Geoff Jones

After staying on Sunset Beach at  Ko Lipe for four nights at the delightfully named Porn Resort (Porn is a very common Thai  female first name), tomorrow I’m moving onto Malaysia.

Lipe, especially Sunset beach , is very quiet & beautiful with turquoise waters & coral,  ideal for snorkelling in . The cabins or shacks are arranged in rows behind the beach, the A row (1000 baht a night) on the beach, B one row behind (900 baht)  and C (800 baht) behind them. All very basic but personally I find ideal, nothing to beat a simple bucket for flushing the loo! . Sunrise beach is a lot more developed with concrete apartments/houses and probably costing a tonne more. All the shopping is concentrated in Walking Street a misnomer as the taxi bikes plough up and down it 🙁

It’s all very laid back and really it’s quite a struggle to leave especially with ‘real’ massages at £6 a hour. Today I treated myself to a 3 hour session with one hour devoted to removing all the horrid skin from my feet, one hour on a traditional Thai foot massage and one hour on a very deep back, & shoulder massage – painful but maybe will free up my left shoulder after my bike tumble the other day.

Done a lot of reading especially The Master Switch which is the amazing history of media in the USA ie AM/FM radio, Hollywood, TV etc etc and also of course my beloved internet & will it survive or will it go the way of all past ‘new’ media, ie controlled by a couple of dominant players. Plus a very interesting article on Sergeyevich Termen who seems in the similar vein to Nicola Tesla.

Fascinating for me , and this applies to all my recent travels, is the vast amount of plastic bottles and other rubbish that we generate now and there seems no solution for (apart from Germany & it’s deposit scheme), wandered around the rubbish tip here dreaming of a big magnifying glass concentrating the sun and reducing the plastic to a few blobs rather than acres of bottles 🙂

So tomorrow another country…

Today I was in tourist mode again off out on a day long boat trip around and on Phi Phi from Lanta including lunch on The Beach with a thousand others.

We started on a regular boat (good experience for the next few days of island hopping) which transferred a load of folks onto the big boat to Phuket, whilst still  out of the harbour at Phi Phi  (praying this is not going to happen to me when carting my bike around). We docked at Phi Phi then transferred to a ‘long tail’ the distinctive boats that have a regular car engine hooked up to a long shaft with a prop at one end. Very noisy & smelly 🙁

First stop was a very pretty lagoon the east side of Ko Phi Phi Le where we all leapt in and had a swim, no fishes here but a sandy bottom & of course loads of other boats.

We then moved to the south of the island where we could snorkel with shoals of fishes, pretty impressive a bit like swimming in an aquarium, the current was quite strong so a bit of effort needed to get back to the boat.

Then it was round to the west and the cove & beach made famous in the film. Blackpool eat your heart out, the place was rammed with boats & folks even so it is still very impressive scenery and the water is surprisingly very clean.

After lunch it was a quick stop at monkey beach but the monkeys were monkeying about and no where to be seen! so back to the main island of Phi Phi, no evidence of the mass destruction from the Tsunami on Boxing Day 2004,  just loads of shops and thankfully no cars or motorbikes allowed, If the weather was cooler it would make a great place to explore.

So a good day out and pretty good value at £22 or so. Didn’t bother lugging the big camera around so only a few pics with the iPhone here