Petra's April Thai Visit- Koh Tao.

Thailand Travels

 

Koh Tao

 

Koh Tao is mostly famous for its dive sites and very laidback way of life. When I worked for the dive school in Koh Samui each day we would make the 2 hour boat ride here to take the customers diving and snorkelling.  It’s a very small island with probably as many expats living on it as Thai locals. People only inhabited it some time in the sixties.

We got a bungalow for 300baht/£5 a night each. It had all that you need, fan, mosquito net, shower- cold, toilet- hole in the floor and smack right there on the beach. What more do you need?

We went snorkelling everyday, had many Thai massages and hired a quad bike. One day we decided to go to a bay on the other side of the island on our newly hired quad bike, armed with nothing but a road map. The way that we followed was clearly marked as a road on the map. HA! It turned out to be a death trap. After 2 hours of serious off-roading we came to a succession of seriously downward sloped gravely paths. Petra got off the bike and slid down them on her bum, I stayed on the bare tired, out of control quad with eyes closed- with a, if I can’t see the sheer drop of the edge then its not there, kind of attitude. Somewhere along the journey I decided that there was no way in hell that I was attempting to go the way we came on the quad and after one more stupidly steep hill I decided to refuse to drive on further. So we trekked the rest of the way on foot, more often than not we were on our buts after slipping on lose stones. We made it to the resort we were heading for about an hour later, we were well out of water and VERY hot! But due to my knack of finding scary situations  absolutely hilarious we got there in good spirits, although looking slightly dishevelled.

We ended up paying two Thai guys 500Bhat/£10 to trek back to the bike and drive it back for us. A 5 hour journey there and a 20minute boat ride back.

The Thai guys arrived at our bungalow about 6 hours later and looked possibly just as me and Petra had done when we walked into the resort earlier- Poor Guys! There’s no way I could have done it though.

We made our way back to Samui the next day.