Wow, what can we say about Phi Phi... it is absolutely amazing!! It is pure paradise with white sandy beaches and crystal clear sea, kind of why we have now been here a week, rather than the 3 days as planned. It is a proper backpacker vibe, no sign of old men and young Thai girls anywhere - yay! Our guesthouse is right next to the beach, which looks over the bay to the island where the film The Beach was filmed. Plus our guesthouse was rather up market as it had a pool, something we had been dreaming of the whole time in Thailand.

(Grant is now taking over writing as i'm not feeling the best, bye for now, x). So the first night we headed out for bite to eat, which was like usual, top quality grub and then thought we would have a few drinks at this bar called Hippies, little did we know but they were having a half moon party that night and the place was packed. Loads of entertainment including a magician (random as hell), live music from some guy on a guitar, party games (of which Linz joined in the musical chairs) and last but by no means least a fire show. OMG the fire show was quality, these guys light these torch things and throw them around like no ones business, all in time to some music which adds to the effect (espically when they play Prodigy songs, yeah you guessed it 'Firestarter'). We were sitting right at the front and i can assure you, like all things in Thailand there are no safety precausions and we were bricking it. Linz will have you believe that i was more scared then her, but i was just doing it to make her feel better!!! A few more vodka buckets were consumed then we cut some serious shapes dancing on the beach right into the early hours of the morning.

The follwoing day after missing the breakfast which was included in the room (not like us to miss free stuff but a lie in was definiately the order of the day) we got a taxi boat and headed out to 'The Beach' island. On the way to the the second island the boat dropped us off to see 'Monkey beach', although sorry to disapoint you Stu we never managed to get a picture of a monkey scracthing his ass, but we will keep trying. Our taxi boat wouldn't take us right round to 'The Beach' so we got to the other side of the island and had to swim to the shore avoiding rocks. Although a little tricky it was good fun and after we had climbed through little caves we walked about 3 mintues and came to 'The Beach'. Wow what can we say, the place was amazing and you can totally see why they choose it for the film. We were actually quite lucky as there weren't that many people there, as some times it can be ram jammed. So we took about a billion pictures and headed back to the boat for some snorkeling. The last drop off on the trip was to this little tranquil green lagoon. You can literally hear a pin drop and we spent the next half hour just floating around.Well i say floating, Linz totally floated and i sank, damn my dense chicken legs!

The next couple of days were a write off as i got ill. Only a cold but properly wiped me out so we spent them slothing around the pool. Don't worry mum totally fine now, so i think it's safe to assume i didn't get SARS, Bird Flu or Green Parrot Disease (thanks for the suggestion Stu).

After recovering from illness, we decided to book a two day scuba course. This course although totally breaking our budget, was so worth it and now we are qualified scuba divers, how cool is that! Our instructor was this French bird called Bridget, who's two passions in life were diving and smoking. She preceeded to tell us the worst thing about diving was that she couldn't smoke, well blow me down i thought it was the fact you might drown!!! The first day, after doing our homework the night before, we got geared up and off we went. Our first dive was only in shallow water just off the beach but was scary enough. Breathing underwater is a freaky but amazing experinece and I would reccommend it to anyone. Here we had to do all the scuba skills. This includes taking your mask off, taking your regulator out (mouth piece), taking whole gear off, learning buyonacy control and loads of others. We both managed to get a hold of these pretty well although Linz did struggle with the buyoncy to start off with. At one point we were swimming around and lost her, only to find that she was right above us and couldn't get back down deeper again. That day we saw a few fish but nothing compared to what we were going to see the following day.

So with an early start (7:30, like being at work, well exluding all the crap bits) we headed out to the second island and did two dives one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Wow is all i can say! The area around Koh Phi Phi is considered to be one of the best dive areas in the world and although this was our first dive we can totally appreciate why. The place was full of thousands of fish of all the colours you can imagine, plus coral reefs made out of blues, greens, pinks, purlples etc. All Linz keeps saying is that is so like Finding Nemo, with all the fish living out their lives in their little fish city! Things we saw of note were leopard sharks (yes sharks!!!), big moray eels, scorpion fish, lion fish and even a few nemo fish.

So after a week here we are finally draging ourselevs away to go to Ao Nang to see Linz's mate's Denise & Elliot. We loved Kho Phi Phi and is defo one of our favorite places, a must for all you wannbe backpackers!

Grant