This morning, I checked out of my room at Hat Railay Village and moved to another resort called Ya Ya. It's further away from the beach, but is cheaper. After I switched accomodation, I shared the cost of chartering a longtail boat with a Danish guy. We went to Koh Gai (Chicken Island) so named because of a large rock tower that looks like a chicken's head. It took me a while to get used to snorkelling. I've never done it before, and found that I could only take panicked breaths at the thought of breathing with my face under the water. I was even worse when I actually got in the water. Swimming around for 10 minutes in a panicked state tired me out, so I pulled myself back up onto the boat for a while. The next time I got in, I took things more slowly, and managed to get so used to using the snorkel that I stayed under for about an hour, only coming up occasionally to drain the water out of my mask.

At Chicken Island there are lots of tropical fishes. The boat guy had a few loaves of bread, and when you threw a bit in, hundreds of tiger fish would swarm to the bread and rip it to pieces. The boat guy threw bread in the water near me while I watched the fish under the water. A couple of the tiger fish actually had a go at my fingers, I guess they look a bit like bread.

The coral around Chicken Island is not very spectacular - it's mostly browns and greens, but the variety of fish is amazing. It's like swimming in a tropical fish tank. I invented a game called "follow that fish" where you pick a fish and see how long you can follow it around before it freaks out and takes off. Even when you're wearing flippers, the fish can all swim faster than you.

After Chicken Island, we moved to another island which is right behind Chicken Island. They are actually joined by a 100 metre long sand bar that is only just submerged, so that you can walk from one to the other. The coral around this island (which I didn't get the name of) was mostly dead. Large areas of it looked like forests after a typhoon, all broken and laying on the seabed. In the bits that were still alive, there were heaps of evil looking black sea anenomes with long spines, so I didn't hang around there. The Danish guy persisted, and went a long way out, but I contented myself following fish around. I found a school of about six big rainbow colored fish with ridiculously small fins that were grazing on algy or something similar that grows on the rocks and coral. With my ears under the water, I could actually hear them scraping the stuff off the rocks.

After we'd been at the second island for about an hour and a half, a storm that we had seen over the mainland came over where we were. There's a basic food shop on the beach which consists of a trestle table under a basic shelter. We waited there for the storm to pass, and then went back to Railay Beach.

The snorkelling at Chicken Island was great, and I'm glad I went. There's still more I'd like to do at Hat Railay: I'd like to rent a kayak and row around the bay to look at the limestone cliffs and the beaches that you can only get to by boat. I'd also like to join a rowing tour that goes to the caves in this area and further north near Phang Nga. I have to leave soon though, to go back to Bangkok to vote in the Australian eleection on November 10. I'm thinking about leaving tomorrow to go to Koh Phang Nga (near Koh Samui) to go to the next full moon party. After that, I'll probably take a few days to get to Bangkok. I might come back to this part of Thailand after the election.