Beaches and Islands

Hello all!!

John and I are currently on Ko Phi Phi, a small island off the Adaman coast in Thailand. If you've ever seen the movie "The Beach", a lot of it was filmed near this area and is famous because of that movie and because of all the coral reefs and little islands near by. It's beautiful but incredibly touristy. Almost too touristy, there is a higher ratio of tourists than local people for sure. However, we've booked a snorkelling trip for the day tomorrow and hope to see lots of fish and reef.

We arrived here today after several days on Railay, http://www.railay.com/railay/intro/intro.shtml a beautiful beach area lined with limestone cliffs hovering over the beaches. It was SO beautiful. The beach itself was rated as the number one beach in the world in 2005. It defenitely deserves the award. It was stunning. The sun sets were spectacular, the sand was white, the water was clear and warm. It was lovely. Our first two days there we crashed on the beach, thankful to get some sun rays after many clouded travel days, leading me to be quite frustrated with the weather gods. We subsequently got burnt, and decided to take the following day off from the beach. We booked a half day rock climbing trip for the morning and it was great! I'd never rock clmbed before, John had done a bit, but we tried and it was wicked. We are SO SO sore though! John's been suffering through a bit of traveller's illnesses as well, although he did push through the day and we later got some drugs for him from the local pharmacy. After our climbing adventure I left John in the room to rest up and I headed out trekking with a British girl I met. We walked around to some of the other beach areas and then I met back up with John for a massage. Very much needed after the rock climbing adventure.

John spent most of the next day in our hotel room feeling off, and I roamed around and beached it a bit more. We enjoyed our evenings with a bunch of other tourists we had met from our climbing adventures and had drinks and such by the beach.

We're enjoying our time a lot here. It seems like we are skipping school though, as we're both not use to being away from teaching at this time of the year for this length of time. It will hit us soon enough though.

Anyhow, I can't get the pics up right now. I'm sure I could spend a day doing it but the costs for internet aren't super cheap, so I do hope to upload them shortly. I hope all is well with everyone and enjoy what the new year brings!

Love and best wishes,

cristen and John :o)