Ninehams Birthday Meal
I loved Phi-Phi as a place. I don’t know why exactly, I just did. It’s by far my most favourite place I’ve been to on our travels around Thailand.
There was lots of little shops with jewellery, shorts, dresses and beautiful hand crafted goods. A million restaurants and little eateries, with the standard food stools dotted around, a couple ice-cream shops, and a lot of dive centres.
The most important thing about Phi-Phi was that they have bakeries! We haven’t seen one bakery since we left England, and I’m not going to lie, I nearly wet myself with excitement when I saw the first one. We only actually bought two donuts between us all, but it’s the fact that they existed which was the exciting thing. The donuts were bloody good too.
Drinks were slightly more expensive on Phi-Phi than other places we’ve been, and people didn’t seem so keen on the old buckets which was upsetting.
We found a great bar called ‘Banana Bar’ which was a rooftop bar which overlooked the whole place. It had lots of cushion floor seats and bamboo chairs, darts board, and they held beer-pong competitions most nights. To get up to the roof you had to climb some really thin steep wooden steps whilst holding onto rope. It was not the easiest thing to do, especially when a little bit intoxicated but when you got to the top it was ace.
one too many...
England should definitely have more roof top bars, they should just stick some big heaters out there.
After drinking either at our hostel, Banana Bar or Sharkys, we’d head down to the beach. It seemed to be the place where everyone goes to get their dance on, get even more drunk, or pass out in the sand.
There was a random pole outside one of the beach bars which drunk people climb up onto. They then either dance, look stupid, or jump off into the crowd of merry dancers. The problem with this last part is you have to have a group of strong men to catch you. Normally it was ok, but we did witness a guy face-plant the floor which was incredibly funny, but also a little worrying.
We spent a lot of our time at these beach bars having a blimin good time.
We randomly bumped into Freddie (from Koh Tao) on the beach drunk, this has happened quite a few times in all three destinations we’ve all been at. It really is a small world. It’s nice to see a familiar face when you travel and move around so much, that seems like a strange thing to say about a guy we met less than a month ago, but strangers become friends quickly travelling.
We also met some Aussie lads, well two different groups of guys, who we somehow ended up spending quite a lot of time with as we kept on bumping into them. The funny thing about Aussies is that they are very similar to us English, but different at the same time. You may say ‘same same but different’.
The good thing about them is they like to drink, they like to drink a lot. This works well for us as we also like to have a little tipple or too. A lot of nationalities don’t seem to want to drink in the same way we do.
One of these groups said to us that we were the nicest girls they’d met on their whole entire trip! This obviously is true as we’re awesome. They also bought Nineham a lot of drinks on her birthday. What nice chaps.
We also met a collection of other people including a guy who was super tall so we named him the Green Giant, a guy who I thought was Swedish but turned out to be a vegetarian Australian (still don‘t believe this), a 19 year old English guy who was incredibly annoying and many other randoms-some good, some bad.
Ninehams Birthday
Me and Bie tried our best to sort out a good birthday for old nelly burgers to have, but sadly it didn’t quite go to plan.
Our biggest issue was she was always with us, the only time she wasn’t was when she was in the bathroom, but this quite obviously didn’t give us enough time to do anything.
We wanted to buy a birthday card, banner, baloons, badges…the works! But because Thailand is silly, we didn’t find one birthday card, badge, banner or anything in-fact. We had to stick to postcards together to form a card, we bought a weird yellow flower bow thing as a replacement for a badge, and drew on her in gold and silver pens as we couldn’t find a banner.
The presents were also a little shit. We wanted to buy her some random Thai stuff, which we did thanks to Seven Eleven, but we also wanted to buy her something nice. This also didn’t happen.
So her presents were fishy fish strips, some crisps which you have to dip into tomato ketchup (actually really nice, and fun), some blueberry pastry squares, and some seaweed crisps. We also got her a muffin with a tooth-pick in instead of a cake and candle.
It all sounds a little shit but there really isn’t much choice here. Maybe Thai’s don’t celebrate birthdays….
We went on the Maya Bay and snorkelling boat trip during the day, then wanted to go for steak for tea, but this also didn’t happen. When we got to the steak place ‘Aunis’ which is supposedly the best steak in Phi-Phi, they were completely full and were told we’d just have to wait outside until a table becomes free.
We didn’t want to wait so went somewhere else and order three lots of pasta as our mains, and nachos and onion rings too. This is the most food we’ve eaten in the entire trip. We were so full we actually felt sick, but it was all delicious.
The Boat Restaurant
After this we went to a bar to get drinks, then to our fav Banana Bar, then onto the beach. Standard.
I managed to wangle some free shots as it was Ninehams birthday which I was very proud of as they cost 80 Baht a shot. Nineham suddenly became very drunk, sort of out of nowhere, which lead to us departing the beach at a respectable 1/2am.
On the walk home a random Norwegian guy got down onto his knees and sang her happy birthday in Norwegian. It was very good!
She was vomming until about 3pm the next day though.
Chang
I was going to dedicate an entire blog post to Chang, but I thought that may be a bit over the top.
The drink Chang is a Thai beer which either comes in a botttle or can. It’s the cheapest beer you can buy which is why nearly all travellers drink it. The problem with Chang is that apparently the strength of it goes from 3% to 11%, so you never know how much alcohol you’ve actually consumed.
It used to be made illegally and so was a pirate drink which is why the percentage differs, well this is what we’ve been told anyway.
We’ve had many a Changover since being here but for some reason we just can’t stop drinking it. It’s fun to chant as well or make rhymes too, which is something we do like to do.
Chug a Chang Challenge is a favourite game of ours.
CHANG CHANG CHANG
