Our plan was to catch the 11:00 speedboat to Phi Phi, but sleeping late until 09:30 or so and having everything still unpacked made that a bit difficult. Somehow we managed to get everything into the bags, take a taxi to the harbour half an hour away and make it to the boat well in time. Or well, there was maybe an extra five minutes but that was totally enough.

One hour later we reached the small island of Phi Phi after a slightly uncomfortable boat trip on the rough sea. Checked into our relatively nice (for the cheap price at least) bungalow, booked a diving trip for Tuesday morning and went canoeing.

Yes, canoeing, there's a beach called Monkey Beach with a lot of monkeys and you cannot reach it by land, only by taxi boats or by canoe so we thought that would be fun activity. Fun it was, and wet.. And no monkeys, but I think we were on the wrong beach. Maybe a new attempt tomorrow.

The tide here is really strong, we went on low tide and had to avoid all the corals and stones which reached almost to the surface. The shoreline had moved like 100 meters back from the high tide as can be seen in the pictures.

Other than that, we surprisingly had a massage. :)

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We met our Ukrainian and Russian friends Iryna and Uliana for dinner and walked to Naiharn beach to welcome the year 2022. Quite crowded beach was actually a nice way to spend the new year night having a couple of drinks.

The night continued long, so today was a quiet day. Just a very late lunch, walking to the beach again to see it in daylight and a massage. I assume we should try to get ourself to Koh Phi Phi island sometime tomorrow, was researching the ferry tickets a bit but seems like it's easiest to just buy the tickets at the pier.

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Some of the people from the boat were also going to Phuket, so we could share a two hour taxi ride with them all the way to Patong beach, just 20 minutes from our destination Naiharn. Seems like many will also have the same route with us, going to Phi Phi on the same day maybe.

Now it's new year party time, maybe. Or at least a dinner, we are most likely a bit too dead for parties..

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Khao Lak reached again. Snif, could have easily spent a week more on the boat. :)

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The last dive of this boat trip was similar to the previous ones, floating in very strong current in between huge rocks. Kind of fun, but nothing special regarding marine life.

Our boat started the five hour journey back to Khao Lak, and we have fixed our plan for the upcoming days. Two ukrainian and russian friends living in Thailand are actually in Phuket at the moment, so we will go back to Phuket to celebrate New Year with them. On 2nd the plan is to take a ferry to Phi Phi islands, maybe dive a bit and then continue onwards to Krabi by another ferry and finally towards Koh Tao.

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Yesterday evening and today morning we did two more dives on Similan islands, actually pretty boring ones. Strong currents and huge rocks, but not much marine life to be seen. One more dive left, and hopefully there is more to see. Although.. Maybe we already got used to too good after Richileu Rock and Koh Tachai, as even these dive sites here have way more life than most places in other countries. :)

Yesterday evening we also had the traditional barbecue party on the boat, but we were way too tired and already went to sleep after 8pm while some people continued socialising much longer. In this bay there was not so much fish around the boat at night, but many sea snakes kept coming to breath at surface next to the boat before diving again.

We also spotted something huge swimming past the boat.. Not sure what it was, but I guess a whale shark. Nothing else should be that size around here, the thing was at least five meters long if not much more. Tiger shark could be an another option as great whites are definitely not seen in this area, but they should also be very rare around here.

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Reached the Similan islands and found the first turtle of the trip. Let's try to find more on the next dives. :)

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One more dive was done on Koh Bon after a bit longer sleep. We were completely ready to bed already after eight and the wakeup call was only after seven, so finally we feel a bit more alive. In the evening the ship lights lured a lot of fish to hang around the ship and a big shark also followed them to catch some dinner. The shark was circling around the boat for quite a while, with everyone observing it on the deck with diving flashlights.

The dive was done on the same ridge as last night, this time with more light for photos. We met our our first octopus of the trip, although he was slighly shy and not so social, going to hide under a rock when I approached closer then a couple of meters with the camera. Dead and flat coral fields in some pictures were caused by the tsunami back in 2004.

The snake in the pictures is extremely venomous yellow-lipped sea krait, which I really did not want to approach very closely with camera. They have only very small fangs which cannot penetrate a wetsuit and are usually very peaceful, but still have ten times stronger neurotoxin than rattle snakes...

Now we are sailing towards Similan islands for two more dives and a barbecue evening.

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Two remaining dive sites were not bad either. In fact, Koh Tachai was maybe my favourite dive on this trip so far. A lot of coral and marine life in all forms and I managed to get quite a bit of nice pictures. The last dive of the day, partially turned into a night dive, Koh Bon was a bit different. It was a limestone cliff dropping directly to very deep sea, with small marine life hiding in the cracks. Due to the degrading light the photos are not that good, although a couple of nice snails I got. The strange black thing in one picture is a sponge snail which basically has a sponge shell, and only lives on Maledives and on this small island.

Pictures are coming later, by the way. The internet connection is basically nonexistent here on the sea. We are sleeping the night next to Koh Bon island on a calm bay and in the morning continuing towards Similan islands.

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On the second day we woke up to the engine start at 05:20 when the boat started the final one hour journey to Richileu Rock through stormy and wavy sea. The rock is a lonely rock in middle of open sea and as a dive site I think it reserves a separate blog entry with pictures. The weather got better during the morning and we were even able to anchor next to the rock and do two dives.

The rock is called the best dive site of Thailand and one of the best in the world, and this time it truly was that. On our last trip some years ago it was not so spectacular and I missed second dive due to fever, but on this trip the site showed the best of it. Diving there was like floating in a dream, in middle of huge schools of fish. Small fish, big fish (Barracudas, another group even saw a whale shark) and medium fish all around you, like you were swimming through a very populated aquarium or well.. as fish soup. I didn't even attempt to calculate the amount of different species..

Now we departed the rock, had a tasty lunch and are on our way towards the next dive site, Koh Tachai island. Let's see how is that.

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