What a day we've had!

Phi Phi island is beautiful -vistas to die for. Here are some views from our hotel:

The view from our room.

A quick dip in the pool.

However, the trip we went on to day was less than what we expected to say the least.

It started out alright. We left the island in a long tail boat.

Then visited monkey beach.

We had a little snorkling where we saw some really neat fish. In fact, I swam through several schools of striped and brightly colored fish.

This is when the trouble started. As our boat (overloaded with 13 people) slowly chugged on to bamboo island, we had a suspition that we were in for some trouble. The spray from the waves (windy day) pelted us constantly on the journey out to the small island. We were cold and all wanted to be at the beach. Once we finally reached the beach, we were given our boxes of fried rice and sat on the beach to eat. Though we'd been told that we had an hour, after about 20 mintues, we were hurried onto the boat because the tide had "suddenly" gone out. We spent about 10 minutes pushing and pulling the boat out to a depth that it could move in.
Finally we were off! However, the good luck was not to last long. We got in one more short stint of snorkling and headed off to the beach where the movie "The Beach" was filmed. However, about half way there, our boat decided that it no longer wanted to work. We sat for a little while, then our 'captain' tied our boat to tow behind another boat of similar side and passenger capacity.

We slowly made our way to the beach and depite the breeze, which made it quite chilly, enjoyed some time there.

We were supposed to return to Phi Phi Island around sunset, but, yet again, our boat would not go. The one that had initially towed us had already moved on and had to return to "rescue" us. Again, we chugged along slowly. After mostly missing the sunset, we were worried that it would soon be dark.

Indeed... Our rescue boat, soon let us loose in the open sea as another boat came to switch out. Because we were going slowly, the first boat wanted to get its passengers back to shore before it was totally dark. An empty boat came and we were instructed to get aboard it. The first girl who tried to climb aboard was literally suspended in thin air. The 'captain' of the second boat was holding her arm and her toes were curled around our boat as the two began to drift apart. She made it on safely, but it was a scary moment.

We did eventually make it back to land - in total darkness (without a light on our boat) but we were frazzled. Fortunately, there was a delicious Italian restaurant waiting for us in town where we downed a pizza and pasta.

We've had our adventure for the trip! Thai customer service leaves something to be desired. But, we're back safe and sound and I"m happy for that!