To Thailand

I had an early start to get a taxi across Langkawi to the jetty for the ferry to Koh Lipe in Thailand. There was a lot of hanging around once I got there and checked in for the ferry. After queuing to go through Malaysian immigration everyone had to hand their passports over to the ferry company. It was cloudy in Langkawi and about a third of the way into the journey, the clouds darkened, the horizon disappeared and I watched the approaching rain storm get closer and closer before it hit us. There was lightning in the distance too. It was quite rough for a while but thankfully it cleared up and we arrived in Koh Lipe as the sun came out again.

Koh Lipe is a tiny island. It doesn’t have a jetty so the ferry docked at an offshore pontoon and everyone waited there for small boats to transfer us to the beach. The small boats drive up as far as they can onto the beach and you get out in the water. We all hung around waiting to be told where to go to get our passports back. It was a weird feeling to be arriving in another country without my passport and straight onto a beach! We were directed into pick-up trucks which drove us across the island to a different beach where the immigration office was. We queued up, first to get out passports back, and then to get stamped into Thailand.


I went to find where I was staying and then to get some lunch. In the afternoon I walked around the island to the different beaches. It’s low season at the moment since it’s raining quite a lot so there aren’t a lot of people here. I was shocked at the amount of plastic and other rubbish there is on all the beaches. I don’t know whether this time of year means more gets washed up during monsoon season or if it’s like this all the time. Perhaps more effort is made to clean up during high season. I’d planned to find a shady spot on ‘sunset beach’ but there wasn’t anywhere in the shade that wasn’t covered in rubbish so I walked back to the main beach. At one end, there was less rubbish so I stayed there and went for a swim. This is one of the beaches. I carefully made sure the rubbish, which was all along the high tide mark, was out of the shot.