Banana Beach, always say yes to hidden beaches

*This piece was written in August 2015, but it made me think of such a happy time in my life i had to publish it again.

Okay, so Phuket is probably one of my favourite places in the world. And it's mainly because Banana Beach was so sick.

Banana Beach is supposedly one of Phuket's secret island beaches and it's considerably less crowded than most of the ones we came across - Patong was practically crawling with people and Surin was a little meh in comparison. The dealio with Banana Beach though is that it is a little tricky to get to (we took a traditional fishing boat over), but we saw people climbing through the jungle from the main road to get down. It is absolutely 110% worth it just to get away from the crowds and luxuriate in peace as you soak up the Vitamin D.

As you can see from my fancy ass hipster disposable above, it's surrounded by super lush foliage and the sand is practically pristine - there's like no rubbish anywhere. Apparently a few years ago it used to be completely littered with plastic chairs, but then after the military coup all the vendors were chased out along with all the seats and now the only people who hang out there are tourists and a ballsy group of people who've set up a table in the jungle to sell coconuts. (God, there's nothing like a cold coconut on a hot day. Except maybe a cold coconut on a hot day with a generous drizzle of vodka.)

These were the dudes who ferried us around, they turned out to be related to our driver for the vacation so that worked out for the best. There's a snorkelling area that they drove us to about fifteen minutes away from Banana Beach, so we headed over there to see some fish. Somewhere along the way, our driver magicked up a plate of freshly cut (and cold) watermelon out of thin air and I'm still convinced that he's a watermelon wielding, fishing boat driving, bread throwing wizard.

So this was the snorkelling area that we got taken to - clearly we should've woken up a little earlier to get a prime spot, but Bangla Street wreaked havoc on our souls yet again.

The guys had loads of snorkel gear so we popped everything on and were told to wait as they pulled out a sack of the nasty ass bread crusts that were slowly going mouldy and began chucking them into the water.

Within seconds, the water near our boat was completely flooded with fish and we were told to jump in.

Yeah, so, you didn't think I'd go snorkelling without my underwater camera did you?

There wasn't really all that much to see, the occasional angelfish and a flood of super common silver fish but it was still really fun to splash about.

Maybe there are better snorkel areas in Phuket, but maybe I'm spoilt by the Philippines. (Tip: Coron in the Philippines will always be the best snorkelling, hands down.)