Once we had received our wristband and boarded the boat, we went off to our first destination, Monkey Island, which, as the name implies, is an island which is inhabited by monkeys. With our GoPro in hand, Steve ventured off to get some footage of the monkeys, but the monkeys took a fancy to the GoPro and tried to grab it out of Steve’s hands.

Our tour guide had told us to stay out of reach of the monkeys, and not to let them climb on you. They can carry rabies and are rather vicious, they will pull your hair, scratch and bite you and grab hold of anything they can. We heeded the warning, but of course, there are always people which are happy to live life on the edge.

On our particular trip, a couple of people were scratched, but none were bitten. However, we spoke to someone who went to the boat party the next day and did get bitten, meaning she had to go and pay for rabies shots. We were happy to take photos from afar rather than attempt to get our moneys worth out of the rabies inoculations we had before departing the UK.

Our next stop was Maya Bay, which was made famous by The Beach, a film that starred Leonardo DiCaprio back in 2000. Everyone was excited as we headed towards this iconic beach.

When we arrived, it was clear why this location was chosen, it is a very beautiful destination. There are mountains around you, soft sand under your feet and clear warm water going out to the sea.

We had seen a lot of people’s photos from Maya beach, and they are always the same photo, where there is a gap in the mountains going out into the sea.

Something we learned from our tour guide, is in the film they used CGI to add/duplicate a mountain into the gap, to create a closed environment.

Not to be outdone by Hollywood, here is Steve in Maya Beach à la The Beach, fully enclosed by mountains.

After we had finished at Maya Bay, we headed to a snorkelling spot. Steve was really keen to get in, with our Go Pro and get some footage, although a lot of people on the party boat were less keen, and instead stayed onboard and occupied themselves with the free bar. Steve was not disappointed however, there were so many fish swimming around us.

When you swim and snorkel around, it is like seeing another world.

Steve got carried away and ended up taking about a 100 videos, which we have had to since go through and prune down to a small collection of more interesting videos.

If you want to see more fish videos, we have put all the videos from this snorkelling trip into a playlist on YouTube which you can access by clicking here. When Steve came back onboard, the sun was just beginning to set, he saluted its descent in the best way you can on an all-day boat party.

Upon turning around, he found that the boat party had quickly turned into, well, a party.

So we quickly grabbed a couple of drinks and joined in the fun.

After the boat got back to land, we had dinner and then headed back to the same stretch of beach, which had once again transformed from beautiful coastline to a party zone. We watched some of the people from the boat party attempting to skip a rope on the beach.

The atmosphere wasn’t too dissimilar to the full moon party on Koh Phangan, there was even face painters giving the revellers unique looks.

After all this fun and excitement, we were happy to head to Koh Lanta, renowned to be a peaceful island where you can relax on the beach and this is exactly what we did.

Aside from the beach, we visited the Koh Lanta Animal Welfare centre, which is a voluntary organisation set up on the island to look after stray cats and dogs. When it was founded in 2005, Koh Lanta had a problem with stray cats, they were quickly multiplying on the island, not being looked after properly, spreading disease and causing problems to other wildlife on the island. Since being founded, it runs programs of education, spays/neuters and tags cats and looks after animals which can’t continue to live in the wild. Where possible it aims to have all animals it looks after rehomed via adoption programs. Whilst we were there they did an organised tour of the facilities and let us spend some time with their cats.

As you can see, the cats had as much of a relaxing time as we did. It was just what we needed after our time in Koh Phi Phi and gave us some rest and energy to tackle the final leg of our Thailand Adventure: Phuket and Bangkok.

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