It's a three-leg journey from Koh Tao to Koh Phi Phi, the first of which is an overnight sleeper ferry that resembles steerage class on the Santa Maria. About 100 of us are packed shoulder-to-shoulder on flimsy mattresses, a couple fans fluttering to keep the temperature below 100 degrees. We take off at 8pm.
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| Steerage? |
I feel slightly ill and fall asleep immediately. We arrive in Surat Thani at 5am and are shuffled between six different tuk-tuks, that go in circles, before the sun rises and we finally arrive at our minivan. I often think the Thais are master psychologists performing detailed experiments on the foreigners ("farang") to see how far the boundaries can be pushed before certain Westerners break down and develop clinically-diagnosed insanity.
Four hours with twelve packed into the van and we're on a second ferry with new Brazilian friends in tow, en route to the unfortunately named Koh Phi Phi island.
The steep limestone cliffs of Koh Phi Phi Don come into sight around 12:30pm, encased in moss and surrounded by crystal blue and green waters. Before we dock, the island looks completely remote and it feels like we've found Atlantis. We have a quick breakfast (yogurt, fruit, granola; mango sticky rice) in the chaotic tourist neighborhood of Ton Sai before chartering a longboat to Long Beach (Haad Yao), a small private beach with ivory white sand, twenty minutes from downtown.
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| Sticky rice with mango |
We're sharing our Phi Phi Paradise Pearl bungalow three ways (800B = $24 total for 3 people plus several geckos), which is about thirty feet from the beach. As we left the main tourist hub, our beach is mostly deserted, occupied mainly by newlyweds. We feel like those celebrities who rent out their own private tropical islands.
Dinner is a giant platter of fresh, plump New Zealand mussels covered in garlic (180B = $5.86). They taste and look like they were caught this morning in the water that makes up our meal's view. I share them with one of the Paradise Pearl's resident kittens, this one black and white with an impressive background in parkour. He shares my affinity for mussels and makes it his life's mission to get ahold of one of the precious misshapen brown and green mollusks. I nickname my new dalmatianed feline friend and constantly remind him, "no briny fresh Gulf of Thailand shellfish for you, Mussel".
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