Here it is! Paradise by the onboard lights of the overnight train! South Thailand where beauty is affordable and easy. Beautiful islands with corals ringing them and white sand gracing their surfaces. Well, after a pretty grim train journey with no beds and a missed connection with the boat, all this was ours. We started on Tao and headed to Phi Phi after a couple of days.
Both islands are really very pretty but PP is jaw-dropping. The limestone karsts all around Krabi are awe-inspiring and reminiscent of Vietnam's Halong bay but with clearer water. Eye-wateringly bright beaches sparkle and dance in the light of the tropical sun and palms tower over all signs of human impact. All this above the sea and below the clearest water one can imagine, sloping ever-so gently off into the deeper ocean. It undulates so slowly to shore that one can walk 20m past the surf and still be no more than waist deep. Of course, Maya (the beach from The Beach) was the real cream of the crop but all were stunning - especially when viewed from the hills above. The longtail boats also fit right into the postcard image, stretched out languidly waiting for business in the shallows. Tao was full of dogs (more dogs than people!) and PP had lots of cats.
Diving was a bit of a mixed bag. From what we'd read on the net, we had high hopes of Tao and expected little from PP, yet it was quite the opposite. In theory, the East should have high season, with low season in the West because of the monsoon, but the visability in Tao was just 5-8m. (That's about what we had in Pattaya, which is regarded as pretty bad for Thailand.) Tao had big schools of fish at the pinnacles but otherwise it was fairly lifeless, though the Japanese Gardens of coral were pretty good. Off PP, our first dip in the water yielded lionfish, scorpionfish, morays, a sea snake and too many nemos to count. By the end of that day we'd added 4 turtles and ticked off sharks and stingrays the following day. The difference was massive. Ko Tao was OK but not much more - even the much-vaunted Chumphon Pinnacle was really only good for depth practice - 20m. There were a lot of factors that made us prefer Ko Phi Phi: it was teeming with life, had better visability and we had Divemasters who really led us to the best sites. Highlights included the sea snake, a Harlequin Sweetlips, two turtles fighting, a whole family of lionfish just hanging around on fan coral, a remora sucking on to us (Emma didn't like it so much), the sharks and a Kuhl's stingray. We really enjoyed both Andy and Lee's guidance at Visa Diving on Ko Phi Phi and the whole setup was great. Obviously we're inexperienced divers and we only dived for two days in each place, but Ko Tao was a bit of a disappointment - perhaps it would have been better with a better divemaster, or on a different day!
Outside the water, life in Ko Tao is comprised mostly of divefolk with a few others kicking about. Predominently, though it seems to be people diving, qualifying to dive, taking additional dive training or resting from diving. (Some call it the dive factory of Thailand.) Ko Phi Phi by contrast was full of chavs, ockers and whatever an Irish chav is called. Of the two, PP is far more developed and has far more going on. Tao manages to achieve being built up but quite empty - neither one thing nor the other. The bungalows we stayed in were pretty special though - the owner is a strict Buddhist and has made up lots of posters extolling the virtus of veggie living and how the monarchs of seemingly every EU country will live for a long time due to their vegetarianism. He also sells homemade condoms. It was hard to find good food on Ko Tao as everywhere was same same western or bastardised Thai, probably due to there not really being much of a Thai population. Having said that, the skewered BBQ seafood was great. Ko Phi Phi was much bigger and carried a lot of attendant problems - the rubbish on some parts of the beaches was a real eyesore and we were treated to the unedifyingly spectacle of gibbons being dragged around to pose with twats. On the other hand, the food was much better as we could access decent Thai places. In one of the little ramshackle places we had to evict a cat from the table who later came and sat on Emma while we waited wistfully for food.
And there it was - Thailand. The Kate Moss of the trip. Very very pretty, good for a party but ultimately vacuous. With our visas expiring we ran hungover and barefoot through the town and onto a boat-bus trip to Penang, Malaysia.
