Saturday, May 10, 2008

Back in Thailand

It's weird coming back to Thailand - I actually recognize places now! I am really just passing through Thailand on the way to Laos, but, coming from the South, I took a couple of days out to go diving. Similan island is supposed to be the best dive spot around, but unfortunately their season ends at the end of April, so I instead re-routed to Krabi to go diving at Phi Phi.


The islands and the Andaman Sea coast near Krabi



An amusing traffic light in Krabi


Staying the night at Phi Phi island was weird - I had expected it to be an almost deserted place with just a few bungalows on the beach... Instead, it's a bustling resort town, which seems to have recovered quite well after being hit hard by the tsunami a few years ago. There are, however, absolutely no cars on the island, which was cool to see. The problem continued to be the weather - by the time we arrived on the island at around 6PM, it was pouring rain.


ominous! But the weather did hold up while we were diving... Turning to pouring rain right on schedule at 1:30 - we were done about 1:15


So, early the next morning, I figured the best way to avoid the rain was to get under water. This is where it felt surreal as we were right back to the very same spot where I had gone snorkeling from Phuket just a couple of months ago... which incidentally got this whole diving thing started. The diving wasn't quite as specacular as Fiji or Borneo, but we did see a leopard shark (it really is spotted like a leopard) - in fact we saw it in a distance once, then a few minutes later, it came back to give us a better look. Later also saw a big fat Black tip reef shark...

After, it was back on the boat for Krabi, and an overnight bus to Bangkok, where, once again, I actually knew where I was going! The bus trip was only memorable for the two terrible movies we saw: D-Wars (the worst movie I have ever seen) and Urban Justice, a Steven Seagal/Eddie Griffin vehicle, which was simply bad... Seagal just doesn't pull the badass off nearly as well now that he's old and chubby!

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