Retired Pimms: to Racha Yei island for snorkelling

Although we are staying at a beach hotel on the south of the island, the beach is a shallow and muddy one where longtail boats are moored, and is not suitable for swimming. That said, it has a beautiful view of the sea, and a lovely swimming pool.

As the tide goes out it leaves the longtail boats high and dry. When the tide is in, the locals can still walk out to their boats in knee deep water for several hundred metres. In the distance is Chalong pier, where speedboats are moored for tours to the nearby southern islands - Coral island and Racha Yei, as well as Phi Phi, a little further out.

There are several tour operators offering trips to the islands that lie off Phuket. The major attractions are Racha Yei island, lying just beyond Coral island and having fewer boats congesting the swimming beaches, Phi Phi island, and then a host of further flung islands which take longer than an hour to reach. Racha Yei takes 40 minutes, and Phi Phi just over an hour.

Whichever tour operator you chose you are very likely to find yourself in one of the fast large capacity speedboats lined up on the shores of Chalong near the boat pier.

These all carry about 50 passengers, and have 3x 25 horsepower engines, plenty of power to get you there and back without problem, depending of course on the weather and the waves. Fortunately the sea was calm and the waves less than a metre so the trip there and back provoked no vomiting or “Hui Hui” as the Thais call it, and they dish out travel sick tablets and free teas and coffees before sailing during a brief talk about how the day will unfold.

Despite a really dire report from a disgruntled passengers (on tripadvisor)we went with the Raya Princess lot, a really big outfit operating several identical boats. I tried an outfit online that came with rave reviews from trip advisor, but their costs were three times higher and they were anyway booked up for 2 weeks in advance, doing smaller initimate trips with just 20 or so to a boat.

No matter, the Raya Princess team were efficient, and we got a half price deal off the internet. Making the day only 42 quid for the two of us, a steal for what they provide. We had ice cold water or coke, fresh pineapple and watermelon on board, and on the island we had a great buffet at a restaurant on the island. The only things that were chargeable extras were hire of fins (you really only need these to tread water while getting sea water out of your mask), and sunbeds on the island. We elected to hire fins anyway, but had no spare cash for sunbeds and shade, and therefore had to hop around getting shade where we could find it, not very easy in the middle of the day, but we managed.

Racha Yei is quite lovely with powder white sands in the swimming beach, and diving schools taking Chinese for PADI courses in the shallows.

We had about an hour to relax and swim, before heading round to the rocky coves to do some snorkelling.

The water was very clear and there were some species of fish in the swimming beach, although not very colourful ones. Since the only way to get on and off the island is by boat, there are quite a few lying just off the floating jetty.

The snorkeling was as good as in Zanzibar off the coral reef there, with lots of zebra fish, and some larger colourful species I don’t know the name of. The fish flock about the snorkellers, since they are attracted by the bread that folk take to feed them. They even come and take bread out of your fingers.

After a pleasant lunch on the island we searched for some shade...inevitably we had to move about.