Island life

Pick of the week: Our little bungalow, Koh Tao

Style: Western sit

Atmosphere: Sporty

Extras: A bouldering wall. What more could you want. After 7 months of searching we have found a pretty good loo. I mean the facilities themselves were rough, but.... it has a wall!

21/07/13 to 07/08/13: Koh Tao, Koh Phanghan and Hat Ton Sai (Rai ley)

***DISCLAIMER: So our little netbook has died, or the chinese have spywared the **** out of it and it no longer works. So this is typed in a rush and so may not include so much detail.... (Yay i hear you cry), also the pictures were on it......***

We caught the overnight train from Bangkok to the port town of Chumplon with the aim of catching a connecting catamaran to Koh Tao and arriving in time to beat the majority of the crowds to the accommodation as we had failed to find any online. The train ride itself was lovely and comfortable if a little chilly what with the air conditioning being turned up to arctic winter. However we were supposed to pull into the station at 5am- which came and went with us still trundling along in the dark at approximately 4mph. We arrived, nerves rattling, at 8am- a full 3 hours late and with a sense of foreboding for what this meant for our little boat trip. We were not wrong- we missed the boat. We finally arrived in Koh Tao at around 5pm, after pretty much every other tourist on the entire island and ended up walking almost the full length of the island fully loaded and cursing the fact that I had a Laos tapestry, Thai cleaver, full set of Cambodian silk cushion covers and a Mongolian snuff bottle adding to the weight of my bag.

You're gonna see a lot of underwater shots as i can only access the go pro 

Perved on a this girl a bit

The accommodation we found was spectacular though- a set of little wooden bungalows set on stilts above a rocky bay called shark bay which was where all the snorkeling trips tipped their punters out for the best marine life. Apparently the waves were too loud for Dad- can't please everyone. We were very pleased indeed by our toilet though (see above).

We decided to spend our first day exploring the island by scooter which is a great idea if you have an off road bike (we didn't). The roads are extremely steep, narrow and generally not paved in any way. On one particularly steep hill our bike started really, really struggling and slowed to the top speed of your average sloth. Ben started shouting at me to jump off the back so that it didn't actually start rolling backwards but neglected the remember that it's almost impossible to jump off the back of a motorbike that's not actually stationary. We stopped, I got off and Ben had the throttle stuck in the 'maximum' position so promptly zoomed off, lost control, careened off the bit of concrete that was the road and into the jungle beyond. Thankfully neither he nor the bike were injured and after a bit of fiddling we managed to get it started again.

Don't step on the coral. Mainly coz it bloody hurts!

Post belly flop

This time we decided that I should sit side saddle (more common than you'd think for women in southeast asia) so that if the bike threatened to bottle it again on an uphill I could nimbly hop off and the bike wouldn't lose momentum. What was not agreed was Ben taking a vicious speed bump at 30mph resulting in both of us and the bike suddenly becoming airborne. As I was on the back I got about an extra foot of lift out of the seat and side-saddle as I was I had no grip whatsoever to anything. The air turned blue and I think the locals may have learnt a few new english swear-word combinations. The general view of the jungle and beaches were, however, beautiful.

Coral

Getting sunburn the fun way

We spent the next day snorkeling around the beach and bay which was amazing as the coral reef was beautiful and there were shoals of fish that I never thought I would see in real life. We saw hundreds of fish in various hues of electric blue/yellow/pink as well as parrot fish and even an octopus. It was amazing and only a little marred by the fact that spending the day face down in tropical water resulted in us all being so sunburnt that even breathing hurt. Ben went from cooked lobster to horrifically blistered so leprous over the course of about 4 days. Oh, and Dad managed to get heat stroke which in actual fact was a relief as when it was happening we thought he might be having a proper stroke (collapsing after having slurred speech and dragging one leg are terrifying things to see when you are about 48 hours from a decent medical facility).

Shark bay, our bungalow was just to the right of shot

Leaving Koh tao

All too soon it was time to move on to Koh Phangan where we stayed at Shambala guesthouse in a 'sala'- read bamboo tent. The facility also boasted a beautiful white sand beach, delicious restaurant and 5 dogs which the owners proudly claimed were racist against Thai people (startlingly true!) who kept our stuff safe in our tent. As we were still recovering from 3rd degree sunburn we spent most of the next two days hiding in the shade catching up on some reading. On our last day we hired out some kayaks and headed out to an island across the bay and had a bit of fun exploring a sand spit and a few abandoned shacks along the deserted beaches before paddling inland into a spooky mangrove swamp where the bats were calling really really loudly from their little hidey holes. That evening was the weekend 'walking street' in town and we popped along to sample the delights of local cuisine which included really good satay (5baht a stick!) and some tasty little pork filled rice pancakes.

Our Sala, behind a view of the beach. Sweet.

What every man wants; an engine for his kayak

Posing

Next on our coastal adventures we headed to the Andaman coast to Hat Ton Sai which is one of the beaches on a peninsula collectively known as Railay. The beaches here are known to be beautiful and therefore expensive so we headed to Ton Sai where the climbing bums hang out for the cheapest rooms we could find. They did not disappoint at 100 baht/night although they were probably also the worst rooms we had stayed in in the whole of Thailand. They consisted of bamboo shacks (no fan or air con) with a bathroom built onto the back out of glass bottles mounted in concrete. The bathrooms had not been cleaned in living memory and stank of sewage at all times. We didn't dare shower in there for fear of either coming out dirtier or catching an awful disease.We evicted 3 cockroaches from our mattress before going to sleep and in the middle of the night a rat crawled across the top of the door frame. Oh and apparently our porch was the local goat's sleeping spot and he rocked the whole structure every time he got up to go for a wee/munch on a rag. Overall, not the best.

Great conversationalists on long journeys

The area was known to have some of the best (or at least best-known) rock climbing in the world and was the whole reason we brought our rock shoes so far so the next day we hired all the necessary kit and got cracking. Surprisingly the rock was pretty good if a little polished and even more surprisingly both Ben and I managed to flash a (very short) 6b! Dad had fun getting to grips with the complexities of sport climbing and all in all a very good day was had. Until we had to return to the shack. However Dad was leaving the next day and we resolved to find something with a lower chance of giving us either hepatitis or fleas. There was an emotional farewell (not least because the sea was pretty rough and the longtail boat we put dad in didn't look terribly robust so we weren't sure that we weren't sending him to a watery doom) and another section of the trip was over.

Onwards