Koh Tao, July 13-17, 2008
Trip Start
Jun 05, 2008
1
12
18
Trip End
Ongoing
Ko Tao,
Thailand
Thursday, July 31, 2008
We began diving that very day and it consumed the majority of our time on Koh Tao from there on out. Our instructor, Simon, was from England and had been living on Koh Tao for nearly a year. We quickly befriended him and had a lot of fun hanging out on the dive boat, sunning ourselves on the second level between dives. Diving itself was a great adventure. Not having given it much thought at first, I was a bit surprised by the heft of the equipment required. Although it's weightless in the water, the oxygen tank and vest (called a BCD) make moving around quite difficult for the few moments before you jump in. But it's pretty fantastic once you're a few meters deep and you can swim freely underwater without having to come up for air. As promised, the reefs in Koh Tao were pretty spectacular. The water is very clear so the visibility is great, illuminating the marine life like a technicolor kaleidoscope. We did six dives in total, focusing on diving skills during a few and just having fun for the rest. Getting to see the island from underwater really enriched our experiences there, and now that we're certified we can dive anywhere in the world for the rest of our lives.
Most of our time not spent diving we passed relaxing near the beach. Sairee Beach faces west, so we were treated to spectacular sunsets every evening. We took to going into the sea at sunset every night, enjoying the view and the warm water after busy days of diving. On islands on the Gulf of Thailand, the tide comes in late in the day, so it's the ideal time for swimming, since the water is ordinarily very shallow on the beach. We made friends with some English guys who had the same tradition, and each evening we met them for another sunset swim, which was a lovely way to end the day.
On our last day in Koh Tao, after finishing the final dive of our course, we rented motorcycles and attempted to drive them to Shark Bay, not too far away on the southern end of the island. Dave and I had rented a motorbike before in Yangshuo and Koh Chang, but we were surprised by how the shops in Koh Tao ran their rental business--it was much less relaxed than anywhere we had been previously. Before lending the bikes, they inspected them extremely thoroughly and marked every single tiny ding or scratch down on their paper, even ones that I would never have noticed. They also handed us a list of every single thing that could go wrong with the bike and how much it would cost us--about $50-300 for any harm that might come (an extremely high sum in Thailand). We were a bit nervous about anything happening--all over the islands we saw tons of people with bandages from motorcycle accidents--but it seemed pretty reasonable until we pulled off the paved main road and saw what we had to contend with the rest of the way to Shark Bay. The "road" could hardly have been called a trail: it resembled a creek bed, laden with huge rocks and gravel and rutted on all sides from water and wear. It climbed steeply uphill, then veered sharply down, continuing this way for a good while. It was a formidable enough obstacle on its own, but with our newfound paranoia about protecting the bikes, it became an even more terrifying natural boundary. Eventually the going got so tough that we parked our bikes at the top of a hill and walked the rest of the way down to the beach.
Like most of the beaches on Koh Tao and the eastern Thai islands, Shark Bay had a flat, white beach with shallow, clear blue water and fringed by a coral reef. We spent the afternoon snorkeling and sunning. Dave managed to see a five-foot black-tip reef shark and a ton of barracudas. Somehow, at the end of the day we managed to make it back and return the bikes without incident, which seemed like a miracle at the time.
We had grown a bit attached to Koh Tao--it was our first taste of true island paradise, and we had had a lot of fun scuba diving and making friends. But there was a mass exodus in swing, with pretty much every backpacker in Thailand heading to Koh Phangan for the Full Moon Party, to be held on July 19. We didn't want to get stuck without accommodation, so as soon as our free stay in Koh Tao was up we hopped down south to continue our adventure.
