We were up early this morning as we were getting picked up from the hotel at 8.15am. Our swangthaew came, we were first in so had to do a couple more stops at hotels to pick others up then got taken to the ferry pier. We were the first to get on, James spotted two seats which had broken off seats in front of them which meant we could put our legs up which was more comfort than we were expecting on this ferry crossing. The ferry hadn't been going long before it stopped near Railey beach and smaller boats brought people from there onto the ferry. We did however have a toddler screaming for a good half an hour of the journey which wasn't great. Once we got off someone from the hotel had come to meet us and another couple we walked with him for about five minutes and we came to a cart which he put all of our big bags in. We then walked for about another ten minutes to the hotel, we checked in and went to our room. We thought we'd make the most of this afternoon and go to the beach so we got our things together and asked the hotel if they had a map. We had heard about long beach which shouldn't be too much of a walk and snorkeling is supposed to be good there so that's where we headed. Phi Phi town was full of small shops, dive shops and restaurants, it felt very backpackery. We managed to go the wrong way at pretty much the first turn we got to an enormous beach with loads of boats, the water was extremely shallow. When we managed to get back on the right track we saw the dive shop I had read about so we went in to talk about fun dives. They sound really cool, we thought we would treat ourselves to this but then we just had to decided whether to do it tomorrow or the day after. We went to get something to eat and decide, we thought best to do it tomorrow and then we have the day after to chill, the dive is 7.30am until 1.00pm so maybe we'd have time in the afternoon too. James went back to reserve our places and we said we'd pop back later to get fitted with our kit. So we set off again for long beach, we walked past a few small beaches and then through some jungly area. The walk took us a lot longer than we thought it would and the paths/tracks weren't the best! But we got there, only it was fairly late now in the afternoon, today's been cloudy and windy so we thought we'd give snorkeling a skip so we had a nice couple of hours reading and having a dip on the beach. Because we'd walked so far getting here we decided to get a long tail boat on the way back. It was fairly wavy but it was ok. We got off the boat onto the pier which was a lot drier than previous long tail experiences. There were loads of fish here at the pier. We headed straight for the dive shop to meet our dive master for tomorrow. We tried on our equipment and made sure we were all sorted then went back to our hotel, we managed to find it pretty easily, I thought it would be harder! We had showers then went out later on to get more money to pay for diving tomorrow and to get something to eat. We've noticed while walking around that a lot of people get about on the island using bicycles but for some strange reason they tend to be small pink bikes with baskets, even the men have these, not sure what that's about?! We got back to the hotel for an early night as we've got an early start with diving in the morning.