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.

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.

Koh Samui

We got off the train the next morning in Hat Yai and quickly found a travel agency to buy bus and boat tickets from. The bus we took from Hat Yai to Surat Thani took about 6 hours. At Surat Thani we took an hour long ferry to the touristy island of Koh Samui.
That got us to Samui at around 7pm. It was dark by that time so we just hopped in a taxi and got the driver to takes to a good hotel on Lamai Beach. The room was pretty good, good for the night anyhow. By the next day we were well aware of the Samui taxi mafia. The extremely exorbitant taxi prices were a huge shock considering we were just in Indonesia where you can get a 13 hour taxi for only $70. And in KL you can get a taxi across the city for only about $5. It cost us 400baht ($13) to drive about half an hour-from the jetty to Lamai (not cheap like what we are used to, but that doesn't even start to explain the mafia's ridiculous prices). Then when we wanted to get a taxi from Lamai to Chewang-about a 5 minute drive, they asked us to pay 500baht ($16). Yes that's right...$16 for a 5 minute drive!!! We managed to get local transport-benches on the back of a truck for 300baht ($10) to Chewang (evidently they are part of the 'taxi mafia' as well!). The 'taxi mafia' kind of restricted us from going around and checking things out so we only spent a few days on Koh Samui.
While we were on Samui we found a great little restaurant called Sunshine Café with tasty baguettes and Thai food. The fried bananas and ice cream were absolutely amazing! They were every bit as good as I remember from Thailand six years ago. I'm so glad I'm in Thailand, the food in other places we have been is great, but in Thailand it's excellent. It's really different in the way of flavours, lots of lemongrass, coconut, curry and chilies.

The beaches on Koh Samui were pretty nice, although Chewang was super busy and lined with really fancy resorts, Lamai had more of a nice laid back vibe. It was hard to explore Samui, because it was all very spread out and the extreme taxi mafia prices weren't making us inclined to go check out other beaches.

So after a few days we got on the Songserm ferry and headed to Samui's neighbour-Koh Phangan.

Back in KL

Yup, back in Kuala Lumpur again! Good thing it's my favourite city in Southeast Asia because we have been there 3 times so far on this trip. It feels like my home away from home on Asia. We checked into Hotel New Winner again and went for roti, by tradition. It was 11:00 at night and there were far more people at Hussain Cafe (our roti place) than at 11:00 in the morning. The people of Kuala Lumpur must love their late night snacks because about a month ago when we arrived at 3:00am all the restaurants/street stalls were full of people happily snacking away and chatting amongst themselves. After our late night roti with the locals, we went back to the hotel and watched Beverly Hills Cop on our old English movie channel, last time we were in KL we watched Rocky. I'm getting my fix of old movies in KL anyways.

Our main mission in KL this time was to get out Thai visas, and that is just what we did the next day. The Thai embassy was a world of difference from the Myanmar embassy. It was air-con, there were seats and very fast moving queue tickets. We walked in and grabbed some queue tickets from the machine, we then started filling our application forms. Within about a minute our numbers were called and I had barely wrote in my name. I went back and grabbed more numbers but they just kept coming on the screen so I gave up and just finished my form, then got a number. Well the visa process was very simple and quick, fill out the form, give them your picture, your passport and hand over the money. The whole embassy 'experience' 1000x different and better than Myanmar's was.

Our afternoon was spent wandering around MidValley MegaMall before heading back to KL Sentral in time for a yummy feast of roti. The following morning we spent organizing train tickets up to Hat Yai, Thailand. Finally after a lot of waiting we got the second class sleepers booked for that evening. Then we hopped on the LRT and picked up our passports complete with Thai visas at the embassy. For dinner we had roti (surprise, surprise!), before heading out on the train to Ha Yai. I'm excited to see what Thailand is like, haven't been since 2007, so it will probably have changed a fair bit.

Bromo, Yogyakarta, Borobudur and LOTS of driving

Our time on Java was definitely spent tired by all of us. The first day we left from Lovina and drove all the way to the town by Mount Bromo, Cemoro Lawang. Our driver on that stretch was pretty good and spoke pretty good English also. The scenery was quite nice, a bit repetitive though. Rice paddies and corn fields and then a bit more rice and corn and to finish it off let's add in some corn and rice!

