Travel by Photo – Phi-Phi Island, Thailand (Part 2/2)

Let’s continue our photo travel to Phi-Phi Islands. We left Monkey Bay and arrived at Maya Bay at about 11:30am. If you were new to this travel blog and wish to know where we were coming from, read Part 1/2. Maya Bay is one of the most popular beach of Ko Phi-Phi Leh Island though there is no permanent inhabitants on the island. The Holywood’s movie, “The Beach” and the leading actor, Leornardi DiCaprio, have both further popularised Maya Bay (the main backdrop at where the movie was screened) as well as enahnced its image to the world.

You can count the number of boats and people in the photos above. There were full of tourists snorkelling, swimming and fish feeding there. We spent 1 hour there relaxing on the white sand beach, snapping lots of photos around and also very importantly, people watching! 🙂

Yeah! I’m taller than those lime rock mountains at the back!

What’s the essence of beautiful portrait shot? Clean and nice background… apart from the lighting off course in order to capture vibrant images.

With one exception that when you want to show the distractive background as part of the photo. As the above photo is full of distraction with people and mountain in background but it was the purpose of the shot to show how crowded the beach was…

That day weather was really perfect with beautiful sunshine and clear torquious sea water.

Beautiful scene of Maya Bay. We left Maya Baya at 12:30pm for another movie backdrop scene. This time we had to travel back in time to 20 years ago to see the cove where James Bond’s movie, The golden Finger was screened. What was next? Snorkelling time again at Loh Samah bay of Phi-Phi Leh. What tourists could do in Phi-Phi Islands at day are mainly swimming, snorkelling, diving, kayaking and fish feeding. These activities are carried in bays and coves of the 2 biggest islands of Phi-Phi, The Ko Phi-Phi Don and Ko Phi-Phi Leh.

Another great example of perfect lighting. I did nothing to the above 3 photos except some sharpening and resizing. No Saturation had been enhanced.

One lighting illusion I like very much is this example above. No shadow (or little bit) of boats could be seen on the sea surface although the sunlight was harsh. This made the object (the boat in this case) like pasted onto the photo but accidentally left out the shadow… 🙂

Most travel agents now are using speed boat for Phi-Phi Island excursion. It saves at least 2-3 hours from the journey if you were boarding at Phuket. I would strongly recommend this type of transport.

At 1:30pm, we left Ko Phi-Phi Leh for Phi-Phi Don for lunch. All of us onboard seemed exhausted and starving.

We passed by the ‘Viking Cave’ at Ko Phi-Phi Leh where bird nests are found and picked for the thriving bird nest soup industry in the region.

This is it: We were approaching Ko Phi-Phi Don, the biggest island of the islands group.

Buffet lunch was served at Long Beach of Phi Phi Don Island. Food varieties and quality were ‘normal’ with western and local Thai foods. Off course, Tom Yam soup was served as well.

What we could do after lunch? Some were shopping for souvenirs next door (above), some were relaxing under shade on the long beach (below) and some might wanted to stay out on seaside for the beautiful scenery (further below).

UPDATED: Click Here to view the original high resolution file of the above photos in Flickr.

At 2:30pm, after our lunch at Phi-Phi Don, we headed to our last stop of Phi-Phi day tour, the Ko Phai or Bamboo Beach. Rows of beach chairs were provided for visitors to lie down, relax and maybe sun-bathe. Again, plenty of fish for travellers to feed and feel. This time round, I left my Nikon D60 on the beach chair and went out to snorkel and fish feeding! Great! At last I could feel the sea water of Phi-Phi Island rather than tell stories from the back of my camera view finder! 🙂 Off course, I needed to compromise. That’s was why no photos of Bamboo Beach could be seen here. Camera man was under water! 🙂 We left Phi-Phi Island and reached back to our Safari Beach Hotel at Patong Beach at about 6pm. The day trip to Phi-Phi Islands was concluded as a worthy and fascinating excursion with a cost of about THB2500 per adult. 🙂 – Travel Feeder.

About The Author

Cecil Lee

The author is an avid traveler and photography hobbyist who loves to share with others his travel and photo-taking experience in many popular tourist destinations around Europe, Asia and Australasia. Read the exciting stories with many photos captured on his journeys.