James Bond Island

I also booked another trip to go to Kao Ping Island, although now a days it's called James Bond Island because they filmed a scene there out of The Man With The Golden Gun.

It was a bit of an anti climax to be honest, all the locals seem to hyp it up and rave about it, but it wasn't really anything special! At least I can say I've been there now though.

It was a good day out though, and we saw lots of other islands and stuff on the way.

So we set off from the pier in this boat:

Not log after we set off the boat stopped by a little island.

The guys on the boat started throwing kayaks out the back!

And then we were all partnered off with a tour guide, jumped in a kayak, and off we went into some caves!

This is my tour guide for the day, Manott was his name I think:

The entrances to the caves were really narrow and low, so we had to lie down in the kayaks as we passed through them!

Because of all the moisture in the caves my camera misted over on the inside of the lens :( It's ok now but it meant that most of the pictures I took were cloudy :(

Here's the entrance to the first cave:

As we went through we could see (only just as it was dark) all the stalagmites and stalactites in the cave.

And then we came out into a clearing that is a vast open space inside the rock itself!

As we were paddling along, my guide spotted a monkey in the tress up above!

And then he pointed out some unusual shaped rocks and things.

We then headed back to the boat and drove to another rock formation that was similar to the pervious one, and again we headed off out in the kayaks to explore the inside of it:

We got back on the boat again and set off to James Bond Island!

We approached the island from the back and had to get the kayaks in to shore because the water is shallow.

There's a small footpath that leads round to the bit where the filming took place for James Bond, this is apparently it:

I tried to get my picture taken in front of the famous rock formation, but because the of the sun and the moisture on the camera lens they didn't turn out very well :(

This was taken just after we left James Bond Island.

We then had some lunch on the boat, and headed to another island with a beach on it, where we kayaked to again and spent an hour relaxing on the beach!

On the way back there were lots of rock formations, some of them really interesting shapes!

And this was my day out at James Bond Island!

Coral Island

I booked a trip over to Coral Island by speedboat. It's not far off the coast of Phuket, but the place AMAZING!

As you can see from the pics, the water is that clear it's nearly transparent!

I also booked an introduction to scuba diving course. From the brief description on the web page it sounded like it was going to be a course based in a swimming pool teaching you how to use the equipment, also the price of the package was ridiculously cheap compared to the other diving trips they did, but the Thai people don't have health & safety at the top of their agenda! So we had a quick 15 minutes in the resort pool, learning the basics, then we were literally thrown inn the deep end and off we went into the ocean!!! It's was ABSOLUTLY FANTASTIC!!! :) :)

Here's me getting my scuba gear on before the course started:

Fully masked up!

And under we go!

 

There were 3 of us that were doing the course that day (me and 2 Japanese girls, who spoke really good English and were really nice).

So after a bit of practising in the pool it was off to the big blue sea!

 

This is our instructor who showed us around under the Ocean (I didn't catch his name, probably wouldn't be able to pronounce it anyway :) )

 

Look we found Nemo :)

Our instruction pointed to us to touch the coral, when you do it kind of sticks to your finger, it's really freaky!

The coral isn't the other thing that clings to your finger though, Nemo came over and had a little bite :)

Our instructor then found us a star fish.

So we all had a hold and passed it round the group!

And then he found another one and took our pictures with them:

He then got some fish food out of his pocket:

And the fish came flying over for it!

As we were swimming I felt something brush against my leg, I thought it was one of the other divers behind me, then it happened again but this time it was more sharp, and again, so I looked behind me and the little white fish in the middle of the picture above was biting me!!! It kept swooping in and biting my leg (it really hurt too!) In the end I turned around and kicked my flipper at it and swam away as fast as I could and lost the little the bastard :)


And then we were running low on air, so we had to go back to shore :(

We had some lunch on the beach, then I went back in the sea to do some snorkelling. It wasn't as good as the scuba diving, but I still got some nice videos/pictures:

All in all it was a fantastic day and I'd recommend a visit to Coral Island if you're every near Thailand!