Monday We booked an early departure from Koh Phi Phi. It's a fun place for a couple of days but after that it's easy to get your fill of drunk tourists and trashed beaches. Gone are the days of the pristine, undiscovered paradises from Alex Garland's novel, at least as far as Koh Phi Phi is concerned. The ferry brought us back to Krabi and from there we got a transfer to Ao Nang. In Ao Nang we had the shuttle driver drop us at the corner on the beach where a booth selling longboat tickets was located, and bought three
Wednesday I froze all night in the air/con car. Sometime around the time we stopped in Chumphon I remembered there was an extra blanket we had stolen wedged under my pillow. The next hour or two of sleep was much more comfortable and then we were woken up by our extremely flamboyant train steward who started waving his hands around at us, wanting to make our bunks back into benches. The train dropped us off in Surat Thani and we were herded away based on the color stickers we were wearing. We were loaded onto a shuttle bus that took us to
Sunday I woke up at 7:30 feeling hungover and so went back to sleep. At noon I woke up again feeling much better and so waited for everyone else to get up and moving. By the time we were all alive and functioning it was definitely time to find food, so we walked around the little Ao Nang area desperately trying to find breakfast food. No place had western breakfast food, only Italian, Thai, and Indian food. We searched dozens of restaurants for an hour before we found a little cafe with a Harley Davidson theme that had several breakfast items
Friday Our good friend and now roommate, Eric, had some friends visiting from Colorado recently who wanted to go explore. Eric had invited us to go with them. We have been wanting to see the rest of Thailand and so considered it briefly, but then decided that six people traveling together would be too much of a logistical problem. It's easy enough to squeeze four people into a room but with six you have to wonder if an extra room is worth it. The morning that they were leaving we all met up and Fletch and I changed our minds. We