Koh Phi Phi is a small island in the Andaman Sea, between Krabi and Phuket. Most people come here as a day trip from one of those places, or maybe stay one night. We stayed four nights, because that’s been our rule of thumb for most of this trip. Turns out that was a solid call, mostly because I caught a lovely stomach bug just before leaving Koh Lanta and was very much not in the mood to do anything ambitious. The morning we left Koh Lanta we also realized that Mylene’s credit card had been hacked/stolen. Damnit! The Scotiabank agent was also completely unhelpful with anything, so she’ll have to call back to actually get the charges reversed.
We spent most of our time at the resort pool. The resort was about a ten-minute walk from the main part of town, which was perfect, because the main area is pretty busy. There are no real roads, no cars, and barely any scooters. Walking is basically the only way to get around, which is great until you remember how hot it is. Usually I’m OK with the heat as long as I have somewhere to go back to to cool down. Unfortunately the A/C in our room was complete shit.
There’s not a whole lot to do on Phi Phi unless you’re into boat tours, which we eventually did on our third day. We went with a private tour because, for four people, it was barely more expensive than a regular group tour. We also decided to do it at the ass-crack of dawn to catch the sunrise and hopefully avoid the crowds at the very famous Maya Bay, where The Beach with Leonardo DiCaprio was filmed.
So we got up at 5:30 am to meet our boat driver at 6:00. Then we left the port and headed toward Maya Bay at what can only be described as the slowest possible speed. I swear I could have swum faster with two broken arms. By the time we finally arrived, there were already about a hundred people on the beach. D’oh!! No idea where they all came from, because we didn’t see that many boats leaving when we did.
Maya Bay is a national park and was closed for years to recover from overtourism. It’s open again now, but with strict rules to keep it from getting wrecked all over again. The rules are clearly posted on a massive sign when you enter. No swimming, no drones, no climbing rocks. Pretty straightforward. But, you know, people.
They have a guy patrolling the beach with a megaphone calling out anyone breaking the rules, and he does not care about being polite. At all. Honestly, it was kind of hilarious. A few greatest hits:
“Hey, monkey boy! Get off that rock!”
“Hey, fat man! Get out of the water!”
“DO. YOU. SPEAK. ENGLISH?!”
He also threatened someone with a 10,000 baht fine for flying a drone if they didn’t immediately delete the footage. I’m guessing that got the message across.
The rest of the tour took us to a few other nice-looking spots, and we went snorkeling a couple of times. The snorkeling itself was pretty average, and we kept getting stung by jellyfish, which the kids were not fans of. They’re tiny and almost completely transparent, so avoiding them is basically impossible. I even tried to take photos of them, but they’re so invisible that you can’t see anything in the pictures. We also saw some baby sharks (doo doo do doo) from the beach and from the boat but unfortunately didn't see any while snorkeling. Not even while snorkeling at Shark Point.
And that’s pretty much it for Phi Phi. That boat tour was the only real activity we did while we were there. I’ll leave you with some random photos before we move on to the next stop.
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