Phi Phi Islands

One of the reasons we wanted to include Phuket on our trip was the scenery. The islands around Phuket are so beautiful. You've likely seen them in photos or even movies.

The most famous of them all is James Bond Island....featured in one of the James Bond movies many years ago. This is not my photo...we didn't acutally see this island, but seeing pics like this inspired us to take the time to see Phuket.

Phuket is an island, too...a pretty big one. But we wanted to get out and see some of the smaller ones. So we booked a day trip on a speed boat. In retrospect, I would have chosen a more private and local transfer - like a long boat taxi that you'll see in some of the photos. But I let the travel agent book the trip and didn't realize the difference.

There ended up being about 30 people on our boat and we had very limited time at each stop. Our main destination was the Phi Phi islands of which there are two - Phi Phi Don (the bigger one) and Phi Phi Ley. In Thailand, you do not pronounce "ph" like "f" so this sounds like Pee Pee.

You can take these boats, or long boat taxis, and stay on some of the islands. Some are big enough that they have hotels and other accomodations. We dropped a couple people off here.

I don't know if you can read the writing on this long boat, but it's a Holiday Inn taxi for the hotel on this island.

One of the main attractions of Phi Phi Ley is Maya Beach...it's a beautiful beach in this cove of rocks. It's also where they filmed part of the movie "The Beach" with Leonardo diCaprio. This area is such a paradise, but the locals have built up tourism so much that they are ruining it with too many visitors. There were hundreds of other people on this beach when we got there. It was hard to get any photos without lots of people in them.

We were traveling on a boat like those in the photo above. I would have rather been on one of these long boats, as pictured below. We had 30 minutes to enjoy this beach...not long enough.

More about our boat day later...