There were lots and lots of towns too, hence Java is the most populous island in the world. About 60% of Indonesia's 240 million (the 4th most populous country in the world) call Java home. To put it into perspective, Java's population density is over 1000 people per square kilometre. In British Columbia there are about 5 people per square kilometre. We pulled in to Cemoro Lawang at around 7:00 that evening (we left Lovina at 8:30am). Java is jammed full of volcanos so we decided to go see the one with the most fame...Bromo.
The regular trip to Mount Bromo is a sunrise tour. You first go to the nearby Mount Penanjakan to watch The sunrise by Bromo and then head back down and climb Bromo. We were unaware of the time change between Bali and Java so we ended up waking up at 2am instead of 3am. At 2:30 we were ready to go...but no one else was. We asked some people what time it was and they replied 2:30. Darn! We were supposed to meet the jeep at 3:30 but the dumb time change made us wake up an hour early. Once 3:30 came around we hopped into one of the hundreds of Toyota Landcruisers and made our way to Penanjakan for the sunrise. Overall the sunrise was a bit of a disappointment. It was really cloudy so there wasn't much of a sunrise. I didn't know what to expect for a viewing area, but I was kind of thinking of a big open field where you sit and watch the sunrise. My expectation wasn't quite matched it was a fenced off cement platform jammed full of people. The hundreds of Indonesians there freezing half to death in the 6-7 degree temperatures (not quite what they're used too) kind of took away from the non-existent sunrise. Once the sun had risen we did get a pretty nice view of Mount Bromo, mind you we were getting trampled by people at that time. After we were done at the viewpoint we headed back down to the jeep and set off to climb Mount Bromo (it's not much of a climb, just more of a walk). Once we got to the steep uphill there was a long set of stairs. The stairs were definitely the worst part because there was no way of passing people. It was a VERY slow walk up those stairs, some people were evidently REALLY struggling, because it was causing a domino effect on the whole staircase full of people. At last we made it up to the top of the stairs and onto the rim of the volcano. Wow! I peered over the edge and there was a huge pile of smoke steaming up from the inside. It was so cool, I have never been up on top of a volcano before, let alone a steaming one.

Then we made our way down and headed back to Cemoro Lawang. once in Cemoro Lawang we got into a minivan and got driven to Probolinggo. From Probolinggo we got into a different minivan to Yogyakarta. I would like to note that we left Probolinggo at around noon. Our driver really wasn't good. He wouldn't stop to let us eat, and when he finally stopped it was at a restaurant with no prices and a menu completely in Indonesian. Eventually he stopped at a supermarket and we bought kraft singles and wonder bread...real nutritious! The car was having some problems too, at 9pm the car broke down and he had to call a mechanic. It took an hour an a half to get it fixed! Then we were back on the road and we arrived in Yogyakarta finally at 2am. The trip was supposed to take 8 hours but it got stretched into a 12 hour ordeal.
We got some sleep that night and explored Yogyakarta the next day. While we were walking we found a really good air-con store with tons of Indonesian souvenirs. After an hour or two of shopping there we headed back to the hotel and arranged a trip to Borobudur for the next morning.
5am pick up...another early morning! We arrived at Borobudur in about an hours time. Borobudur was built around the 9th century and took approximately 75 years to build. The giant stone stepped building is 35 meters tall with several levels, the bottom ones covered in reliefs while the top three had lots of stupas. We had a guide that explained to us lots about the meanings of the reliefs. The stupas near the top were pretty amazing, there is a Buddha inside every one of them. Borobudur was pretty cool but what really took away from it all were the hoards of school kids running around and constantly asking for photos. The obnoxious megaphones were also very irritating. But I'm glad I saw it, I really like old temples of that. Sort so it was nice to tick another one off my list.

On my way out of Borobudur I bought a mini stupa and some flip flops. The next morning we flew out of the surprisingly small Yogyakarta airport back to Kuala Lumpur, my favourite city in Southeast Asia. I'm sad to leave Indonesia for all the nasi campur (mixed rice) and sate (grilled chicken skewers with peanut sauce) but I'm super stoked for roti in KL and Thai food after that! I also won't be able to speak Indonesian anymore (...well I could but people would look at me like I'm stupid and not understand a word I'm saying!).

Lovina

When our plane arrived in Denpasar (Bali) we took a taxi and headed straight to Sanur and stayed at The Ducks Nuts hotel again (for the third time!). We just got settled in and I slept and rested. My fever went away in about a day but I was very hot, achy and had a bad headache during that time. After I was rested up and feeling better we hired a taxi and took the 3 hour drive up to Lovina- a town on the north coast of Bali.

Lovina was a pretty good little town, lots of good, cheap warungs (restaurants) and a nice market. Another one of Lovina's draws is the diving. The diving is also quite cheap and it is pretty good too, as we found out the day after our arrival.
We went on a dive trip to Menjangan Island and I was very surprised by the corals. There were plenty of huge fan corals on both dives. Two dives cost 500,000Rp (about $50) and at Komodo and Alor they were 800,000Rp ($80ish). It definitely wasn't as good as Komodo or Alor but it was very good considering it was Bali-the tourist mecca of Indonesia. And heck, if it's that cheap I don't expect supreme diving!

