Day 6: James Bond Island and Sea Canoeing

Thursday was a major off day for us. We didn't even leave the hotel, except to walk on the beach. The most exciting thing that happened was that we walked along the beach in the other direction, found another river inlet, and I almost drowned in it while trying to cross. It looked shallower and calmer than it really was. Also, Kent got attacked by biting ants while that was happening. Oh, boy.

On Friday we had our final excursion to James Bond Island in Phang Nga Bay, about a half hour away. The night before found out that the Belgians had booked a trip for Friday to the bay, as well, through a travel agent in town (we booked through the hotel) and we figured we'd see them at some point during the day. They ended up being our travel companions on the boat all day, haha. The lady, I think she said her name was Micha? asked, Are we the only tourists in Thailand? For everywhere except Phuket, it sort of seemed that way. We found out the twins' names were Tille (pronounced "Tilla"), the shy one, and Rhode ("Rhoda"), the outgoing one. Their dad's name was something like Yoss or Yost (or Joss or Jost). Oh, these foreign names. They had some trouble with my name, too, though. Luckily, the little girls had their names written on their shirts.

We took a boat through the bay for a while and saw a lot of jutting rock islands, mangrove forests, and this floating Muslim village:



Our first stop was James Bond Island, named so because it was used as a location in the 1974 film "The Man With the Golden Gun." The local name for it is Ko Tapu Island. I don't have a lot of pictures from there. I must have taken most of them with my film camera. Here we are on a rock leaving the island. We were only there for a half hour, but we explored some shallow caves with stalactites and stuff. I have a bunch of 4x6 photos of them, but nothing to put up here. Sorry.


After leaving James Bond Island, we boated around some more, saw more rock islands and rock formations, and ended up at an island dock in the bay, where we would go sea canoeing. We were given plastic bags for our cameras and put into a little inflatable canoe with a rowing guide. He brought us into caves to show us stalactites and other rock formations like these:





Here's another boat, by the way:


The biggest cave we were in:


More rocks. I'll be honest with you: with all these rocky pictures, I'm not sure if they're taken from the boat or the sea canoe or during what part of the day, but enjoy.





I took a lot of these photos because the rocks looked like something (usually an elephant, according to the guide), but I'm not recognizing anything from the pictures.



We also went through a mangrove forest:



The guide took us into these caves so tiny that we had to lie down on our backs to get in, and I almost lost some forehead and nose a couple times. The first time he did it, I didn't even believe we were really going in at first. I thought we were just going towards that two-foot opening (or whatever) because he had to get around a tree trunk or something, or he was just psyching us out. But no, he told us to lie down and we went right through. It was nuts. This is a photo from inside one of the caves, just barely big enough for us to get through:


More rocks:



This is the cool part. These are videos of us going into the big and little caves:

After canoeing and having a soda on the dock we went to lunch in a big floating restaurant and then our guide took us through some shopping alleys. This woman and a tranny each threw a monkey on me and Kent and told us to take pictures, which we did. Then they tried to charge us 50 baht (about a buck fifty) a picture for pictures we took with our own cameras. We would have paid them something if they had just asked for a donation, but they were so pushy and scammy and overpriced about it that we didn't pay them.

That wasn't the end of our day, but the Monkey Temple is a post of its own. I'll do that one in the next day or two. I took about a million photos.