"James Bond Island"

Today we started around 9am, heading out with a 1.5h van ride to Ao Phang Nga Nat'l Park, which is home to our ultimate destination - James Bond Island.

But BEFORE we get there, we stopped at "Monkey Cave Temple", which is like a local religious cave system with a lot of golden Buddha statues. It was pretty cool but I was excited about the monkeys and the fortune I received. Unfortunately, my fortune told me I have trouble getting married because of my big mouth.

Arriving in Ao Phang Nga, we hop on a traditional Thai Longboat, which are interesting. Essentially, they are long wooden boats that have a captain in the back who powers and steers with what is essentially a car motor on one end and a propeller on the other.

image credit: Easy Day Thailand

image credit: Reddit, user deleted

This is the traditional type of watercraft here, and these things can absolutely rip through the water. They even have longboat racing and super jazzed up engines and boats, so, pretty cool. 

The ride to James Bond Island is beautiful, lots of limestone islets and dense jungle.



Now, I haven't seen the old James Bond movies so I'm going off of what I'm told, but "The Man with the Golden Gun" was filmed at this location, making it a huge tourist destination for this province.


The island is pretty small, so there wasn't a ton to do here besides walk around. 

Next we went to a floating Muslim village called Koh Panyee. This is super interesting...

So around 200+ years ago, 3 seafaring fishing families from Java settled here. Thai law states that foreigners can't own land, so they settled on the water. They've built a beautiful mosque, freshwater well, school, hospital, and even have floating soccer fields for the kids to play on. The women tend to storefronts while the children are in school and the men either work on the properties or fish. Some of the older generations speak Bahasa Indonesia but Thai is mostly spoken here. Because it is a Muslim establishment, no alcohol, pork, or other haram things can be found here.


That wrapped up our day, we headed back to the van and went back to Ao Nang, which is our home base town. I was exhausted so I was asleep pretty quickly haha, I'm still not 100% after food poisoning so taking it easy where I can and this heat is TOUGH. Saps the strength right out of you.

Love you guys, I'll check in again soon.

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