Fun on the Thai beaches

This picture pretty much describes what we've been doing for the past two weeks. Clay and Trista finished their SCUBA diving course and I was happy to finally have someone to build sandcastles with.

We worked well into the night and it was quite a sight when it was done. In the morning I noticed some of the local stray dogs had marked my fortress as their territory. At least the tide hadn't come in yet.We found a little friend who helped us. We named him 'Oreo' (or Double-stuffed as a nickname) and he was so cute and friendly!

One day we rented motorbikes and rode up to the top of Koh Tao Island and found a lookout point where we could see the nearby island of Nangyuan. It is a protected park so you have to pay 100 baht ($3.00) to enter.
Then somebody had the crazy idea to put our swimsuits on and swim out to it so we wouldn't have to pay.

It was a long swim but one of the coolest beaches I've ever seen. The snorkelling was awesome, too. We couldn't swim with the camera so we don't have any pictures of it.
This is a view from above but it doesn't do it justice. We loved Koh Tao and you can see why when you see the view from our beach bungalows.

Then we were off to another beach on the other side of Thailand. We took a boat to the mainland, then a bus across the Malay penninsula over to Krabi where we got a longtail boat out to Railay beach.

I thought I had already found the perfect beach, but I was wrong.
It's OK to be wrong about some things. I didn't mind finding another awesome beach.

Of course it's not the perfect beach unless you can make a really good sandcastle. Clay tested the waters (or the sand, rather) and decided to be creative. Can you guess what they are?

The Salt Lake Temple, Balanced Rock, and Clay and I after we got distracted by the beautiful sunset.

There was a thunder and lightning storm that night and I had lots of room to build my sandcastle when the beach cleared out as it started raining.

This was the final product. We even had a few curious spectators.

We eventually moved on from Railay and went over to Phuket island. It wasn't as pretty, but the first couple of days it rained anyway. When it stopped we decided to try boogie boarding.

This one didn't work out so well . . .Clay and Trista went SCUBA diving out on Koh Phi Phi and said it was beautiful so we took the ferry out there. And suddenly we entered the kingdom of Floren and were faced with the cliffs of insanity! Inconceivable!

Koh Phi Phi got hit pretty hard by the tsunami, but there is no sign of it now. It is another perfect beach in a long line of contestants.And the runners up are:

Monkey Bay

Koh Phi Phi Ley
and Maya Bay
Yay! We have a winner! Maya bay was where the movie "The Beach" with Leonardo DiCaprio was filmed.

And it really was beautiful . . . .

We saw all this on a sunset tour and dinner was included. We also got to snorkel and kayak all for about $16.00 It was a fun day!

And now I'm off to find the next perfect beach . . . .

(Actually we are off to Kuala Lumpur and Singapore next. So we'll say goodbye to the beach for another week or so . . . .)