Our last few days in Ko Lanta

Knowing we only had one full day left, on the 14th we took the 'Four Islands' tour. It was a trip on an awesome speedboat (that had three 225hp Honda engines!) around four islands just south of Ko Lanta, giving us two snorkelling stops, a beach/lunch stop and the Emerald Cave. The first snorkelling stop was great, the water was really clear so we got to see plenty of fish and coral, although most of the fish were quite small and a lot of the coral was quite bleached. I was even more gutted at this point that my Fuji underwater digital camera had broken in Vietnam because I could have got some great shots, so I had put up with taking ones from the boat.

Next stop was for some more snorkelling, this time there were even more and even bigger fish. The few guys running the trip started chucking in pieces of banana into the water, which I know you're not really supposed to do, but it meant that hundreds of brightly coloured fish swam right in front of our faces. I grabbed hold of a piece of banana, and the fish were swarming around my hand nibbling at the fruit and my hand.

Lunch time! We parked up on a beach on Koh Hai and had a couple of hours to chill out on the beach and eat the food provided. Chicken, rice, veg with some fresh fruit, all washed down with a Coke. The last stop was to see the Emerald Cave. The boat pulled up near a small cave enterance, and one of the guys jumped in the water armed with a torch and told us to follow him. We all jumped in the water, and starting swimming into the pitch black cave. At one point you could not see the enterance we had just came in through or the exit at the other end, it was just total darkness (apart from the pathetic light coming from the tour guide's torch up ahead). Luckily this wasn't for long and I could soon see the exit and swam towards it. As I swam out of the cave, it opened onto a small beach and the Emerald Cave. It is almost like being inside a volcano, you are completely surrounded by rock, with the cave being the only way to get in and out. They did offer to take my camera in a waterproof case through, but I didn't want to risk it so I've added a photo I found on Panoramio.com.

Emerald Cave enterance

Taken from Panoramio.com

15th Feb would be our last morning in Ko Lanta, so as we had a bit of time before heading to Phuket we went to say goodbye to some of the people we had gotten to know. First we went to the Welfare centre to take Pepsi and Lanta out for one last walk down to the beach and say goodbye to all the staff there. Pepsi came in the sea this time for a swim! This was becoming a pretty sad morning!

Then we went to Blue Moon to say goodbye to Gang and his eagle. He gave us our last drinks on the house which was nice! So we're going to get some prints of the photos we had taken there and post them to him, he said he is going to start a new photo album and put them in it! The eagle, who was rescued by Gang, can't fly yet because its feathers were too damaged but on our last day it decided to try so was jumping around on the ground right in front of us and gave himself a bath. Lek was nice enought to give us some little presents on check-out and drive us to the bus station. Lek is really creative and makes miniture models out of clay, so she made me a tiny monkey and made Isabella a bracelet.

The five hour coach drive to Phuket was pretty horrible. The first part we were on the back row which has an annoying hard bar underneath the whole back bench, but after being on the road for a couple of hours some of the other travellers got off, so we moved into some more comfortable seats. We were going to spend one night in Phuket because our flight was quite early in the morning, Lek offered to call a hotel we had found the details of online, although they were full and recommended another place. There was a slight lack of communication, and Lek thought the next place she had called was 'Nai Yang Beach Resort', so we got a taxi from the bus drop off point to it. Unfortunately, the place we were staying in was called Nai Yang Cottage! So after some confusing discussions with the staff at the wrong hotel we realised what had happened, and they kindly called Nai Yang Cottages for us who promptly came to collect us.

Clearly we were in luck with all the nice people we had been meeting and helping us because the guy at Nai Yang Cottages, Kitty, was also extremely helpful and friendly. He didn't want any money for collecting us in his own car. A bit later on when we had got back from dinner he offered us some food he had just cooked with what I assume was his family (his house was only across the road!) but we were full so had to decline. He then took us to the airport in the morning at around 7am, in time for our 09:50 flight to Singapore.