Koh Phangan

The boat ride to Koh Phangan was fairly short, only about 40 minutes. Our day was going quite nicely until we arrived at Baan Haad Yao Villas, then it started spiralling downhill.
We booked 3 nights at Baan Haad Yao Villa on Agoda.com, assuming we were getting a deal. When we showed up we found out, in fact we weren't getting a deal on Agoda, the walk in price was exactly the same. Then when we went to look at the room we found mouse crap all over the beds, the not-so-helpful-staff tried to deny it and say it was geckos, but we knew all too well it was mice. The pool on the brochure was blue and clean, but the one at the hotel was green and you couldn't even see the bottom. It was a battle to get our money back (we paid online with Agoda). First they tried to say it was low season and they had no money, they were broke. Somehow that just isn't very believable, they have a big resort sitting there but they have no money...I don't think so. Finally after a bit of arguing we just called Agoda and got two of the three nights refunded.
Then we walked over to see if there room available at another resort, yes they had room, but as soon as we came back with our stuff they jacked up the price another 200baht ($6). Six dollars isn't really a big deal, but it just irritates you to know they just always want to get that extra money out of you, so we moved on once again. We went back to another hotel for the third time, and rechecked the price in the lobby but as soon as we walked over to the room the jacked it up 200baht, just like the last place. We finally found a hotel, but then my dad went to have a shower and saw that the water coming out of the tap was brown and there was a HUGE cockroach on the pillow. Finally after most of the afternoon and some of the night looking we found a cheap little place that was good enough to lay our heads for the night.
In the middle of all this mess we stopped for dinner, I had some alright tuna pineapple curry. But within 10 minutes of eating it I puked it right back out. So overall, not a very good day. The next day we packed up and moved over to Salad Beach.
We found a great hotel called Salad Beach Resort, with a nice pool and an amazing breakfast. I could go on and on about the breakfast, there were eggs, toast, bacon, fruit, yogurt, granola and cereal. I haven't had granola and yogurt for a long time now and even though it was loaded with raisins (which I hate!), it tasted sooooo good! It was nice to have the pool because the beach was really shallow and not great for swimming. We even found a cold hot tub with a cascading waterfall while we were wandering around the garden area. One day kinda merged into the next while we were here, but I'm pretty sure we stayed 5 days.

We found another great place to eat called Big Mama's Restaurant. The food was amazing. All of the sauces were so flavourful and just plain yummy.

On one of the days we decided to go diving at sail rock-the best dive site in the gulf of Thailand. We did two dives, both at sail rock and they were alright. I came expecting not a whole lot of the diving and my expectations were met. I saw a few cool things like cleaner shrimps, nudibranchs and a school of barracuda. The visibility wasn't very good, only about 5 meters, give or take. It almost seemed like swimming into a snowstorm, with all the plankton floating around. It sure didn't feel like it though, the water was very warm-30 degrees Celsius!
After we knew the diving wasn't anything special at Sail Rock and got a bit bored of Phangan, we hopped on boat up to Koh Tao. The ride was only about an hour, but a choppy one at that.