Journey to Phi Phi Island!

So last Night my family and I hit the town of Kata Beach in Phuket. We stayed out way past our bedtimes till 10 oclock! Bought some small souvineers and im getting a tailored suit! We went to this massage parlor and it was very very painful, in a good way though(well at least afterwards it felt nice. During the massage...not so much). Much harder to bargain in thailand than in Indonesia. Perhaps this is attributed to the fact that i know how to speak indonesian but cant speak a lick of thai...whatever. We also got this thing that was kind of like a crepe. Inside was banana and cheese which turns out to taste really good (seriously try it. the two pair very well together). We then went home and immediately fell asleep because we had to wake up at 5:30 am (again!) to get ready for our adventures to pee pee island. I mean Phi Phi island.

Our breakfast was at the hotel. I swear every tropical ish hotel that is big enough has the same type of breakfast deal: an egg station where you can get whatever you want that was eggs, some kind of weird sausage looking stuffs that you really should learn to avoid by the 15th time but still havent, fried rice, fried noodles, some kind of chicken pooridge that was clearly been left cooking for far too long, "bacon", either french toast or waffles i have never seen pancakes, salad (why salad is served for breakfast is beyond me. I still partake however), lots of fruit (mostly pineapple, papaya, dragon fruit, and watermelon and cantelope), sweet pastry items, and some other traditional food. I am not complaining, im just saying its all the same wherever you go.

We then took a rather long bus ride to Phuket town where we disembarked on the pee pee cruiser, which was this luxurious ocean liner with many many ammenities....haha no. it was a rather nice boat with three stories. Thats about it. Oh and it had TVs with which they could play this commercial for some product that keeps your ipod dry when you go to the beach (because nothing says your sexy like a lanyard around your neck with your ipod when you are at the beach ) and Mr Bean. I dont know which program was more insufferable. So that took a good 2 hours and we got to see the Beautiful Phi Phi Islands. Then we finally got to go Snorkeling around 11 am (that is 4 hours of traveling beforehand). Let me just start that i am terrified of fish. No idea why, i am just scared that they will amass and as a single unit, engulf me and leave nothing. Slightly irrational but i still cling to that belief. So when i went out today, with the 50 or so people, i was hesitant at first. It did not help that the damned things looked a little like piranhas. But i did it anyway and jumped in and swam around for about an hour. I just always made sure i was not the furthest person in one direction and kept my arms and legs as close to myself as possible. There were some schools of fish that swam into me but none, thankfully, brutally murdered me.

Then we took this rather dingy looking boat across the bay and into a small island, one of the pee pee's. We had a buffet lunch there (some thai steamed vegetables, sweet and sour fish, "fried" chicken, rice, and spaghetti. which one doesnt fit) Oh yeah, i eat meat now. just chicken though. too scared to go for anything else. Lunch was good though and then i layed down on the nice, searing beach. I dont know how common it is in the states, but usually when i go onto the beach and lie down, i am relaxed and comfortable. Its a very different reality here. I lie down for two minutes and it is really hot and i am sweating buckets. i turnover just to see sweat dripping off me and onto my towel. I look at the person next to me and see that they are covered in sweat too. It looks like they are cooking in the sun since they have this very discomforted look on their face. But i figure that it's the norm and i stay put, literally cooking on the sand. My left arm started tingling and i couldnt see anymore since sweat was in my eyes so i figure its a good idea to jump in the ocean out of fear of overheating. So i jump in and see some people next to me. I make a remark about how i think i see flying fish and they respond in this unintelligible babble of a language. I give them a confused look, they give me a confused look, and i ask them where they are from. No so sure what they said, but i heard "australia" in the mix and all of a sudden i was relieved. They werent speaking English to me, they were speaking Australian. So i pretended to understand and told them i was from California after they gave me a series of gestures and grunts that i took to be "where are you from". Then we all got on the big boat and came back to phuket. All in all, i would say it was a rather nice trip, but there was far too much traveling and the snorkeling wasnt super great (i went to bali last last year and saw much better things and had to do no traveling whatsoever (i mean aside from the initial traveling to bali(which i just wont count because that's silly))). Hopefully I'll survive another night! And look at this pictures of James Bond Island. It's neat! 5 points if you know what movie it's from!

-Aaron "Applefish(thats a real thing right?)" Brown