Colorful fish and colorful “ladies”

Snorkeling excursion yesterday! More varieties of fish than we saw on our excursion last week. We started with a bus ride across the island to the harbor where we boarded this boat. It was much bigger than the speedboat we took out of Pattaya. This one held about 250 people, all enroute to Phi Phi (pronounced pee-pee) Island, a two hour ride across the water from Phuket Island. The ride to the island wasn’t bad, some rocking of the boat, but no slamming against the waves because this was a big boat.

As soon as we reached Phi Phi Island, we transferred to a smaller boat and went a short distance to this snorkeling area. all four of us snorkeled, but I was the one with the camera.  So many fish! more varieties than at Pattaya. The coral was a bit deeper in some places, so the fish picture is filtered thru more water, but great views. Again, Phillip pushed me around so I could focus on the pictures rather than swimming (we had life vests on). Here are some of our underwater shots. The first one is cloudy with the bits of bread that we tossed in the water to bring the fish to me.

You can see the bag of bread in Phillip’s hand in this next shot. Sometimes, the fish swam between my goggles and the camera, about a foot away.

The ones below were not the yellow and black fish. They were black with white stripes and a red mouth and chin (do fish have chins?)

I don’t have the software to get the following picture to more accurately reflect what we saw, but this one was iridescent blue and lime green.

This fish had the same colors, but with a green spine and more green on his tail. Perhaps a cousin to the above fish.

Although it looks blue in the picture, those pieces of coral on the bottom right of the picture are deep purple. A wide variety of coral colors and shapes in this area:

More coral shapes and another of the striped fish in this picture:

We snorkeled for an hour. The masks fit great and the water was calm, so it was a truly enjoyable experience. After an hour, the snorkel boat took us back to the Phi Phi pier, where we walked to the island’s hotel for a nice lunch of four different Thai entrees, onion rings, and spaghetti. Yes, an odd combination, all served family style from a lazy susan in the middle of our table. Walking back to the boat, we passed one of our fellow travellers trying to catch a fish by hand. He didn’t succeed (quick little fishies), but you can see how many came to his piece of bread. On the boat, they served fresh fruit on a skewer as we were leaving the island.

The ride back to Phuket was more difficult than the ride to Phi Phi had ben. The wind had come up and the waves were higher. The boat didn’t slam the waves, but the rocking of the boat was a bit much for me. None of the four of us got sick, but I sat in my chair with my eyes closed and went to a “happy place,” laying in a hammock at the ranch while Phillip (who held my hand during the entire boat ride) rocked the hammock and gave me margaritas in a glass with a salted rim. I had to add that last bit about the margarita to the story in my head because the salt water spray drenched us during the ride. Anxiety, but visualizing that story helped me a lot. We made it back safely, as I knew we would.

And now the story about the colorful “ladies.” Amanda and Leslie, you might not want to read the next part to the grandkids….unless you want to do some explaining they might not be ready for. Pattong Beach has an area that’s written about in the guidebooks and that David had to show us…. the transvestite club street. All the clubs had only performances of men dressed as women, and a lot of the bar girls were not really women. This group of performers had come out of their club between shows to try to entice tourists to attend their show. Some of them were really pretty. You can see in the background that not all of them wore evening dresses….. Sorry to disappoint, but we didn’t attend a show.