Last week I flew from Chiang Mai’s International Airport (a tiny regional airport, even though it serves the fifth largest city in Thailand, a metropolitan area population greater than 1 million) to Phuket in Southern Thailand. By rail this trip would take roughly 24 hours, but by flight is a quick 2 hours. I stayed in Phuket Town on Thailand’s largest island and one of its largest tourist destinations (Patong Beach being a large draw but not my style). After a night in Phuket town I caught a ferry to Ko Phi Phi Don, a tiny island in the Andaman Sea.

Phi Phi Don is the only inhabited Phi Phi island, and it is really quite small–no more than two miles in either direction. The island was nearly completely destroyed by the 2004 Tsunami, and has been largely rebuilt in the 4+ years since, although there is still much evidence in incomplete building structures and a lack of palm trees in Ton Sai. I’ve seen a lot of before and after pictures and to actually see first hand the actual magnitude by being on the ground and seeing the landmarks and village is pretty amazing. While I can get a grasp of the physical damage, I can’t really get a grasp on the horror of December 2004 where about 600 people lost their lives here.

There are no motor vehicles or roads wide enough to accommodate them, and bicycles on the footpaths have become the menace that tuk tuks and scooters often are in the bigger cities. To get around the island one either walks or hires a long-tail taxi boat: a crude wooden boat with a car engine bolted to the back with a 10 foot long prop shaft welded to the flywheel. If you’re in a market for a long-tail boat I recommend a turbocharged model for two reasons: 1) they are much, much quieter (mufflers seem to be either impossible to obtain or perhaps a sign of weakness among taxi pilots), and 2) they get you to your destination quicker (boost FTW I guess).

The water taxi system fulfills the vacuum left by a lack of tuk-tuk drivers, and so the pilots are pushy and not altogether trustworthy. Prices amongst the pilots are fixed (nominally higher than they would probably be if competition were in effect): 100 baht to long beach, 200 to the other side of the island, 400 to the extreme other side of the island.

Despite the lack of ground transportation infrastructure, the place is pretty busy. There are thousands of tourists on the island, even though the worldwide economy has hit the tourism industry here pretty hard.

My plan was to do a bunch of ‘adventuring’ up in Northern Thailand and then spend the last week or so decompressing and relaxing on the beaches of Southern Thailand. When I got to Phi Phi I ended up staying at the Baia Baia bungalows on the northern Ao Lo Dalem beach. The beach is really quite nice, and packed with bars, restaurants and bungalows.

What I didn’t realize when I checked into my bungalow during the day is that every bar on the beach has battles each other in a war of who has the biggest amplifiers and speakers. There are probably three big beach bars towards the eastern side of Lo Dalem, each with substantial investments in soundsystems, which they then attempt to justify by utilizing non-stop from about 10 pm until 4:30 in the morning. After attempting to get some sleep on the first night on the island, I figured if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em and marched off the 100 yards or so to the parties. What I was shocked to see is that nobody was even at the bars! I think a lot of the visitors felt the same as me, which is a lot of us came to relax and chill out. The transformation from nice relaxing chill-out beach to complete concophony of violet sound was like night and day. The three bars didn’t care that their 120db dance music formats were ineffective, they just kept soldiering on until sunrise. They do this even during the week–although I admit that occasionally a bunch of people do turn out and have a good time.

If they are throwing raging parties with hundreds of people, obviously these beach parties are fiduciary backbone of the island and should continue. But the fact is that most of these bars are totally abandoned and are just spewing out noise pollution all night. I just don’t get it, and I suspect that a lot of the nearby resorts don’t appreciate this apparently recent phenomenon, which surely is a constant complaint.

The next day I decided to head off to a more remote part of the island where things were a bit slower and more relaxed: “Long Beach”. The only problem was that I got exactly what I was looking for: peace and quiet. After spending an evening and a day just lounging around, I was 100% bored. Be careful what you wish for!

It was nice though to bump into some Portuguese medical researchers I had met in Bangkok. It was a reoccurring pattern because when I was in Chaing Mai I bumped into some Washington girls I had met at the bagel place at Seatac airport–Thailand is big and small at the same time.

After a visit to Long Beach headed back to the main Ton Sai village and found a lovely, modern and affordable guest house conveniently located in in the very quiet center of the town.

When I got back to Ton Sai I was trying to figure out what I was going to do with another 6 or 7 days on the island. I had planned on doing a deep sea fishing trip, but beyond that I had no idea how I would use my time. There are a ton of dive shops here, and I ended up talking to an Australian guy at Island Divers, and I began to think maybe I should try to learn how to scuba dive. The next day I came back and booked the course, realizing that the 3 day course would fill my days well and that it could be a heck of a lot of fun.

They gave me my PADI textbook and told me to come back at 8 in the morning with the answers to all the knowledge review sections. I spent the whole afternoon and evening studying, but only got 3 of the 5 chapters finished, which as it turns out was sufficient to get started in the course.

