There are no pictures from the day today, because we missed most of it.

I managed to drag myself out of bed at about 10am for some work and attempted to wake Julia from the dead at about 11am to succeed only briefly. She was feeling rough, but I managed to persuade her to go and have something to eat with me.

We went back to Cosmic and ordered a pizza and two banana milkshakes. Julia sat down, but at the sight and smell of food wanted to vomiting. In her defense, she staved it off for a bit, but when she started to gag I advised her to run for the hills – she did, disappeared into our room and was never seen again.

I was left to finish a pizza and two banana milkshakes by myself, probably saving me from hang-over hell. I went back to the room to check on the passed-out-again Julia and went back to D’ Books for a day of work. Only around 5pm did Julia attempt to surface again, and tenderly so.

We decided she needed a lot of food and once again had the all-you-can-eat BBQ buffet at Matt’s Joint and let it settle with a long walk on the beach. Phi Phi seemed to be back to normal – parties where starting up, but it didn’t have the same air of urgency about it. We settled on a spot on the beach with some chairs and relatively cheap drinks and sipped on beer and Bacardi.

As the crowds gathered and the night warmed up, a few local people appeared on the beach and entertained us with a fire-show. Julia and I realised that we didn’t keep a bucket from the night before, something we (and possibly thousands before us) thought would make a good souvenir. So we decided to order another bucket for the sake of it. We got a nice bucket with a cheap mixer consisting of Sangsom – the local poison, which I believe they call rum.

Tried as we did, sipping it for a while, it didn’t make the hideous drink any more palatable, so after we left the venue we dumped the nearly full bucket down the drain. In light of the stories of major hangovers due to this shit, it was probably the best move ever.

With Julia’s headache warn off and the euphoria from the night before still lingering in our veins, we made a big mistake – we tried to recreate it. We were back at the Tiger Bar and with buckets in hand we quickly made friends. We even bumped into the Scottish girls from the night before and swapped and compared memories and stories. But it was clear from the start that it would never even come near to touching the likes of the night before.

It ended up being quiet late actually, and after a night of sedate conversation and but one bucket o’ vodka, the night wound up for us at the very respectable time of 2.30am. After a late-night bite we headed back home and to bed, but not before taking in copious amounts of water.

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Today was all work and no play, for me at least. My office was Phi Phi’s D’ Books, a quaint little book store with all sorts of new and second hand books in many languages other than English. They do well decent lattes and excellent frapps, but best of all – they have free wi-fi!

It’s also on one of the main little alleys of Phi Phi, so there’s loads of traffic going past there, mainly people going to and from the beach and all the associated ogle opportunities that come with it. None of which I appreciated, of course, because I had my nose down writing my little heart out.

Anyway, Julia befriended a beagle called Sumo and a lot of coo’ing ensued – so much so that she spent a good portion of her day reading next to me in the hopes of seeing the little dog. The dog, of course, has no short supply of affection and goes where he pleases.

After a long day in the shaded area of the shop, where I’m sure I nevertheless got sunburned, we made our way down to the beach a little too late for the sunset. We rented a kayak anyway and paddled like madmen to the mouth of the lagoon hoping to see the last of the rays dip into the ocean. The catch is that once you get to the mouth of the lagoon, you’re in near-open seas, but you’re still blocked from seeing the sunset by the far point of Phi Phi.

So as the wind picked up speed we turned around, happy for the exercise but not up for the mission of getting back if we went any further. On the paddle back to the beach it was well apparent that Phi Phi had come to life and that tonight it was party payback time on Phi Phi island. Several pubs slash clubs on the beach already had their lights and music going and soon the throngs of party-starved tourists on Phi Phi would be lifting their elbows en force.

The previous three days had been a quiet time to pay respects to the royal family who lost a member some months ago and whose cremation ceremony had taken place. But tonight would be large.

It seemed busier than usual so Julia and I acquired our first drink on the cheap from one of the mini-markets and sipped it as we searched for a place to eat. After yet another long walk along Tonsai beach we finally chose a spot and settled down. We had more beer. I can’t remember much about the seafood dinner now except that the chicken was good.

Earlier on we bumped into the videographer from our dive trip and asked her where was good to party. “Tiger Bar”, she shouted over her shoulder as she peddled off on her bike. So after dinner that’s where we headed and it was located conveniently close to our hotel.

