Kata Beach and Raya Island

As I looked through my pictures and my friends' pictures I realized that I will probably take more then two blog posts to show all the pictures of my trip. It is just so beautiful and I believe that a picture is in fact worth a thousand words.

We were about a 10 minute walk from Kata beach and we went and enjoyed the water the first day we got to the hotel. It was beautiful out and so much fun to play around in the huge waves. I don't have any good pictures from that day since we were too busy jumping the waves and trying to not get pulled under the salt water. I actually had my back turned to the waves and one hit me really hard on the back of my head! It hurt like someone had just hit the back of my head with a soccer ball or something. It reminded me of the power of water! We went back to this beach in the evening the next day and just enjoyed watching the sunset over the bay.

We never really saw any great surfers, but it was fun to watch them try to get up!

The sunset and the waves!

Trying to not look like tourist by giving the peace sign just like the Asians would do...

Look at us holding the sun...

Jumping for joy...I won't show you all the tries it took to get this picture....

Here we are...We were a wonderful travel group as we were all flexible and helped with the big decisions (like where to eat, etc)!

Raya Island
On Sunday we went on a day trip to Raya Island. We got a discount on the trip from the people at our hotel and we decided that it was probably worth going in a group since we got a ride from our hotel to the boat dock, speed boat ride, lunch, snorkeling stuff to use, snack, and a ride back to our hotel.
We got to the place and realized that we were actually going on a "princess" tour! How fun is that, haha! They had us divided into groups and each group had a tour guide. We were in the red group and our tour guide was crazy! He would give a cheer and we were suppose to answer back. We had to practice on the boat ride. It was about a half an hour ride to the island and we were sitting in the front of the boat. Let me tell you we were flying over waves, waves were coming over onto the boat so we were holding on for dear life! I guess I would rather go fast then rock back and forth. Once we got to the island we dropped off some people that were spending the night and we went to another bay to go snorkeling. We got to the other bay, rocked back and forth before they decided it was too rough...we went to another bay after another 10 minutes they decided that was too rough. By this time Annalisa was not feeling so great. We went back to the main beach and went snorkeling there. I really wish they would have let us touch dry land first, but they didn't we went straight into the water. It was fun to practice snorkeling and the water was beautiful, but after awhile Annalisa and I both went on to the boat and tried to calm our seasick selves! As soon as we touched the ground we were so happy and felt much better! We went to eat on the island and then we were free to do what we would like until 3pm. Ok this is too much talking- I am going to stop, so you can see pictures. They are all out of order because I just am not that good at blogging.

Love the color of the bay!

The guy in the gray shirt was our tour guide. Nice white sand!

We went to a look out point  on the island and were warned about  a big "lizard." He walked across a path right before we walked back down. I am thankful that Laura saw him before I got too close!

Picture of our boat on the way back from the island. I don't have a great picture  on the way there when we were in the front.

The sign that said we were going on the "Raya  Princess Tour"

Ok sorry but I just love the color of the water and cool little boats.

At the lookout point- look at that water!

Searching for shells and other cool things

So when it was about 2:50pm the tour guide for the blue group started walking around the beach yelling that the blue group had 10 minutes before they left. Now you have to understand that this is Thailand. We got picked up from our hotel about 15-20minutes after the latest time they said they would pick us up. Anyway our tour guide was loud and we hadn't heard him yet. We started getting ready to leave, etc but we weren't too worried. Then we saw him walking towards a boat on the other side of the beach- so we started walking that way, too. As I reached the water (I was the 1st of the 3 of us). I saw the boat start leaving! I tried to go really quickly over the rocks and a guy yelled at me that I was going to fall....well I was going to be stuck on the island if I didn't run! Our tour guide finally saw us and they stopped the boat and we waded out to the boat. There was no apology or anything from them, we just said "sorry we didn't hear you tell us it was time to go." As we continued to pull away he started counting people! Great idea! 

We went for about 10minutes and our boat died, they worked on fixing one of the 3 motors and then started going for about 1 minute before it died again. They finally got it fixed and we were off for good this time. Our tour guide then started laughing about how we were running to catch up with the boat and his excuse was that there were other boats that needed to get in. Oh well, I guess you just need to be ready at anytime.

Our boat