Our first full touristy free day!! When you go on trips with Habitat for Humanity, you generally have at least two days that are fun-filled with activities within the area of visit. We are in Southern Thailand, staying in Khao Lak. Just outside is Phang Nga which is a city comparable to Seattle in size. For our free day, we traveled about one hour through Phang Nga to the Bay’s. The drive was mostly through town and it was much more busy than where we are staying. Although, I think that it looked to be one of the poorer areas I have seen so far; slum like.
Anyhow, we arrived at the pier about 9:00 a.m. and split up into two tail boats. We headed to a large ferry-like boat about fifteen minutes away that was anchored in the middle of a bay. This is where we got into small, two-man rubber canoes. I went with Ashley and we had a guide take us around. When I say guide, they just would row; as I mentioned – it was very hard because they don’t speak English so we didn’t get to learn about what Bay we were in. He took us to several caves and within the rocks because we got there during low tide. The two rock formations that he said in English were “Pigs Nose” and ”King Kong”. It was incredibly relaxing and I could have done it all day long!!!
After he took us through the caves and paddled around for a while, we headed back to the ferry to jump into the tail boats to head to a floating village called “Koh Pan Yee” where the sea gypsies live. It was originally built for the “James Bond, 007” movie. It is now only a tourist based community and as soon as it closes its hopes, it becomes an excluded, quiet, muslim community. It looked really cool from the water, it was all raised up on a pier and had two large restaurants and marketplaces. The team had a seafood lunch there….. I as you all know am not a fan of seafood. If anything, this freaked me out even more. Whole fish, bones, skin, and eyes were cooked up and thrown on the table, uhhhhh. I passed on that!! Afterwards we had time to roam through the trinket shopes, a lot of it was jewelry such as pearls and t-shirts. 
Not much of a variety…. At times, it smelled so bad walking through because of all of the dead sea life and the hot heat. The people were very very pushy at this place, they would touch you, follow you, and beg you to look at their shops. It got to be awkward – but good to see the gypsy community.
After about an hour and a half, we jumped into our large tail boats and headed for James Bond Island. The actually island is called “Khoa Tapoo; (Nail Island)” and its famous landmark is called “Khoa Ping-Gan; (Slide Rock).” This first found its way onto the international map through its starring role in “James Bond, The Man with the Golden Gun.” This is what most of us were looking forward too because you are constantly hearing about it and it is supposed to be beautiful. On our way there, the bay started to get extremely windy. We arrived and the sand was covered in a layer of broken sea shells… a little surprised they hadn’t broken down more from the water. As they were pelting us left and right, we sprinted up from the water to check out the island. Maybe this is why it is called Nail Island???? It was packed full of tourists; we asked Tom a few questions as we went and he said for some reason it seems to be that they bring all of the tourists there at the same time! The rock formation was huge and it had a beautiful setting. It was hard to take pictures because as we were saying the “other” foreigners would just stop right in the middle of your pictures!! It took us several times to try to get a picture! We walked around, they had a few shops, also very touchy, and a small cave that you could climb up to. We soon were headed back to the pier… it had been a longer day than we had expected; but it was so good to have a day out in the sun relaxing instead of building! We are spoiled and really miss not having a lot of free time!
After we got back and showered, all of us younger kids wanted to have a pub crawl… naturally, it turned out to Tiffy’s for dinner (the place we go every evening for a beer and internet!) and a little place called the Everyday Bar and Grill. Every night they have a Thai guy that sings and plays guitar…. His hits were shockingly The Rolling Stones! SO FUN! They even had a dart board for me to show off my skills! :) It of course ended up to just be me, Ashley, Ben, Matt, and Heath – we played a few rounds of cricket and talked with the locals… it was really fun to be there.
We called her Luna... reminded me of Luna Lovegood!!! (Harry Potter Fans...!) & Had to post for Dad!!
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