Yoga ~ Travel ~ Joy: Playing with fire

Today was mostly an in-transit day. We returned our mopeds to the travel agency, then took a taxi to the ferry dock about 45 minutes away from the hotel. Our ferry to Koh Phi Phi was about 2 hours, then landing in the tourist-crowded town of Tonsai. While riding the ferry we were informed that we would have to take another ferry from Tonsai Pier to Laemtong Beach, where we are staying on the north side of the island. That ferry wouldn’t leave for another two hours, so we stopped for lunch at the Pirate’s House in Tonsai, the first place we came to that looked decent. The town was so crowded with tourists that we could barely walk, and we didn’t want to fight our way through it with all our luggage. I had a delicious watermelon smoothie, perfectly refreshing in the sweltering heat.

Long tail boats in Tonsai.

When we finally boarded the ferry a couple hours later, after waiting out a torrential downpour as the ferry arrived, watching all the passengers disembark and get soaked. Luckily when we boarded the rainstorm had all blown over. After about an hour the ferry stopped in front of the Holiday Inn Resort, and a long tail boat pulled up to take us the last few meters to the beach; there is no dock on Laemtong Beach.

After checking in, we relaxed in the room for a bit, scheduled our excursion for tomorrow, then decided to go catch the sunset on the other side of the island at the Sunset Bar; on this peninsula the island is slender enough to walk to the other side easily; the resort had bungalows and rooms all the way up and over the hill, and the Sunset Bar was set on the top of a cliff looking straight west. As we were climbing the stairs, we noticed a lot of people coming down, and when we got to the top we saw that we had missed the sunset. :) We had a drink anyway, and pretty quickly we were swarmed by mosquitoes, so badly that we went down to the hotel store and bought bug spray for $6 for a little 3oz bottle. Grrr, they know there is nowhere else to buy it, and we tourists will be desperate for it!

Laemtong Beach at night.

After missing sunset, we walked down the beach to the Phi Phi Natural Resort for dinner, as we knew they would be having a fire dancing show later. We had an average dinner (resort food so far on the trip has been mediocre), but the fire show was fun; basically fire dancing is baton twirling, except the batons are on fire. They twirled them by themselves, tossed them to one another, did various partner acrobatics with them, etc. After the show they let us take pictures with the fire dancers, who obviously found this part tedious. :)