Day 16 of The Big Adventure, according to Sarah.
We woke up early, showered and packed up our bags. Yes, I finally had something to pack! (Although not that much to put in it, but still) 

We headed downstairs to check out and wait for our transfer to the pier. As we were waiting, a load of firecrackers went off directly across the street from us, to our shock. 

We were both a bit stunned and turned to look at the receptionist who was sat, reading her book, and didn’t bat an eyelid. This was a pretty normal occurrence it would seem. 

Our minibus turned up pretty quickly and took us to the pier where our boat for PhiPhi was departing. 

We boarded and managed to find two seats together. We were surrounded by loud Americans, much to Lauren’s annoyance.

The journey took about 2 hours and a couple of American boys sat next to Lauren decided to strike up a conversation. It turned out they were an attorney and a banker from New York: Simon and Eric.

They seemed friendly enough and when the boat landed at PhiPhi they said that we should all go for a drink later on (assuming we all awoke from our naps). 

We got off the boat and walked the long pier, which was lined with people holding signs for different hotels – clearly a lot of hotels offered transfers here. It was a sweltering hot day and the further we got down the pier, the more I prayed I would see a sign with our guesthouse’s name on it. No such luck. 

Google maps said it was a 9 minute walk – so we were probably just being lazy anyway. 

So through the little lane ways of PhiPhi we went. It wasn’t all that far at all… It was just the midday heat that was a killer. 

We got to our hostel and checked in with the receptionist who spoke very little English. She then got up to show us to our room; she lead us through the hostel, out the backdoor, through the ‘kitchen’ (loose term) and into a backhouse where our room was. 

It was a large space, with two rock hard single beds and one stand alone fan. We put it on straight away and lay down on the beds in an attempt to cool down. 

The fan was failing us and Lauren was fading fast. I tried to tempt her with food but even that didn’t work. Things were getting serious. 

I suggested she have a cold shower to try and cool off and that seemed to perk her up a bit. 

She quickly undressed and went into the bathroom. 

A mere 30 seconds later I heard a small scream come from the bathroom followed by an ‘ewwwww’. 

She peeked her head around the door and said ‘Babe, come and smell this’.

The water from the shower had that ‘Thailand smell’, also commonly known as sewage. 

‘Get it off me’ then left Lauren’s mouth. 

But how were we going to do that without a shower? 

We decided the only thing for it was to go for a swim in the sea to get the smell off Lauren’s leg. 

And with that, we warily packed our bags for the beach and headed out. 

Now there aren’t really roads in the main part of PhiPhi – it’s all little walking laneways. And these laneways don’t show up on google maps so we just had to head in the directions of the ocean and hope we got there and didn’t end up in some resort.

We spotted a ‘beach –>’ sign graffitied onto a wall and followed the arrows until we reached the beach. 

  Lauren headed straight for the water which was shockingly warm. 

Like jacuzzi warm. 

Like warmer than the air (if that’s even possible) 

She waded out a good 100m and still wasn’t up to her waist so ended up just sitting down. At least the smell was gone. 

We lay on the beach and watched the sunset over the mountains and decided to head back to our disgusting room. 

  
We realised we were both quite hungry and I’d read there were some decent food markets in PhiPhi so we headed out to track down some yummy food. 

En route a man standing outside a dive shop (presumably trying to sell things to passersby) asked where we were going and what we were looking for. So we told him we were looking for some good cheap food. He recommended we head to a place called Papaya. So off we trotted and sat down. There was some confusion as Lauren wanted Indian and they had some Indian dishes on the menus outside, but once we sat down it became clear that there were no Indian dishes and the man would have to run to a restaurant down the road to get it. After this slightly rocky start, we decided to just share a Penang curry (my fav) and rice and some fried morning glory (similar to spinach and green beans). 

It was delicious. 

After we’d stuffed our bellies, we went for a walk around all the little stalls that lined the streets. We had a vague plan to wake up early the next day and hike up to the viewpoint for sunrise and I thought I’d probably need some shoes more sturdy than flip flops. And we wanted to buy some snorkels and masks so that we didn’t have to keep renting them each time. So off we set. 

We managed to find masks and snorkels pretty quickly and even haggled them down to a half-decent price. But shoes other than flip flops just was not happening. 

We had been wandering for quite a while when we noticed some people walking around with buckets of alcohol in hand.

In no time at all, we seemed to be in front of a stand ordering a bucket of passion fruit mojito of our own. The lady making them was free pouring and clearly felt very generous when making ours because the amount of rum she poured in seemed to never end. 

It was very yummy though and kept our spirits up whilst we shopped. 

  
We ended up wandering onto the beach to watch a fire show a bar had put on. Some of the acts were so talented you couldn’t help but stare in awe.

 

 
We were there for about an hour, and by the time the bucket was finished ‘high spirits’ had turned to ‘drunk’… and then Simon and Eric showed up. 

We said our hellos and watched more of the fire show. And then the boys told us about a bar they’d heard about where tourists fight each other for free buckets and they were KEEN BEANS to go. 

Lauren and I, not being particularly keen on watching people fighting, were keen on free buckets so we agreed to go along with them. 

We stopped off on the way to get them a bucket of vodka red bull which they finished shockingly quickly and then headed inside the bar to front row seats. 

  
Some sweat (or was it blood) from the fighters actually landed on me. We ordered 2 more buckets and settled in to watch some of the fights. Shockingly, there were girl on girl fights. Lauren and I were appalled. 

Eric had been saying all night that he really wanted to fight and kept trying to convince Simon to fight him. After a bit of cojoling, Simon agreed and they both signed up. We were their ring girls. 

They both went all out in the fight, and they both ended up with bloody noses. 

At the end, the ref raised both their hands to signal a draw and gave them both a medal. 

  
They went to collect their free buckets, but after 5 minutes it was clear that both of them were massively struggling with life and wanted to go home. 

We walked with them back to our hostel and said goodnight. As they clearly weren’t in any state to keep drinking, we ended up with a grand total of 4 buckets of alcohol on our hands which we ended up leaving outside. (After Lauren tried to sell them to passersby with the classic line of ‘they’re not spiked – I promise!’).

  
Once inside we instantly remembered how horrendous our hostel was and how uncomfortable this night was going to be.

Lauren, rather optimistically, set her alarm for 5am and was adamant we would wake up to hike up a hill for sunrise. 

We both lay, essentially naked, ontop of our sheets, with the fan blowing directly at us. It was still too hot to sleep and I don’t think either of us managed to sleep for more than hour in total that night.