The first thing we got was a vodka bucket. It’s a three-quarter glass of vodka over ice with about 2 small bottles of Red Bull and at THB 200 they were buy one get one free. Turns out they are better friend makers than the friend disc…

At first Julia and I sat on the side watching the throngs of singles do their thing. Mingle, drink, flirt, etc. etc. The vodka budget along with the beers we had earlier on started kicking in and I leaned over to two random guys who had just arrived and said “hey, try this”. They each had a sip and the one said “that’s brilliant, I’m getting some too” and he went off to return with one each for him and his friend.

Rob and Frank, Dutch boys, where the first of many friends the bucket would reel in. We bantered a bit and chatted, they in Dutch, myself in Afrikaans and Julia in ecstasy at hearing all the foreign languages. Frank eventually would keel over after his second bucket.

As the bucket emptied and we acquired more, we met Kirstie and Laura, two fine Scottish lases. Not sure how we befriended the, but I’m pretty sure either Julia or myself offered the some of our buckets. Possibly using the same MO wel ment Israeli called Edan, a Fin called Felton (we think) and a French girl named Emily. We also bumped into the 2 Korean boys Han and Jung again. In one way or another, the vodka bucket was instrumental in meeting them all.

Needless to say that after our third vodka bucket, Julia and my memories start to blur and fade a little bit and we can’t quite agree on all the details. What is clear is that our posse ended up on the beach where Julia and myself acquired a 4th vodka bucket. I cleverly used this friendship tool to acquire more friends, most of who I wouldn’t have remembered if it wasn’t for the fact that I snapped pictures of them all.

Eventually our party petered out and in the wee hours of the morning I once again became aware of my surroundings. Myself, Julia and Jung was trying to get Jung back to the place where he lived, but we where hopelessly lost and Jung had lost his key. We stumbled around the island until we started walking uphill and I realised we were nowhere near where we should be. I asked some random person where we were and she said we were near the look-out point, which is a very far walk from anywhere.

Sober up fast we made our way back to the centre of the village and miraculously bumped into Han, who gave Jung his key. As we stumbled around near our hotel room, Julia excused herself from the search party and Jung and I continued alone. Eventually he had gathered enough of his senses to locate his room, and with him safely inside I made my way back to mine.

Julia was already in the land of slumber and I joined her shortly after. If it wasn’t for the camera, much of the memories of this night would only have come back to us perhaps weeks from now.

Luckily we had a 3Gb SD Card full of photographic memories from this, possibly one of the biggest party nights ever on Phi Phi.

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Ah Sunday, day of rest. A day of rest and pizza. Well, apart from the couple of hours of work I got in before Julia got up it was a day of rest, but it was started with pizza. And today I did something I haven’t done since I was like 8 years old: I spent the entire day on the beach doing absolutely nothing. Phi Phi’s Loh Dalum beach, to be exact.

And if you’re going to be spending a day of doing absolutely nothing on a beach, what better beach to do it on than on Phi Phi island? It’s not The Beach, but it might as well have been. Idyllic: A strip of soft white sand outlining the bay awash with beautiful, gleaming bodies, clear turquoise waters softly lapping at the sand, gently rocking the moored long-tail boats as it does. Green, tree-covered cliffs rising above the lagoon and dropping down sharply at the mouth in the distance underneath a clear, deep blue sky. Why do people ever leave Phi Phi island?

Of course, my bliss was spent under the shade of a rather big umbrella (for which we paid THB100 for the day) holding what was left of my tube of SPF 50 very close by, reapplying very often. Other people’s beautiful, gleaming bodies soon turned into red lobsters – not so sexy.

Anyway, we chilled, we people watched, we went in the water, had banana shakes, I reapplied my SPF 50 and we repeated the cycle. Several times. At one point we ventured out into the sun to throw around our Ultimate disc like the experts we are, not like the beach bums tossing around those toy frisbees, barely making it fly.

The friendship disc hadn’t been flying long between Julia and myself when a couple asked us where we got the disc, and we said we brought our own, but virtually every shop sells the toy frisbees – we invited them for a game though, but the friendship disc wasn’t warm enough yet. He disappeared for a while and later reappeared with his own shiny new, green, plastic frisbee.

No too long after, 2 Korean boys stopped on the beach and longingly looked at the disc. We waved for them to come in and they couldn’t resist. Han and Jung joined us and over the next couple of hours we taught them how to throw a forehand and a backhand and, dare we say, by the end of it they were pretty good.

Of course, the friendship disc attracted other people – there was Daniel from Germany and Vince from Canada, a league player. It was good. After we were all burned to a crisp (except SPF 50′fied me), we dispersed. I invited Hung and Jung back for the afternoon when the tide would be out and we would have a level area to see if we could get a game going – then Julia and I returned to the shelter of our rented umbrella and the comforting smell of SPF 50.

