We took seats in the downstairs cabin of the ferry before it set off from Koh Phi Phi. We sat back in the air conditioned comfort of our seats and, thanks to our early start, it wasn't long before we dropped off to sleep.

A couple of hours later we pulled in to a pier crowded with similar ferries on Phuket, where we tied up to another boat. Everyone filed off and then we found the chap who would take us in his minibus for the next leg of the journey, to Phuket airport. We had booked accommodation near the airport as our flight was at 6am the following morning, and figured the best way to get there was to get to the airport then get picked up from there.

We piled into a minibus with other travellers, and then our driver took us through the built up, busy roads of Phuket which, from the road at least, didn't look all that appealing. About 45 minutes later we arrived at the airport. We had called ahead to our accommodation and, when we were dropped off only had to get downstairs to the taxi pickup area outisde the arrivals area. This was easier said than done, as the only stairs in the airport were inside, beyond security scanners with huge queues waiting to pass through them. We couldn't be bothered with that, so walked back down the vehicle ramp to the lower level, where we found the lady from our accommodation.

We piled our stuff into her car and she drove us about 5 minutes from the airport, to a pretty group of modern bungalows in a quiet garden setting. We got checked in and took our stuff to the room, where we camped out and cranked the air conditioning up. We ended up ordering some pizzas in for lunch, after seeing a brochure on the reception desk when we checked in. We ate these while watching movies and mucking about on the laptop, then Lucy had a nap while I finally caught up with our backlog of blog entries.

In the late afternoon, we decided to get out and get some fresh air, so we nipped out of the room and found we could get a little sawngthaew down to the beach for 40 baht. We hopped in and one of the guys from our accommodation drove us the short distance to the beach, past a gaudy but pretty little temple with lots of gold statues in nicely landscaped gardens. He dropped us on the road a short distance from the beach, which we could see beyond some tall pine trees and family picnic huts. We arranged to be picked up at the same place at half past 7, then walked through the trees and emerged onto a lovely long, curving beach which, although it had quite a few sun loungers arranged on it and a dozen or so tourists, seemed very quiet and peaceful.

We had arrived just as the sun was going down, so walked along the sand and took a seat outside one of the basic bamboo-built restaurants lining the sand under the trees, Mr. Kobi's. A very cheerful mustachioed Thai version of Samuel L. Jackson, evidently the Mr. Kobi alluded to in the establishment's name, approached us and psychically anticipated our order of two mojitos. We sipped these rather strong but tasty cocktails as we watched the sun go down over the end of the bay. We then ordered some food, but had to move inside the restaurant before it was served since a huge grey cloud, which had suddenly appeared overhead, burst in a torrential downpour. We ate our food at the wooden bar inside the place, amusing ourselves looking at the hilariously captioned photos of the bar's owner and customers stuck all over the walls. The food was fantastic as well. Lucy had one last bowl of tom yam with chicken while I had my favourite, papaya salad, with seafood. We also shared a plate of awesome homemade chips and I had a fresh coconut to wash it all down.

After eating, with the music cranking up and the ex-pats with their young Thai girls in tow starting to turn up, we left and walked down the road to our appointed meeting place. We arrived exactly as our driver turned up, bang on half past 7 as arranged and hopped into the blue LED-lit back of the wee van to be whisked back to our room.

We spent the rest of the evening polishing off the dregs of the bottle of gin we had picked up, duty free, on Langkawi and uploading some stuff to the blog. We watched some movies on the TV in our room as well, on a channel which seemed to be streaming the contents of a hard drive somewhere as one movie segued into another with zero breaks. Eventually we called it a night and got off to sleep, with our alarm set for 4am.

When the alarm went off a few hours later we groggily got up and packed up the last of our stuff, before humphing our bags to the reception desk and ringing the bell for one of the staff who was going to take us to the airport. We loaded our stuff into the car and he took us straight to the door of the departures area, just a few minutes' drive away.

In the airport we checked in and got through security without any problems. We had a pricey but fairly decent pastry and some tea and coffee for breakfast, before the plane started loading. On board, we squeezed into our tiny Air Asia seats and were soon on our way to Bali. At the start of the flight, we had a fantastic view over the scores of rugged islands emerging from the glittering Andaman Sea below as we climbed through the clouds, then we read, but it wasn't long before we fell asleep for most of the rest of the flight.