Bamboo Island Camping

We met up with mr Tok again who agreed to take us over and let us do a spot of snorkelling again while he waited, so we did and took some pics on an underwater camera and then re embarked and headed for Bamboo island. We got there about 1ish i think and there was quite a few speed boats and sunbathers lined up along the beach so after we had unloaded the boat and mr Tok spoke to the ranger and sorted a tent for us to rent we headed off in search of virgin sand. At the end of the beach are crops of very jagged rocks and we humped our stuff over several and several small beaches before we found one we liked next to a solitary longtail fishing boat and a little shelter with a few people sitting inside eating waiting for the tide to come in and pick the boat from the sand ready for a nights fishing.
We got to making fires straight away and after not too much effort and about an hour we had boiling water for some delicious instant noodles… half way through eating I had noticed that the tide was in fact moving pretty quickly and that some of the rocks we had climbed over to get there werent far from the water before, so we scoffed up and headed back to the campsite stopping on the way on one beach completely empty except for a big log laying in the sand and sat on the log looking out to sea at a deep blue sky trying to sus out if it was a big storm or just the sunsetting… we had a swim and as the sun went down everything seemed so quiet and the bright colours of the sand, sea and lush forest faded away we walked around the last crop of rocks to the campsite, only to discover we were the only people camping that night and although there is a very small local population we had the paradise to ourselves and the chap who hired the tent had expertly put it up for us.
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We got to making a fire and some hot chocolates and watched the last few flicks of sunlight dissapear before we realised we had forgotton to buy a torch, and the gereators powering the lights was turned off at 10pm. We had our fire and we sat around a bench half in the forest and half on the beach and watched the storm we had been hoping wasnt a storm attack the mainland in the distance with lightning so amazingly feirce and bright it lit our table up better than any torch and it was so frequent we could take pictures of the lightning with not much effort, we ate and watched the storm for hours until it seemed Bamboo Island was the only place that wasnt under it because it seemed to be all around now, and a few spots of rain started falling we took the fire (cleverly on a sheet of tin) to our tent and sat under the porch but it never really managed to get us at all…

The morning came and we got up at 6 am when its coolest to watch what was left of the sunrise and just sat on the beach and swam in the sea for 4 of the most beautiful hours I’ve ever experienced until 11 am when Mr Tok came to take us back and the tourist boats start to thunder across the sea from Phi Phi…