The next day my mom and I went shopping at the nicely sized market. It wasn't so big that it was overwhelming but it was still big enough to have competitive prices. I bought a cool tye-die sarong and some nice bracelets. My mom however decided to go to town with the bracelets and buy 50 of them...one for each of her coworkers.

That evening we had another amazing meal at Wijayaa Warung. I had more amazing fresh lemon juice and nasi campur (translation: mixed rice). Nasi campur can be anything from chicken, rice and some sambal (fresh chili peppers ground up into sauce) to the extravagant spread I had here.

Labuan Bajo, Kanawa and Komodo National Park

We flew out of the itty bitty Alor airport and took a stop in Kupang, as we did before. Since there were no connecting flights to Labuan Bajo on the same day we had to to stay a night in Kupang.
We headed straight to the airport early the next morning and headed for Labuan Bajo with SkyAviation. I was pleasantly surprised to see how Labuan Bajo has cleaned itself up. Before, Labuan Bajo was a dirty, dusty, rather dank little town. Now they have paved the roads, cleaned up some garbage and added some nice little restaurants and shops. When we got to Labuan Bajo we grabbed some snacks and caught the boat to Kanawa Island right away.
Kanawa is a gorgeous island about an hour boat ride away from Labuan Bajo and is just barely outside of Komodo National Park. We stayed at Kanawa three years ago so we were eager to come back and see what it's like now.

Last time we were here there was an absolutely spectacular house reef for snorkelling. We were upset to hear there was a very bad storm in January that took out the jetty and damaged some of the reef. I was far more than upset when I hopped in the water-I was depressed, devastated and torn. The reef to the right of the jetty was thriving, vibrant and life-like before, but it's nothing near like that now. Huge toppled over coral heads scatter the ground and the odd fish moped by. I felt like I ought to cry, life has been ripped out by the roots and will take generations to recover. Coral takes it's time to grow so I can't imagine it will be anywhere near back to its original state within my lifetime. I was happily surprised to see that the coral on the left side was quite intact and lively. Although it wasn't nearly as vibrant as the right side prior to the storm. It's still very nice to know the reef wasn't completely annihilated.
Since there is only one restaurant on the island you eat are rather obliged to eat there. The food has gone up in price a fair bit since 2010 but it has gone up in quality a lot too. They hired a new chef and the food is just amazing. We stayed for 6 days and I didn't have a sub par meal the whole time.
Although Komodo is most famous for spotting the Komodo dragons, it's fame also comes from the world class diving. Our first dive was at Tatawa Besar. The highlight of this dive was the blue polka dotted, fluttery nudibranch that I have never seen before. We also got to see some turtles, a leaf scorpionfish and nudibranch eggs (my dad thought it was a fake flower). Our good luck continued onto the next dive- Karang Makassar, where we saw 3 manta rays!!! "Check"...there goes another one off my bucket list! The first one was sooo amazing, we all knelt on the bottom while the manta circled around in front of us and got cleaned by his cleaner fish. Once he came right over top of us, about a foot away from our heads. We saw two more later on in the dive but they were a bit further away. We also got to see a huge whiptail ray stirring up the sand looking for dinner. The best part about the mantas was that they were in the wild (not a zoo or aquarium) and it didn't feel like we harassing them (they were perfectly content with us there and it was their choice to come close to us and investigate). The next day we did a dive on the Kanawa house reef. I was pretty stoked on our frogfish find, it was so weird looking but it was amazing, I never would of known it was a fish if our divemaster didn't point it out. Some other cool sights were turtles, cuttlefish, pipefish and a HUGE bumphead parrotfish. The following day we did two more dives one at Cauldron and the other at Gili Lava Laut. Cauldron had amazing topography, with a huge sandy bowl/cauldron in the centre of the dive site, surrounded by coral reefs/gardens. At one part of the dive you could look up and see schools of fusiliers and trevally. And at another we saw 11 devil rays trying to swim against the current. In the sandy part at the bottom there were hundreds if not thousands of garden eels sticking their heads up and catching food that happens to float in their direction. Gili Lava Laut was our final dive in Komodo. It was a good farewell dive because we got to see 5 turtles! There was also lots of nice soft corals, even ones that swayed back and forth and looked liked hands trying to grasp a hold.

One afternoon when we weren't diving my mom and I decided to hike up to the top of Kanawa Island to get a good view. The hike wasn't very long (about 20 min.) but the view of the island and of the park was great. We sat up and ate some peanuts before we got shooed by a pile of ants. We got a couple peanut shells with 4 peanuts inside, still not quite as good as when we got a peanut shell with money inside last time we were in Indonesia.

We had to leave two days before we planned to because I woke up with a high fever. As much as I love Kanawa, I think it must be cursed! Last time we were here (in 2010) we had to leave early because my dad got a kidney stone. We changed our flight tickets and got ready to go back to Bali so I can rest in an aircon room and hopefully get rid of my fever.