So… the slow-ish boat to Koh Tao took several hours and stopped once, on Koh Phangan. More than half the people left the boat. I was glad I wasn’t going with them. Braving the intermittent showers, a large group of people hung out outside on the top deck of the boat and swapped stories. I’d lucked in to two fairly cool people, and we were soon fast friends. One of the people who had joined us was a Thai girl who worked for a dive resort on Koh Tao as, effectively, a tout. Her name was Om (I think!) and despite trying to get us to dive at the resort she worked for, she was very cool. She spoke excellent English and had a lot of good stories. The two guys I was with had lots of questions about everything in Thailand and she was only too happy to talk with us about everything from religion to lady-boys.
Needless to say, the two hours between Koh Phangan and Koh Tao passed quickly. We decided to go with Om to the dive resort she worked for, because a) she was cool, b) it had a shiny new ute with rain protection to take us there, c) it was raining, and d) we knew the place by name and it had a good reputation.
Because I only had a short time on Koh Tao before heading to Singapore to watch the Singapore Open golf tournament, I was thrown right in the deep end: I was to start my open water course that evening. My group was a little large but that wasn’t a problem, and everyone was fairly cool. Most of them were Irish – there was only one other guy in the group of 9 and he was an English guy married to an Irish girl! The dive instructor was a former English primary school teacher who went to Thailand for three weeks, decided she liked it, and has been there for two years working as a dive instructor. We had a trainee dive master with us – also English and a radio DJ, who also went to Thailand for a few weeks one year ago.
The next four days passed in a blur of cheap beer, delicious food, rain, diving, rain, diving, rain, rain, rain, diving, and has the distinction of being one of the most memorably fun times I’ve ever had in my life. There’s something about sitting six meters from the water on a beach with cheap cold beer watching people twirl fire sticks, whilst with a group of twenty people with various colour skin, various accents, and various spoken languages, that makes for an incredibly enjoyable time. Sure, it’s not a particularly authentic travel experience when one realises that there’s nothing on Koh Tao that isn’t for tourists or for the people who support the tourist industry – that is, there’s no real Koh Tao. It’s a place for people to dive.
During the dive course I started to feel worse and worse, and I was actually glad when it was over. My whole body ached and I guess the cold came back to bite me. However, I am now qualified to dive! The course was completely awesome and I really can’t wait to get back…
The day after an enormous night out, including dinner at a fairly decent restaurant, to celebrate certification, I was due to leave Koh Tao for Koh Samui. The night was one of the wettest they had had for some time, and in the morning several long tail boats along the beach had flooded to such an extent that they had sunk. Whilst waiting for my ferry I watched locals trying to un-sink the boats, with varying degrees of success.
I arrived on Koh Samui late, stayed in another dodgy hotel, and awoke at about 4am to head to the airport. I was due in Singapore that night, via Bangkok.
