Photog's day off at James Bond Island, Thailand

My roommate Matt & his girlfriend Lena had been researching Khao Phing Kan or whta is more commonly known as James Bond Island which is a small island in the northeast of Phang Nga Bay a few hours away from where we docked in Phuket. They also wanted to visit the fishing village of Ko Panyi which was famous for the whole village being in stilts above the water.

All this sounds amazing right? Except it was not a tour offered by the shore ex department and we had to make our own arrangements to get there as to visit both places it would take all day and just travelling to one of them would mean a journey of several hours. Everyone wanted to go in the photo department but one of us was supposed to go and film a tour that day, now if it had been on the Coral as junior I would be the one missing out (like I did on the team white water rafting in Costa Rica that I'm clearly still not bitter about!) but Travis was an awesome boss and said lets both go as long as we take a camera and do some filming we'll be fine.

Mick our manager was very relaxed with the team for the most part and was only prone to sweary outbursts usually involving onboard management and head office requests. The morning of the tour we all met on the gangway and saw that Mick was coming with us, me and Travis nervously looked at each other as he asked 'so which one of you is filming today?' Travis producded our smallest camera from his bag and said he'd be doing some filming that day on our trip to James Bond Island. I think Mick just nodded and didn't say anything so we still couldn't tell if we were in the shit or not but most importantly he was letting us go on the tour!

Between the team we'd sorted out the tour with a local operator in the port and I think the whole trip cost us around $40 each for the full day, even though it was a long trip and miles away from the port area we were fairly confident we would be back in time as we docked at 7a,m and all aboard for crew wasn't until 11pm, plenty of time to get back!

We met our minibus driver and got on the road for a few hours driving northeast through Phang Nga, after exiting the minibus our driver was now our skipper as we transferred to a small boat to travel across the bay to the various islands.

Our first stop was for lunch as we'd been travelling for hours and I was starving as our boat pulled up to Sunny Seafood in Ko Payni

I think that may have been one of the first times in my life that I got out of a wooden boat to walk up to a restaurant resting on stilts, I can't remember much about the food except there was a lot of it and I think it barely cost us $50 for 8 of us.

It was time go get back on the water and head out to the rest of the stilt village in Ko Payni.

I still do not know the story behind it but there was an absolute ton of small cats (strays or pets?) all over the village and with cats natural aversion to water it didn't make much sense having that many of them in a small village.

Next it was onto James Bond Island, famously named because it was a location in 1974's 'The Man With The Golden Gun' as seen below

It may have been a mix of heat / beer but I decided I wanted to go for a swim and thankfully I had swimming shorts with me, although with the folly of youth no towel which meant I had sand pretty much everywhere for the rest of the day which was fun in the searing Thai heat.

I'll always look back on this as one of the best days of the contract and one of the purest experiences you can have in the time frame we have when we are ashore. Everyone throughly enjoyed themselves and took a million pictures and it was just about exploring and seeing places you would normally never have a chance to see.

We certainly didn't worry about getting back in time as when you have your manager and assistant manager with you, and three quarters of the whole department even if the worst had happened and we had been delayed this would be very little chance that the company could afford to sack 3/4 of a whole department. When you are young you do not think about things like that and you just enjoy the moment, it was great to be sailing around in a tiny wooden boat with just the sound of water as we pushed through it.

Just to round off the day we still had a few hours of shore time when we got back to the port area, so of course we found a little shack bar / restaurant and proceeded to eat and drink ourselfs into a coma. Big thanks to Matt & Lena for opening my eyes in that there is more to do in port than just find a bar and get drunk which seemed to at least half the crews daily mission in port.

Oh and the video of the day? Well, it was one of our most popular videos that cruise and most of the PAX stopped to watch it in the gallery and then inadvertently we caused shit for shore ex as all the guests wanted to know why they didn't get the chance to go there. Though that was part of the magic of that day, being the only crew / people from the ship in the area so that it felt like an actual day off as there was no guests from the ship that we still had to be polite too even when we were off duty! Check out the great video shot and edited by Travis at the start of the article and don't miss an epic shot at 4.14.

On the next cruise diaries - More Asian adventures from the Sun Princess!