The Maller Family Travel Gazette: |
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| The weather once again is wonderful, despite the warnings about this being monsoon season. If we've had three or four hours of rain in the two and a half weeks we've been here, I'd be surprised. Delighting in the paradise that is our final resort location here in Thailand, we decided to go for the higher-end form of entertainment today: a speedboat snorkeling trip. It cost about eight times what a longboat trip costs, but it gets you around a lot faster and lunch is included, so it seemed worth it. So off we went after breakfast. Our boat drivers delivered us to some spectacularly beautiful areas around Phi Phi Don (the larger island, where we're staying) and Phi Phi Lei (a smaller, uninhabited island). We all had fun snorkeling around enormous numbers of fish, beautiful (yet terribly battered) coral reefs, and lovely limestone formations. We finally stopped for lunch on a scenic deserted beach. Max and Sam went to play in the water, and Max ambitiously swam out to a nearby coral reef. Moments later, we heard him yell to us that "the urchins got me". We were terrified, and as Max made his way back to the beach, the boat drivers sprang into action. As he approached the beach, Nut, the head man of the three man crew, quickly cut open nothing other than a lemon, and immediately applied it to the three distinct urchin spine punctures on Max's heel. I'm sure modern medicine has numerous, more complex and expensive antidotes, but the men seemed convinced this was all we needed to do. Proud of Max's courage and his positive attitude, we all loaded back into the boat and returned the our hotel. We had a quiet afternoon, except for a small expedition Sam and I took to see a huge colony of nutty little fiddler crabs near the hotel. | |