Koh Tao

Koh Tao...literally 'turtle island' is best known for its diving. Diving courses to be exact, Koh Tao issues the second most PADI diving certificates in the world. Unsurprisingly Cairns, Australia, is in the lead. Bans (one of the bigger dive schools on Koh Tao), alone qualifies about 8000 people per year. And there are about 60 dive shops on Koh Tao, so that means ALOT of people learning to dive (they won't all get as much business as Bans, but still that's a lot of people).
We got flagged down on the ferry by a guy from Bans, so we decided to check out their rooms, but soon found out they didn't have any triple rooms. We moved down along the beach checking out places as we passed until we settled at Lotus Resort. The room was somewhat dark and dank, but the pool was really nice. Both Bans and Lotus were located on Sairee Beach-the main beach, the busiest, the loudest music, the best shopping and the most variety of places to eat.
The next day we upgraded to Wind Beach Resort for a little bit more baht, but a nicer room and it came with buffet breakfast. The pool at Wind Beach was quite nice too, very nice at the beginning. Our first couple days on Koh Tao were quite mellow...but then all the full-mooners came up Koh Phangan and it got busy FAST. It was crazy the amount of people that arrived in a matter of days. It wasn't intolerable, it was just really busy. For our hotel, cleaning the pool wasn't high up on their to-do list. Then they turned off the pumps for a whole day, that combined with not cleaning the pool and tons of people swimming in it, didn't end up too well. On the evening of the day they had the pump turned off the pool started looking grossly murky and not clear. By the next morning the pool was completely disgusting and you couldn't even see the bottom. The pool wasn't very deep either, only about 5 feet. Our stay at wind Resort was cut short to four nights because of the filthy pool and the buzz of Sairee was getting a bit tiresome. Most of our time in Sairee was just spent wandering around town and hanging out at the pool or hotel room. We got a TV in the room that had three English channels: the odd animal documentaries, the mediocre movies and the crime show reruns.
On one of our days at Sairee, my mom and I went for a walk over to Hin Wong Bay, to check it out. The walk wasn't very long in distance but there was a massive hill that we slogged up. Hin Wong Bay was quite nice, very bouldery though with only one patch of sand. It just so happened that the only patch of sand was private and you had to buy a drink at the bar to access the beach. We bought a drink and then donned our masks and snorkels to check out the apparent 'snorkelling spot'. I was surprised by the amount of life around the bouldery shoreline, nothing great but still something to look at nonetheless. After our snorkel we ate some pad thai at the restaurant next door before heading back to Sairee.
Like I said before, we spent a total of five nights at Sairee, one at Lotus and four at Wind. So after a fair bit of looking we found a nice place just south of Sairee on Mae Haad Beach. Our new place was called Koh Tao Regal Resort. Sounds fancy but it was actually a little cheaper than our last two hotels and a bit nicer too. The pool at regal was nice as well; a three tiered infinity sure pool, looking out over the ocean. The pool even had a makeshift wooden diving platform. We stayed at the Regal Resort for 3 nights before checking out and moving on. We were only a short walk away from Sairee, so we made frequent trips there.

One day we got ambitious and decided to walk to Chalok Bay, on the very south of Koh Tao. It took only about half an hour to walk to Chalok. We checked out a few resorts, our favourite being Koh Tao Resort Paradise Zone. Koh Tao Resort has two areas-Beach Zone(its location is rather self explanatory) and Paradise Zone(up on the hill). The view from Paradise Zone was breathtaking, you could see so much. In my opinion the pool mixed with the view was the perfect combo. The pool was just spectacular, it was an infinity pool looking out over the ocean. It really felt like you could just keep swimming and swimming and swimming, like the pool had no edge. And when your feet hit the wall, it was like reality was softly nudging you back, not the all-too-powerful shove reality often likes to give.

Afterwards, we peeled ourselves away from the serenity and headed down the hill to the dive shop so we could organize some diving. And that was just what we did, the following day we went out for two dives. Our first dive was at Hin Wong Pinnacle, not super exciting, but there were a couple of fun swim throughs. We also spotted a cool looking nudibranch, it was black and white and reminded me of a cow. The visibility on our second dive was only slightly increased, but I liked it a lot better. Laem Thian Pinnacle (our second dive) was a bouldery dive site, leading to not much life but a whole lot of swim through tunnels. The swim throughs were really fun and a great practice for buoyancy. I saw TONS of nudibranchs on that dive, most of them the same black with white and yellow bumps. We had fun so we decided to go on two more dives the next day, one of which was at Chumphon Pinnacle, the best dive site on Koh Tao. I was very surprised when I jumped in the water and looked down I could see the dive site clearly. The visibility was much improved from the last two dives. Their vis was about 10m and Chumphon was double. The visibility was better still in Indonesia at about 30m, but it was a pleasant surprise to have 20m. The pinnacle had a bit of coral but it was mostly brown hues, with lots of pasty pink anemone fish taking cover in the fields of anemones. The highlight of the dive was definitely the schools of fish. We saw an enormous school of barracuda and massive school of fusiliers. White Rock was our second dive that day, not super exciting but still good. We saw some huge groupers so that made it more exciting. We are finished diving for this trip, that brings my total number of dives up to 26.

After we finished diving and enjoying the view at Koh Tao Resort, we headed back to Regal Resort for our last three nights on the island.
Now I will talk about food. Yum! Since we stayed on Koh Tao for so long we tried out our fair share of restaurants. We ate at a really good duck soup place in Sairee, but they closed down for some sort of event after our first couple days. We decided to try out a duck soup place in Mae Haad, but it was terrible. We found two different great restaurants in Mae Haad though. One was called Pranee and the other was called Yang, both very cheap and very good. In Chalok we ate mostly at Buddha View and had a great barbecue one night. The pancake stalls at Sairee and Mae Haad were amazing! We tried a few different kinds-banana, peanut butter and nutella on one and pineapple and coconut on another. It's probably best not to watch them make the pancakes though. Seeing all the dollops of butter and glugs of oil going into it, doesn't make you feel great about eating them. But they taste absolutely amazing and I'm sure they wouldn't taste nearly that good without all that butter and grease. Greasy food is the norm in Asia so it will be nice to go home and actually eat stuff that isn't fried.

We continued on our journey by catching the boat and bus up to Bangkok.