We Love Ourselves Some Pee Pee

Thailand  |  Ko Phi Phi Don + Phang Nga Bay / James Bond Island  |  May 2014  |

Ko Phi Phi. Pronounced "Pee Pee." We did not name it. We just very much enjoyed saying it.

The lead-up to Phi Phi involved one of the most eventful drives of the Thailand trip: we left an hour and fifteen minutes early for the ferry on the east side of Phuket and arrived with minutes to spare after encountering a stalled semi-truck, a motorbike crash, and an overturned ice truck, all in sequence. The ferry ride itself is two hours and features the kind of plastic deck chairs that collapse unpredictably no matter how you position yourself. Matt and I both gave up and stood for the last hour, which turned out to be genuinely pleasant.

First impressions on Phi Phi Don: crowded pier, people shouting hotel options at you from every direction, garbage, construction, and heat that is aggressive even by Thailand's standards. We thought: oh no. We thought this for approximately five minutes, until we walked five minutes to the other side of the island.

Our eyes genuinely didn't believe what they were seeing. A perfect cove with water in a shade of turquoise that I would have dismissed as photoshopped if I hadn't been standing in front of it. Completely real. The kind of beautiful that makes you stop mid-sentence and just point. It is one of the most beautiful places on earth and I mean that as factual statement rather than travel hyperbole.

We had massaman curry on the beach, a couple of beers, and then met our sleep-aboard boat for the overnight Maya Bay tour I had booked through TripAdvisor, which had excellent reviews. The boat was... smaller than advertised. Less spacious than the website implied. The "showers" turned out to be a bidet hose in a bathroom with a door that barely closed. The "covered sleeping area" for rain was optimistic given the number of people aboard.

We stuck it out through the snorkeling (the water was beautiful, the snorkeling itself less impressive than Florida, which surprised us) and then arrived at Maya Bay around 4:30pm. And this is when we conducted an honest self-assessment. We looked around at the crowd: almost entirely backpackers in their early twenties, trading multi-country stories, gearing up for a beach night of drinking and sleeping upright on a boat. We are wonderful people who support those experiences wholeheartedly for the people who want them. We are simply not those people. We are people who need a door that closes.

We bailed. We caught the night plankton dive back to shore instead, which turned out to be genuinely magical: plankton are tiny squid that light up when disturbed, so moving your hands and feet around in the dark water creates these little explosions of bioluminescence all around you. Way cool. Matt also discovered that the chest area of my swimsuit created the same effect when tapped, which he found very amusing and which is how I ended up with dying baby squid in my bra. I'm choosing to see this as a unique travel memory.

We found a cheap hotel, showered, and crashed. The next day we rented beach chairs for eight dollars and spent it swimming in and out of that unreal turquoise water. I would do that whole imperfect trip again for another day on that beach.

The James Bond Island tour the following day was everything the overnight was not: perfectly organized, well-staffed, and genuinely wonderful from start to finish. Our company was Two Sea Tour, and our guide Philipe had clearly been doing this a long time and loved it. He gave our group a two-hour head start on every other tour to get into the cave lagoons before the tide made it impossible.

The Phang Nga Bay itself is 42 islands, all limestone, rising out of the water in those dramatic jagged peaks. Approaching them by boat reminded us immediately of Guilin in China, the same kind of impossible-looking vertical rock formations covered in green. Except forty degrees warmer.

The cave lagoon experience was one of the most serene things I've done anywhere. We canoed into Diamond Cave, named for a rock inside that sparkled under the headlamps of our guides. Just a handful of canoes in complete quiet. Mangrove trees, a monitor lizard, a giant jellyfish, walking fish that skip along the surface and can survive out of water for two hours. We took a moment to stop paddling entirely and just listen. Then the tide started rising and by the time we were leaving, Matt and I had to lie completely flat in the canoe with my legs on top of his shoulders just to fit back through the cave opening. An adventure in every sense.

James Bond Island is where they filmed a scene from The Man with the Golden Gun in 1974 and has not been quiet since. More than 10,000 visitors a day. The rock itself is smaller than you'd expect but genuinely beautiful, and Philipe armed all the guides with props including a gold-painted toy gun for photos. He was very proud that no other tour company had copied this idea yet. We took the most ridiculous photos. We loved every second.

The tour ended on a private beach with warm sand that produced bubbles when you walked on it, like your own personal foot spa. Lunch was a full buffet on the boat. We couldn't have recommended Two Sea Tour more enthusiastically.

Our last night back in Phuket, we returned to the Thai restaurant at the resort and ordered two whole lobsters and banana fritters for dessert. Then packed. Then Cambodia.