Activity level: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️
Modes of transportation: 🚗👟⛴️🛥️
The night before, it monsooned. Normally, rain is soothing, but in this case, it was actually kind of too loud. We were pretty tired, so we fell asleep anyway—that is, until we were awoken by a couple fighting next door at 4:30 in the morning (never figured out what about). Luckily, we brought earplugs, so we popped those in and fell back asleep.
Our tour left at 8:00, so we had to be packed up and ready to leave at 7:30. We weren’t. But we did check out of our hotel, drop our bags, and make it to our pickup point by 7:58. The tour didn’t leave until 8:20 anyway, and we weren’t even close to the last people to arrive.
Our first stop on the tour was Maya Bay, a national park and beach made famous by the Leonardo DiCaprio cult classic, “The Beach.” We happened to hit a nice lull in the crowds, so we saw the beach relatively empty (by the time we left, it was packed).
The beach sits in a calm cove with striking, jagged cliffs all around. It’s gorgeous and picturesque. We also enjoyed watching all the people obviously posing for Instagram (us included). We had about an hour there to sit and enjoy the sights before our boat left, so we sat for a little and just took it in.
Next, we went to Poh Le, a snorkeling and scuba spot nearby with fairly shallow reefs. We had a little time to snorkel, and saw beautiful reefs that were surprisingly vibrant (considering the instructions were hard to understand, and people kept stepping on the reefs).
There were hoards of sea urchins, so they warned us not to stand up, but a couple people on our tour definitely got stung. We even saw an albino one (or maybe it was dead. Not sure. It was definitely white though). By the end, our foreheads were hurting a little because the snorkel gear didn’t quite fit right, but we had seen most of what was there anyway.
After that, we went to a deep cove where we could swim. The water was deep deep blue, and we got to do some tricks off the front of the boat. We were having a good time swimming, when Sarah gave out a little yelp. She thought Eric was messing with her, but she looked over and he was 8 feet away. Seemingly, she got bit by something (there was no mark so it couldn’t have been too big) so we all pretty much got out of the water (it was time to go anyway).
We puttered around past some caves before heading to “monkey beach.” We thought it would be sort of lame, but honestly, it was insane. There were about a dozen monkeys that came right up to people. We probably shouldn’t have been surprised, since people feed them all kinds of fruit—but they seemed pretty chill. They mostly just came to grab food, except for with this one guy, who they constantly attacked (he didn’t even do anything). So that was funny.
We both decided not to get too close or feed them since we didn’t want to get bit and get weird monkey diseases, but we had a great time watching them run around. One of the babies even climbed on a woman to grab her jewelry (it didn’t succeed at getting it).
Eventually, it was time to leave and end the morning portion of the trip. We headed back to Phi Phi, and the boat grabbed us lunch. Then, we dropped off the half-dayers and left for the short ride to bamboo island.
Bamboo island was pretty chill. We ate chicken fried rice lunch before heading out to swim. The island had a pretty large, clear, shallow swimming area on the beach, so we swam around and chilled out there. We messed up a little because we left our hats and sunscreen on the boat thinking we could get them after lunch, but the boat docked way off shore. So we ended up a little sunburnt. Womp womp.
We headed back to Phi Phi, and, once back, we bought a ticket for the next ferry out. We had about an hour, so we grabbed second lunch at a Thai/Italian restaurant (with A/C). We got some Tom Kha (chicken soup again), green curry with beef, and a cold coconut to refresh after a long day in the heat. We ate pretty quickly before grabbing our bags and heading to the ferry.
Once on the ferry, Sarah napped and Eric played some chess for the two hour ride. Sarah started to feel bad, so they booked an airport hotel and got a shared cab to the airport.
Unfortunately, the shared passenger turned out to be pretty smelly, and it exacerbated Sarah’s headache. By the time we made it to the airport hotel, things had taken a turn for the worse. She immediately laid in bed and started to feel even more nauseated. Eric set out for the only nearby food, 7/11, and grabbed some ramen, prepackaged fruit for dinner, and protein shakes along with some ginger drink, Vicks vapo rub, and water to hopefully help with Sarah’s nausea.
Nothing really helped. And as soon as Eric left, she got violently ill. We tried making sure she was hydrated, but that didn’t stay down long. Eric ate his dinner, and they both went to sleep to try to see if they could make their international flight in the morning.
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