Third World Differences.

November 16th

I rolled over at 5:15 this morning and Jess was sitting up in bed. She wasn’t feeling well at all and she decided that she needed to go to the hospital. We stayed in bed until 6:30am thinking that we'd have better luck getting in right at 7am. We had to walk a bit to find a taxi and were surprised how quiet everything was- all closed up. The taxi charged us $200 Baht ($7 USD) and the drive ended up being less than half a mile, I was annoyed. We walked into the hospital to find only one woman behind the front desk. She told us that the doctors didn’t arrived 8:30am and didn’t see any patients much before 9am, even in the emergency room. I guess no one in Phuket can seriously ill between 9pm and 9am. We walked back to the hostel, it was hot at this point, and we were both dripping with sweat by the time we arrived. I climbed back into bed and Jess went on the internet to kill some time. At 8:30am we went down stairs and the owner of the hostel, Robin, offered to drive us back to the hospital in his car. He really is such great guy, I hope his business does well.

As we entered the hospital we were greeted by an older man who spoke English he showed us how to check in and explained how the whole process worked. Although it was clearly a third-world hospital, we were relieved that at least there was a “Westerner” who greeted us and spoke fluent English. We sat and waited about forty-five minutes to speak with a nurse then went back to the waiting area. About 20 minutes later Jess was called in by the doctor and examined. Turns out she has tonsillitis and was prescribed four different medicines to help with the pain and to help her get better. We walked back to the hostel, making a stop at Au Bon Pain to grab a sandwich and the ticket agency to get our pickup time to the ferry changed because we had missed the first boat that we were planning on taking. We had about 2 hours to kill so we ate our lunch in the room and did some research on Ko Phi Phi.

We got picked up by a mini van at 1pm for our 2:30pm ferry. The mini ran was interesting. We were the last two people to be picked up so there was very little room for us. There wasn’t anymore room left in the back for our bags so the driver put them on the top of the van and used our backpack straps to tie them down. I worried the whole ride as we zig-zagged up and down the narrow roads that our bags would be long gone. Luckily we arrived safely and so did our luggage.  The ferry ride was an hour and forty-five minutes. Jess and I both quickly fell asleep, we were both exhausted being up so early.

When we arrived at Phi Phi Don we walked off the pier and were instantly bombarded by tour groups trying to sell us everything from longboat rides to hotel rooms. We had done research and decided it would be easier to get a room once we arrived on the island, but we weren’t expecting this. We stopped and talked with a couple different agencies who each showed us cheap rooms, then said that that particular hotel was full and tried to sell us a more expensive place. We really didn’t want to spend more than $1000Bath a night ($33USD) a night and wanted AC and Hot water (both are hard to find on this island). The agencies said that this type of room didn’t exist at the price we wanted and kept saying that it was the busy season so it was more expensive. Annoyed and sweaty we decided to walk around with our heavy packs and see what else we could find. As we started walking with our bags we quickly started to realize that almost all of the buildings had rooms available upstairs. We popped into a few places that wanted to charge us $1200Baht, but decided to keep walking. We finally came to Pirates Hotel, which is a place that my mom had read about on TripAdvisor and suggested that we say at. The owner quickly came running out to us as soon as he saw our backpacks and offered to show us a room he had available for $1000Baht. We were pleased that it was clean and everything that we wanted. Relieved we threw down our bags and showered. We got changed, paid for the room, and decided to get a lay of the area. We were very surprised how small this island actually is. More accurately, how small the portion of the island that is inhibited is. The map that everyone gave us made the place look huge, but in reality you can walk through the whole town in less than 5 minutes.  Our first stop was at a scuba shop where I booked a trip with two dives! I’m so excited about it. I was shocked when I got off of the boat and realized how popular scuba diving is here. For such a small town there has to be at least 30 scuba shops. Its unbelievable.

It started to get dark and we were both hungry so we got dinner at a restaurant called “Sammies.” Sammie is the owner and he was nearly killed in the tsunami that hit Ko Phi Phi on Dec 26th, 2005. He was buried under 3 meters of rubble and it was nearly 3 days until anyone found him. It was shocking for us to see all of the pictures that are so prevalent in this town of the destruction done to this town by a huge wave. The food was delicious, I had my first Pad Thai dish here and it was 10 times better than anything that I’ve had at home. I also had a banana smoothie that cost just over a dollar and was the best smoothie that I’d ever tasted. My whole meal was less than $4USD- god I love Thailand! Feeling full and exhausted we decided to call it a night. We walked back to the hotel room. We were handed half a dozen flyers on our walk home advertising different bars and parties that were just getting started. We were excited to check out the night life, but since Jess really wasn’t feeling good and didn’t want to drink with her new medicine, and I had to be up before 7am for my scuba dive we decided to call it a night. The owner of our restaurant rents DVD players so we decided to rent one and watched one of the movies we bought it Bali. It was a perfect ending to the day.

Bye for now.
Love,
Katie.