^
I did tell you this in the last gibberings thread but it got closed soon after at 1000 posts - and you'd bought your ticket anyway. Yeah, that ferry crossing is the one we nearly died on - 2 hours became 4 hours of terror.
EDIT I stayed quite a bit up the main beach (quite a long way up I mean). First time in my life I ever saw a Monitor lizard, freaked the shit out of me, was only a few yards from our door. Looked like a dinosaur in the undergrowth.
One of these
I vaguely remember you mentioning something, what exactly happened again when you were on the ferry?
In Ko Pah Ngan now, just stayed in Ko Tao for the one day. Arrived here yest and today went on a trip, elephant trekking and monkey park, waterfall, chinese temple, bottle beach and snorkelling. I had a good day but it was a bit of a dodgy trip and apparently the company I took is the best of the best, I'd hate to see the worst.
The elephant 'sanctuary' was a scabby peice of grass with a mosquito infested swamp, the elephants looked rougher than me after a night on the buckets, all battered and bruised and cut. The trek consisted of a walk through some trees and then the elephant swimming in afore mentioned swap for about 5 minutes. Well at least I got some cool pics. There was a single monkey chained to a barbed wire fence that looked delusional.
Onto the waterfall. It was more fall than waterfall as there was no water so we 'trekked' (i.e. a 10 minute walk up a hill) to another water pool, it was unimpressive but good to cool off. Back down for lunch that at least was nice. Onto the Chinese temples, it was interesting. Temple-like. Seen a few of those in my time.
Then we took a longtail boat to Bottle Beach which is rated as one of the better ones on the island. The sand consisted of gravel and rock and was horrible to walk on. Sea looked quite dull but the water was nice to swim in. After the beach off for snorkelling, a whole 20 minutes of it, at a rather unimpressive area full of no more than 2 different types of small, unexciting looking, fish. There's a dozen or so boats coming and going as you try to snorkel and little regard for safety, someone could easily be sliced in 2 by the boats. You're just given a mask and told to jump in, no experts on hand, no life guards, no one even paying attention. I've done some snorkelling in Aus (and I know you can't compare Thailand to Aus) and you were always given a life jacket or floating device to use in case you got into trouble, our boat didn't even have life jackets. I'm not the strongest swimmer so didn't want to swim too far from the boat, the boat continually floated away though so it was a tough swim back. This idiot tried to get in and panicked then tried to grab onto me, almost drowning us both. He was fully clothed and didn't even have the mask over his nose so water went straight up it, he freaked out and HE COULDNT FUCKING SWIM so what he was doing is beyond me. I had enough after that and got back on the boat for fear of my own life. I don't want to die snorkelling just to see some non descript fish.
Despite there being so many faults I did actually have a good day out and it beats sitting on a beach getting burnt all day, I'm not a fan of that. I'm fed up of backpackers with superiority complexes because they're staying at some remote beach only reachable by long tail boat where there's nothing but a wooden shack and a coconut tree, who gives a fuck. A beach is a beach to me, they are all pretty boring and I've seen enough nice ones on this trip and others. I also have to laugh when they go on about how their bungalow is only 100 baht a night then they tell you it costs them 400 baht each way for a boat every time they need to go anywhere. GREAT DEAL! I'm debating whether to head to Samui next or skip it as hearing it's not that great and not really all that exciting.
So yeah, TL;DR but that was my day. Off now to the shooting range to fire either an AK47 ior a Magnum. Gangsta!