So after saying a bittersweet goodbye to Railay we took a short boat ride to Koh Phi Phi to meet up with Jess for a weekend of partying and scuba diving before heading further north. Koh Phi Phi was nice but a little hyper developed for tourists. It consisted entirely of bars, hotels, dive shops, crappy souvenir stalls and restaurants. We had pretty hardcore night on the town before picking a random scuba company to take us into the deep. The scuba master was a crazy mangler South African who really liked to talk. He spent a whole hour describing what we would see while diving before opening up and describing his last weekend that he spent in Thai prison after blacking out drunk. He told us proudly that he hadn't touched booze in 7 days. Probably a pretty big feat if you live on Koh Phi Phi. Anyways, it turned out that Jess, Kiersten, and I would be the only people diving that day. Because Jess had her advanced scuba certification she was technically able to dive up to 30m. Kiersten and I were supposed to go no deeping than 18m. Fortunately that didn't stop our South African buddy. Because he was a certifided instructor and another dive master was coming along for dive, he decided that he would just take us deep anyway. So on our first fun dive, Kiersten and I went to 26m with poor visibility and hard current and enjoyed a much more technical dive then were certified to experience (our dive logs say we went to 20m hehe). Anyway, our two dives that day were much more serious than any we did in Koh Tao. We had a great time and despite the poor visibility the dive sites were incredible and we saw a number of alien fish that I couldn't possibly attempt to describe.
From Phi Phi we went with Jess to Phuket and hung out for few days before taking a bus north. Our plan was to head north, see a few places (Chiang Mai etc.) before heading into Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia. We stopped shortly in Bangkok before transfering onto another bus that took us up to the riverside town off Kanchanaburi. It was a nice change from the southern Thai islands; less touristy and felt more like a real city rather than a giant tourist trap. We rented a motor bike and rode 60km up to the famous 7 tier waterfall at the nearby national park. The waterfall was nice and everything but I thought that it didn't compare to local areas back home like the sooke potholes. We swam a bit chilled out, let the carp knibble our feet and then hit road back into town.
Our next stop was the ancient Thai capital of Ayuthaya to explore some ancient ruins. I didn't really know what to expect, but I really enjoyed this town. Although there was lots to see, there weren't too many tourist and ruins were in great shape. The town itself felt like a real Thai town and the people were really nice. It was here that we started considering another possible plan: going back to Bangkok and flying to Myanmar. We had both been interested in travelling to Myanmar since arriving in south east Asia but hadn't really started to seriously discuss it until here. While considering this option we spent our time in Ayuthaya on crappy singlespeed bike roaming ruins and eating the local food. After checking the cost of flights to Myanmar (you can't go there overland from Thailand) we thought, screw it, lets go. So instead of heading further north we caught a train to Bangkok and sorted out Myanmar visas.
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