Koh Phi Phi Don – Thailand
How angry do you get with yourself when you repeat a mistake that you have made before and should have supposedly learnt your lesson from….? This is an important question and one I asked myself several times that day….! We arrived on Phi Phi at about 10.30 am after an easy journey that was tainted all the same by a difficult nights sleep and pressure from the tourist advisers on the boat. Two hours of being told that 1) there is no cheap accommodation where you are going and…2) what there might be will have gone by the time you get there! Now I know that this is a ploy to get you to book into over priced accommodation (that the touts get high commission for). When you get there it never looks like the photos they showed you and often it is grubby, old and smelly!!! (This is a general statement about touts the world over – not just on Phi Phi!!!)
We got to the pier and settled Gavin and Tehya in a cafe for breakfast as they were both hungry and hot. Becca, Oonagh and I set off to look for accommodation and got weigh-laid by the tourist accommodation office right by the pier (our 1st mistake). Here we got chatting with one of the adviser’s (our 2nd mistake) who told us that there was no cheap accommodation on the island and that they had booked out all the cheaper rooms already (a lie) and that the only rooms left were at a certain guest house and we would have to book immediately (our 3rd mistake) or not get a room. They also told us that the price of 500 Baht a night was only available through them and not direct with the guest house – if we went through the guest house we would have to pay 800 Baht.
Our biggest mistake was allowing our good judgement to be rushed and clouded – book the room with out viewing it first!! Thankfully we were not stupid enough to book more than one night – we had the sense to remember we might not like what we see when we got there. Why book it in advance at all then I hear you cry!!
I can not remember the name of the guest house – although I wish I could as I would put it here. We left with a young man who came from the guest house to help us with our bags – we set off back through the town following signs for the Tsunami evacuation route. We walked for about twenty minutes and finally arrived at the very back of the town tucked under the mountain. The street was like a ghetto, the main path used by everyone as a highway – went right by the door to our room (within a foot) – which when we went inside stank of mould and mildew. The owner of the guest house sat relaxing at the front of the building polishing what looked like an automatic machine gun. We left our bags and walked back to the cafe we had left Gavin and Tehya in feeling depressed and stressed knowing that Gav would say we were total Wally’s. We decided to leave our bags at the accommodation temporarily while we looked for other accommodation.
I went and spoke to a different tourist guide to get some general information about what accommodation was on the island, things did not appear any more promising! There were very few places for 500 Baht (with the current exchange £10), when I went to see them I was mightily disheartened. As a rule the standard was terrible, on the same level as a squat. The doors had been smashed in and patched up with plywood, the metal balcony rusted and hanging dangerously from the wall – not somewhere suitable for a four year old child to stay. The walls of one room had blood stains all over them and the bed (left unmade) had horrific
marks on the mattress. Oonagh and I left (with Tehya) feeling shocked that someone could possibly think it acceptable to show rooms in such a state.
We returned to Gav and Becca and told them what we had seen, they left to carry on the search – some time later Becca returned alone with no good news to say Gavin left on a boat to Long beach in a bid to try and solve our situation. He returned about an hour later to say he had found two bungalow’s for 500 Baht each – they were primitive and only had electricity from 6.00pm until 6.00am. On the upside they were close to the beach, the sea looked much more inviting. Cleaner than the two beaches that sit on either side of Phi Phi town. So we headed back to our rooms on the now named machine gun ally to let them know we would be leaving. We came to the unanimous decision that we would say they could keep our room payment in return for a hand with getting our bags to the pier!!!
{w:600;h:350} Ko Phi Phi Don, Thailand
(map of Phi Phi Islands, Thailand)
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We left on a long boat to Long Beach – and our next attempt at finding suitable reasonably priced rooms.
Posted by Hanna on November 5, 2008.
Tags: long beach, Phi Phi, Phi Phi Don, Phi Phi island, Phi Phi Lay, Phuket, Phuket Town, Thailand
Categories: Thailand
