Koh Phi Phi in a sentence: Pronounced Pee Pee and never fails to make me smile each time we say it.

After our amazing liveaboard trip we got a free transfer to Phuket town. We drove past all these nice hotels that other people from our trip were getting dropped off at, with ours being the last of the trip. We pulled down some dark and dirty road hoping that it was a side street to get to where we were staying but unfortunately this was indeed where we are staying! The joys of travelling on a shoestring budget (especially after all the money we've spent scuba diving). Not much to do here although I did help some poor lady who had toppled off of her very over loaded scooter - helping her up and loading all the fruit back on.

We got our ferry from Phuket Town to the infamous Koh Phi Phi. Such a beautiful little island but completely exploited for tourism. Nevertheless the island was stunning and very very very very hot! Getting a bit sick of moving around all the time and in need of some R&R we decided that we would stay here for a while before going to Krabi to catch our flight to Malaysia.

Most of our time was spent on the beaches during the day, occasionally venturing out of the shade into the furnace fuelled by the intensely hot sunshine. The sea here is very shallow, making for about a 75m trek to cool off when the tide was out. One day we took a walk to Long Beach, south of island which was a lovely small beach with crystal clear water - unfortunately when we settled down to do some sunbathing we notice swarms of Mosquitos flying around us who were quite aggressive and decided to walk back to the other beach and sun bathe there. The evenings were spent eating local cuisine, or sometimes treating ourselves to a Pizza or a Burger and then having a few drinks at one of the many bars - our two favourites were Banana Bar, a rooftop bar overlook Phi Phi playing a variety of music and also playing a film every night at 7pm! And Chillout Bar - situated on the beach, lounging on cushions looking out to sea and of corse drinking a cocktail from a famous fresh coconut.

While we were here we decided that we still weren't quite done scuba diving yet and signed ourselves up for a couple of fun dives. We had a great dive master called Tristan whom has come over from New Zealand, finding this out the hard way when he got upset after I called him Australian. We had a group of 4 divers with us and were unfortunately stuck with a girl whom only had her open water certification. This was ok in that the dive sites aren't that deep but she literally had no control over her boyauncy, didn't know how to clear her mask of water when submerged and gassed through her air in about 35 minutes. Luckily Tristan was a bit of a lad, surfaced and got the boat to pick her up and took us back down for another half an hour so we could get the most out of our tanks.

The water clarity was not as good as the liveaboard we had just come off of (although at 15m or so it's really not bad) and saw mostly fish and coral we had already seen. On the second dive I was starting to feel a little disappointed that we had spent our money on this, until in the distance we saw a large turtle grazing on the coral! Amazing! Finally I get to cross off swimming with a turtle off of my bucket list (although technically we just watched him having lunch). We spent a little while watching this guy before moving on, after about five minutes finding another turtle. This had turned into such a wicked dive and had no regrets in forking out the money to do some more diving.

Between dives we went to the infamous Maya Bay (the island where The Beach was filmed. In my mind as we were turning the corner into the bay I had the song from the film playing, for it to be instantly pulled from my imaginary turn table as we saw the fleet of tourism boats saturating the bay, with the view of more bodies than sand on the beach. What an immense let down! Our boat stopped quite far from the beach, and while we could have swam over we decided that diving and doing flips off of the boat and snorkelling would be more entertaining.

While in Phi Phi you cannot miss out on making the trip up to the view point in one of the mountains. After many, many, many, many......many steps up to the view point and about 2kg lighter from all the fluids we had lost from our bodies and are now soaked into our clothes, we were rewarded with an amazing view over the island, gazing at the strip that that splits the sea apart from each other. We had timed our trek perfectly, getting there when it wasn't that busy giving us time to take some nice pictures, watch a wild monkey messing around and get some good seats to watch the sunset behind the mountain. Nice start to the evening, now we just had to walk all the way back down those steps with no light!

Phi Phi was nice, although Emily and I are split over which Island is best, with myself very much in favour of Koh Tao, while Emily seems to have fallen for Phi Phi. Either way there are no regrets in visiting both of the beautiful locations. Very sad to be thinking that soon we will be leaving Thailand.

C & E x