We watched some videos, went over the various equipment and got suited up for our first series of underwater exercises. As we were prepping our gear, the skies darkened, the winds picked up and a storm rolled past the island. The waves increased in intensity quite a bit, but seemed reasonable enough (certainly calmer than even the nicest day in the Puget Sound). Due to the difficult conditions we weren’t able to get through all of the exercises that we’d have normally done, but seemed like we learned a lot: descents, equalizing, clearing masks, recovering masks, recovering regulators, alternate air sources, buddy breathing, equipment removal, ascents, etc.

During one of the exercises I kept getting poked by something (coral I thought), but when I moved away from it I still kept getting poked. Jim our instructor and Sam, a divemaster and instructor in training took a look and told me that I was getting bit by these very aggressive and territorial little fish called Sargent Majors. They really like to nibble at cuts, scrapes and scabs which you get quite quickly around the sand and coral on the sea floor. In a fair fight I think I could probably could have kicked their asses, but I was just learning to maneuver underwater and so was no match.

I was really surprised at the mental and physical requirements of learning to dive–it is quite intense! When we were finished we had to walk back to the dive shop with all of gear (which weighs quite a bit!). Needless to say at the end of the day I was exhausted!

The next day we went for our first actual open water dives off of the Bidah islands south of Phi Phi. We reinforced our basic skills (clearing masks, recovering regulators, descents, ascents, etc.). While snorkeling around on the surface I sucked in and swallowed a fair bit of seawater, which is not pleasant. 5 minutes later I discovered my body does not care for drinking seawater and I began spewing all over the place. I’m a bit more careful about my breathing discipline while snorkeling now, lesson learned! It was a pretty cool dive, where I started to get over my anxiety of breathing under frickin’ water and started to enjoy myself! We saw a lot of fish and even a couple of big sea turtles near the reef.

The next day we went out on a bigger boat to Phi Phi Ley, a beautiful island where they filmed the movie “The Beach“. I found myself getting a little nauseous with the bobbing and swaying of the boat, and just before we were going to perform our ‘giant strides’ into the water I got quite seasick. Once in the water though, everything was fine and we had a couple of really nice dives. We saw a lot of fish: lion fish, clownfish, trigger fish, an eel and even a black-tipped reef shark.

Lieke, Tjerk (my classmates from Amsterdam) and I took our final written knowledge examination and we all passed (me with 90%, Leike got the highest score). I am now a PADI certified open water scuba diver. I’m now looking for diving buddies to go with back in the northwest.

After diving the students and instructors went down to Aloha, a little restaurant that was trying an experiment: a 800 gram (1.75 lb) burger that if you can finish it and all the fixings (onion rings, fries, salad) in 30 minutes is free. If you can’t it is 500 baht (roughly $15) and about 3 times the cost of a normal meal here. They have only been running the promo for a week or so, but it has been popular. One of the instructors thought he had what it took (he didn’t) and I knew that I was not worthy. As of last night 5 people had actually conquered the burger, out of many, many attempts. Was quite entertaining.

Later that night I realized that I had set a personal record for puking: 3 separate spewing events in a 2 week period–food poisoning, seawater induction, seasicknesses–and for bonus points none were alcohol induced! Last night was St. Patrick’s day so I had a great opportunity to go for four, but figured my record of 3 will stand the test of time. Despite the dubious record, it hasn’t really negatively impacted my vacation, if anything it has just made it more memorable.

Due to the risk of decompression sickness and flying in airplanes I was not able to do another day of diving, and I had really had my fill of boats (and seasickness) so decided against a deep sea fishing charter. Instead I’ve relaxed and read some books, which has been really nice.

Other notes about the trip so far that may interest readers

• Thailand has a fantastic cellular network which is very affordable and reliable, and have had no problems using the Edge capabilities of my iPhone anywhere in the country.
• Power is not reliable here. It seems that everyday the power goes out for at least a few seconds, sometimes longer.
• Thunderstorms here have been awesome. We have gotten a great one pretty much everyday in the islands, and one is happening even now!

The only other thing I was going to write about was something that happened to me just about an hour ago. There are a lot of local kids and toddlers that walk around and explore, somewhat unsupervised but not in any real danger. A little girl of (about 2) and presumably her older brother (about 3) were walking on a busy brick footpath and tripped. She had been carrying a two small toy cars, similar to a matchbox and had dropped one which broke in two. She immediately began crying and I stopped to help her up and reassemble the car. It wasn’t until about half-way through fixing the car that I realized what such a well-loved and yet totally shabby car it was. The tires were long since gone, one of the wheels was missing, the paint and decals all worn off, but it was clearly still very important to her. It was so worn out that in the US we’d have simply thrown it away long ago. I got it fixed and the world was right in her eyes, which was a nice feeling. The kids were relatively well-dressed, cared for and certainly healthy, but it really got me to realize how fortunate we are.

Sorry for the long post! I’m heading back to Bangkok tomorrow for a couple of days and then back to Seattle!