Ko Lipe
From the island of Koh Yao Noi I'd worked out a route farther south, because within about a week I needed to get to Kuala Lumpur, where my return flight was leaving from. Since I hadn't yet had my fill of snorkeling and crystal-clear water, I finally decided to travel to the island of Ko Lipe. It's a sought-after tourist spot, which made me a little apprehensive. And as it turned out, rightly so.
Even the beginning showed that I was heading to a place heavily visited by tourists. First I paid about 40 CZK for the hour-long boat ride from Koh Yao Noi toward Krabi, then 70 CZK for a ride in an old van to the town of Krabi, then 100 CZK for the roughly 3 km taxi ride to the station, and after that about 1,000 CZK for the bus and boat to Ko Lipe. The closer you get, the more you have to pay and the less anyone will let you use local transport. Once you're a tourist, then travel with the tourists and pay up.
The crowning touch was the final scheme, where the big boat anchors 30m from the island's shore and you have to pay yet more money for entry to the island (a nature reserve) and for a ride to the beach in a small boat. It's probably obvious to you that this is just another tourist trap, so the locals can squeeze as much money out of them as possible. I wasn't even on the island yet and it was already annoying me plenty.
It looked much the same when it came to finding accommodation. The prices really were high (easily 3,500 CZK a night for a nice beach hut), and on top of that no one wanted to haggle with me, because I simply had to stay somewhere on the island, so I'd have no choice but to agree to someone's high price anyway. In the end, after about an hour and a half of walking and riding around the island (there are these cheap tuk-tuk taxis here), I agreed to a dark, damp bungalow for 1,800 CZK a night.
Ko Lipe is a tiny island, so you can move around it comfortably on foot. In the morning you head to Sunrise Beach, in the evening to Sunset Beach, and in between you swim in the crystal-clear sea. There's a coral reef around the island, but the underwater life is already fairly damaged and you won't see many fish.
If you want to enjoy better snorkeling, you'll have no choice but to pay for some organized trip. You go out to the uninhabited islands of the national park, where the boat always stops for a while and you can dive. Then some break on the beach, watching the cheeky monkeys, and off you go again. The whole trip was a bit too organized for me, and we spent, for my taste, far too little time snorkeling. It's unbelievable how tourists behave even in places like these. No one respects the ban on standing on the coral, so even in these spots it'll probably look "who knows how" in a few years.
I was also surprised by the amount of plastic waste in this national park. There was tons of it on the little beaches, and it seemed to bother only the tourists, who here and there picked up a piece of plastic and carried it back to the boat and put it where it belongs. Marine pollution really is terrible and we have to do something about it. Especially in Asia, people should learn to dispose of plastic in an appropriate way instead of tossing it behind the nearest corner or into the nearest stream.
On this trip to the national park there were, in places, truly beautiful views of the enormous boulders that were part of the small islands or just jutted out of the sea. Those, apart from the underwater life and the monkeys, were definitely the most photogenic spots in all of Ko Lipe and its surroundings. On Ko Lipe itself you'll certainly enjoy photographing the brightly colored boats, which you'll find on essentially every beach. In contrast with the crystal-clear water and white sand, they make absolutely postcard-perfect compositions.
Even though Ko Lipe is a beautiful island with still-lovely surroundings, and even though it's laid-back and very photogenic, for me it was more of a tourist attraction than any kind of exotic experience. The island is full of tourists, restaurants and hotels. There's really no talk of any authenticity here anymore. In the middle of the island there are still two small settlements where the locals live in rather wretched tin shacks (with satellite dishes, of course), but otherwise the island already belongs to the tourists.
And when I wanted to get off the island, it just confirmed everything. From the previous island I'd left for 40 CZK. Here the trip off the island cost me about 800 CZK. By then I was saying goodbye to Thailand and heading for Malaysia, to the city of George Town, but more on that some other time.