Koh Phi Phi - like 'pee-pee'

I think there must be five times as many foreigners as locals in Koh Phi Phi. Maybe more, we arrived there shortly before full moon so most of the tourists were in Koh Pha-ngan on the east coast at Full Moon Parties, it still seemed pretty busy to me! The town here is situated on a narrow band of land in the middle of the island between two beaches. The buildings are really close together and if it wasn’t for the sunshine and the bikinis I may have got the labrynth of shops confused with the alleyway networks of Varanasi.

Koh Phi Phi is just a tiny island and it was hit by the Tsunami in December 2004. Virtually all the buildings and infrastructure on the island were wiped out by the waves. I met a lady on our snorkeling trip who was there when it hit. She said she clung onto a palm tree and somehow she survived. She left the island for a few years to work and save enough to build up a boat ticket business again.

I’m amazed that people would stay, or even come back after such a disaster. This was my first trip to Koh Phi Phi and it seems the general consensus is that things have changed, for better or worse I’m not sure. What I can say is that this is a serious tourist town, and they have their business down pat. Prices on this island are virtually fixed because it is so small, and the touts were out in force. We didn’t know when we arrived that there are no roads on the island, no cars and very few motor bikes. We hired a ‘taxi’ to get us to our hostel. This turned out to be a wheel barrow that our ‘driver’ threw our bags into and we walked behind! There are loads of white people working here in the tourism industry - selling boat tickets, dancing on tables, working in bars, dive shops, everywhere really. Maybe I will never have to come home after all?

The snorkeling and sight-seeing trip around Koh Phi Phi Don and Koh Phi Phi Leh was my highlight. Phi Phi Leh is the smaller of the two islands and it is protected as a national park. It’s also where they filmed the movie The Beach (fabulous book by the way). The trip was great and I swam with some amazing fish, again, fish I haven’t seen before. I also discovered that if you listen you can hear the fish underwater. I have never noticed that before, and once I did I couldn’t believe I had missed it. I was watching these huge parrot fish (probably about 20cm long) chomping away at the coral and I could hear them using their hard little mouths to get whatever it was that they were eating. It was awesome. Then I started hearing the chomping sounds before I could see the fish… I love it under there. We watched the sun go down surrounded by the legendary limestone cliffs that come jutting out of the water around the island.

We spent the evening watching muscled Thai boys fire twirling on the beach, eating and drinking and talking to nice people we met on the trip. By the time we left our Rastafarian waiter was far more pissed than we were, sitting with his friends at the next table asking us occasionally if we were ‘don’t worry be happy?’ This is one funny town.