We spent the rest of the afternoon people watching and banana shake drinking, occasionally going back in the water for a cool down.

As the sun went down Han appeared again and we had a bit of fun on dry, flat land, but we couldn’t get enough interest for a full on game. We said our goodbyes and Julia and I headed back for a rinse before we had a pizza dinner at a restaurant called Cosmic – we actually have to pass along the back of this restaurant where their kitchen is to get to our room, so we’ve been seeing the food they do and have craved it for a while. It was well worth it.
The third quiet night on Phi Phi winded up with yet another walk along Tonsai beach searching for some or other party, but we found nothing and settled for the comfort of banana shakes.

We’re looking forward to tomorrow night when this “quiet time” is over and parties will once again thump on Phi Phi. But tonight, it’s yet another early night.

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Our day today started fairly early as we had signed ourselves up for a 2-dive day with Phi Phi Scuba, which was recommended to us by Dive The World. Bright yellow outfit somewhere in the centre of Phi Phi town (Phi Phi Scuba, not Dive The World) - you can’t miss it really.

We had met our dive guide for the day, Chris from Denmark, and we was going to show us the sights of Phi Phi’s underwater world. Because of the great snorkeling on the previous evening’s sun set cruise, we had great expectations.

We set off on the yellow Phi Phi Scuba and headed away from Phi Phi Don in the direction of Phi Phi Leh, the cluster of islands where The Beach was filmed. Our first dive site was to be Bida Nok. “Heavy on air?” Chris asked as he was going through the signals. I am heavy on air, very, in fact, lucky if I last 40 minutes.

So we went in, along with a substantial amount of other divers on our boat, at 8:31. The water temperature was a toasty 29.6*C and we had around 10m of visibility. The fish population weren’t as dense as I had expected, but there was loads of variety on very colourful coral reefs, outcrops and rounding, much unlike what I, Mr. Inexperienced, have seen before.

Next to Julia with her keen eyes and knowledge, we quickly spotted a few scorpion fish and lion fish. We also saw a free-swimming moray eel and that was about the highlight of the dive. Technically though, both Julia and myself had perfect dives. Julia felt very confident and had no buoyancy issues. I lasted a whopping 57min and had no trouble with buoyancy either – I was very excited about that.

We were hoping to see some leopard sharks or at least something big on this dive, so we were a little disappointed that we didn’t, but it was a great dive nevertheless. We aimed our positive thoughts at a turtle for myself and a manta ray for Julia on our next dive, with a bit of a prayer for a whale shark if we had any luck left.

While having lunch, we headed for our next dive site at Malong or Maya Bay, at the mouth of the lagoon that washes The Beach and next entered the water at about 11am. The water temperature was the same and we had slightly more visibility this time. The coral-scape was fantastic, with loads of big boulders, canyons and even a swim-through, my first ever. The coral, considering the amount of divers on this site, was in pretty good condition and the variety of fish amazing.

We again saw some interesting fish and smaller critters, but nothing big. It was about 10 minutes towards the end of our dive when I had lost hope of seeing anything interesting when Chris signaled something. I couldn’t make out what he was trying to tell me, but I swam forward from where I was at the back of our group of 4. And there, as I rose over the coral ridge, was a turtle! I followed him at a distance for the next five minutes, watching him lazily pick at the coral and munching at things, blissfully unaware of the divers ogling him or the noise of the boat engines overhead.

Chris eventually called me away as we had reached the end of the dive, but I was super stoked. Excellent dive because of that turtle – may he live long and prosper.

The rest of our day was fairly laid back. I got a few hours of work in and a nap. We decided to go down to the beach for the sunset (although technically you can’t see the sun set from the beach). It was relatively quiet with few people around.

A member of the royal family had passed away several month earlier and the custom involves embalming the body and keeping it for a set period before the cremation. As it happened, the cremation was taking place over this weekend, and for 3 days bars would be closed and no loud music would be played – hence the quietness on the island – but it was almost blissful.

After a bit of a frolic on the beach it was dinner time and as we had had Thai food non-stop since we got here, we thought it time for a bit of a meaty dinner and there’s no meatier dinner than the eat-as-much-as-you-can buffet at Matt’s Joint. The sign out front says: “Girls: THB 265, Ladyboys: THB 280, Boys: THB 295, Kids & Rabbit: THB150”. Not a bad deal.

Our next hour and a bit consisted of pork chops, pork sausages, prawn skewers, chicken fillet, smoked salmon, 4 different kinds of pasta salads, a green salad, potato salad (and jacket potatoes for all-you-can-eat novices), corn on the cob and fresh bread. What a spread! But try as I might, I only managed a plate and a half and to my detriment was stuffed after. Julia also managed significantly less that what she aimed for – but it was money well spent.

We walked around the island looking for signs of life, but alas, found none. We ended up at a beauty salon where Julia had a manipedi and I had a foot massage, before we headed back with 2 DVDs and beers and ended the evening in our room – relatively early thanks to a fairly active day.

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Arrived on Phi Phi today and more of what has come to be known as D-myths have been debunked.  I have to say though, the full moon could have something to do with it.

An acquaintance of mine said we should book before we go to Phi Phi because it’s high season and everything will be full. D-myth.  We ignored his advice - mainly because pre-booked accommodation were all THB1,500 plus per night, somewhat beyond our budget.

A short walk from the pier (ignore the numerous touts who are not as aggressive as in Patong) revealed several accommodation options for between THB750 and THB1000 (after negotiations).  We were up for a bit of comfort but not too much walking, so we settled on H.C. Andersen’s.

Somebody told us that it could be due to the full moon and many holiday makers having moved to Koh Panghan, otherwise it might have been a lot harder to find something decent at a good price. There are loads of options though.

The lady who assisted us at H.C. Andersen’s was really friendly and honest, so we settled in.  Everything is clean is neat. Our bed’s mattress has some odd indentations and the air-con takes a while to chill, but it has free wi-fi, the mini-bar’s prices is almost as good as the mini-mart, so we’re happy.

We booked a sunset cruise which is a bit of a tour of mainly Phi Phi Leh, which is the island where The Beach was filmed. Before the cruise we arranged a diving excursion with Gop from Phi Phi Island Divers - service was great and the facilities seem top notch - seeing my glasses, she even offered me prescription dive goggles!

We had a quick nap before the cruise.  Our first stop on the cruise was at Monkey Beach, which, unsurprisingly, is a beach where you can see monkeys.  They are not as relaxed or as arrogant as the monkeys we found at the Enchanted Monkey Forrest in Bali, but they certainly liked, and was used to, being fed.  As is the thing with monkeys, the excitement wore off quickly.

Our next stop was on Phi Phi Leh itself, and we paused for a bit of kayaking and snorkeling.  The quality of the corel and the variety of the fish I saw bodes well for our diving excursion tomorrow - can’t wait.

Next we headed towards the cave-like entrance to The Beach where we encountered numerous other boats aiming to do the same thing.  It wasn’t too crowded though.  After we scampered ashore and through the cave we walked along a forest path for some 5 minutes before we reached the site of the film - it is as beautiful as is depicted in the film and is still relatively unspoiled.

And what else would you do if you find yourself on an idyllic, major-motion-picture-perfect beach? You play a bit of Ultimate frisbee of course!  Well, we tossed it around at least - no games though

Just before sunset we got back on the boat, which had in the meantime pulled into the main bay.  As the sun set we had a simple fried rice dinner and started heading back as the last rays of the days dissolved in the increasingly darkening water.

Back on Phi Phi we were reminded that this weekend is going to be a dry one on Phi Phi.  A member of Thailand’s Royal Family passed away on this day last year (I think) and there will be 3 days of observing the anniversary - this means all the bars on Phi Phi will be closed! Bummer.

Good news is restaurants are still open and they too serve alcohol.  There are also numerous convenience stores dotted across the island, which sells beer at THB50 for a big bottle of Chang.  Cans start at around THB50 and stuff like Smirnoff Ice and Bacardi Breezers are around THB80 - they do vary. Strangely enough, the only 711 on the island won’t be selling alcohol until Monday.

We explored the island a little this evening walking around the narrow street devoid of street-lights, but lit up by the many stores fringing the paths.  As all the bars were closed, many restaurants were full with people drinking, but there was a distinctly somber mood about.  We covered a good part of the island but found nothing party-like - except perhaps at the Hash Bar, which was packed with people watching The Beach on a big screen.

It would have been an early night had it not been for the DVD we bought and watched in our room - which like the one in Patong is equipped with a TV and DVD set.  We also got the wi-fi Internet access going, which had been off earlier on in the evening.  Phi Phi is virtually blanket covered by some or other wi-fi network - it seems every shop has a network, which is either encrypted or requires a log on of some sort.

Tomorrow we have to get up early for our diving excursion, so off to bed I go.

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