We took a ferry from Samui to Koh Tao the day before Songkran, which is the Thai New Year festival.
We checked into a little hotel called the Sairee Seaview Hotel. It was the only cheapish place with availability as Songkran is such a busy time and a lot of Thai people take holidays at that time.
At first, the place looked grand. The guy at reception was called Boy and he checked us into a huge family room with 3 big double beds and a huge balcony with great views of the coast (the views were so good as the hotel was up a bloody mountain).
After a while, we realised that we'd been ripped off as we were sharing the room with many unwanted guests. There were cockroaches abseiling down the wall, a million ants marching around the bathroom and the bedroom floor, crickets yabbering on the balcony, and a giant forest moth named Norman who was sadly not for this world anymore but the hotel thoughtfully preserved his carcass as a welcome gift for new guests. There was also a token gecko who must have been on the 5:2 diet since he wasn't eating any of our in-room snacks!
We forgot about our roommates and went out to explore the gorgeous beach and the little town. We got the chance to meet Barry and Cath again in Koh Tao before they went home which was brilliant. There was a tropical storm that night that knocked out all of the power in the town and we all got drenched running for cover in a bar that had been hosting a beach party.
They reopened their beach bar indoors and we met some other cool people including a French dude, Bruno Suarez (not his real name but he looked like Bruno Mars and Luis Suarez' love child). Brian got to dust off his French vocab and made many controversial political statements which just blew their minds. Examples include: "j'aime le salle de bain"; "je suis ete une tree" and "je suis mange le chat" (google translate if you like). He also took to finishing every sentence with "et toi?" for good measure. He's just so damn good with languages, what a fricking catch.
Paul had packed / purged Brian's suitcase before we left and put around 5 kilos of mosquito nets, tee tree oil wipes, neck case, mosquito hoods, mosquito repellants, ear plugs, burn cream, dressings, sleeping liners, travel towels, Milton, antihistamines, Gaviscon, duct tape, plasters, under water bags, etc. It looked like Bear Grill's suitcase. When we got to Dubai, we thought, 'mother of jaysus, when are we going use that stuff? We could have brought more clothes!' It turns out we used every single item in the bag up to now, apart from an underwater bag which we had considered dumping in Koh Lanta. Turns out it came in super handy for the Thai new year celebrations!
The Thais celebrate Songkran by having a full-on national waterfight. What brilliant people. Brian and me walked down to the town after breakfast and were immediately assaulted by buckets of ice cold water. A three-year old girl walked up to me with a Super-soaker bigger than she was and proceeded to drench the parts that the buckets had missed.
That was it! We armed ourselves with some water guns and joined in the fun. It was a full day of soaking and being soaked. We were covered in coloured powder and flowers. We had a ball! Poor Barry and Cath were leaving that morning for Bangkok and got soaked at every stop of the long journey...luggage and everything! They take no prisoners here on Songkran!
We met lots of great people in Koh Tao including a cool couple from Amsterdam, Hans and Lise, who were chilling there for the week after trekking in Chaing Mai. We also met a lovely young English couple, Adam and Sarah. Ha, this is starting to sound like a swingers blog :)
One day, we met this dog who I thought was the image of Ryan Gosling. Anyone? No?
We were chatting to Mammy Whelan one night and she told us that a guy from Cork, Colin Callanan, had died when he was diving in Koh Tao while we were there. He had a little 6-year-old boy and a family so it was really sad. Brian lit a candle on the beach and wrote a few words beside an Irish charm and we said a few words for him. We gathered up a little bag of sand and the charm and will post to his family when we get to Canada.
The weirdest thing happened after that. We were walking through the town and Brian got a weird feeling and said, "I've a strange feeling that that guy died in that hotel", pointing at the Lotus Resort in the middle of town. We were told it happened at sea so it was a strange thing for him to say. However, we were both really freaked out while chatting to a guy later that day and he informed us that the man had died in the pool at the Lotus Resort! Mystic Bombles eh? He must have had his bluetooth turned on. RIP Colin.
The beaches in Koh Tao were stunning. We were only planning to stay for 2 nights, especially because of our overcrowded dorm room, but we ended up staying for 9 days. It was paradise! Brian even got into the water without sending me to do a jelly fish census first!
We moved from the forest insect refugee camp to a lovely little hut by the sea in a place called Bowthong. It was really cute. The hotel manager was a spacer called Pong. She was a little round woman from Bangkok with a funny twitch and all she did was smoke and drink beer and sleep all day at the reception desk. Sometimes, when she was a awake, she'd whistle and yell at passing tourists, offering them good rates. All the other staff would roll their eyes at her as she gulped another beer.
Brian woke up at 5am one morning and heard something walking on the wall! It was, of course, a huge mouse-sized cockroach, which jumped from the wall to the bed and started charging at him. He used Paul's under water bag to capture and hurdle him out of the room (yet another big thanks to Paul for his survival bag). Brian told the mad manager the next day that he had a visitor at 5am this morning. She raised her eyebrows as if he was about to divulge a raunchy tale involving a Thai girl and some soapiness and she looked all eager to hear about the antics. When Brian explained about the cockroach in the bed, she waved him off and exclaimed that "that's good luck!". Haha. Good luck is getting a hotel room where you can close your eyes and not hear the pitter patter of giant cockroaches in your bed, you little pudding head!
The resort workers were mostly from Myanmar and were really sound. They all wore T-shirts with Aung San Suu Kyi on it. They absolutely worship her, rightly so. We emailed them 'Unplayed Piano' by Lisa Hannigan and Damien Rice. One of the Myanmar waiters, Milo, took a shine to Brian and, impressed with his grasp of the lingo, took to calling him 'Mr. Thailand' every time we passed by. Brian was delighted with himself and felt on par with the actual King of Thailand.
View from our resort's restaurant:
The food in Koh Tao was the best standard that we had had in Thailand, along with Koh Lanta. My favourite thing was a dish called mango sticky rice. Alan would love it so I ordered it in his honour every time I missed him, which was lots. I was doing it for you Alerie (5 stone later)!
We went fishing one day and Brian caught around 5 decent sized grouper fishies.
I caught nothing for 4 hours and then caught a baby grouper which I threw back in (well the fisherman threw him back in, I was not liking the hooks. The poor fishies :( I then started catching beautiful tropical fish and was very upset so I retired my fishing career so as not to murder anymore of Nemo's cousins. I spent some time hanging out with my Thai boys instead :)
We brought one of Brian's nice groupers to the restaurant that night and they barbecued it with a baked potato, it was yum!
We went on a snorkelling trip one day but couldn't have chosen a worse day for it. The waves were mental and I thought we might die at one point but the only casualty was Brian's iPhone which sadly drowned (we had left the underwater bag behind as we were afraid of the cockroach eggs). I caught an eye infection from the snorkel gear and ended up looking like a grouper fish for a few days, karma's a bitch.
We visited a gorgeous island called Nangyuan. It's a private island with amazing beaches that you can snorkel off with two mountains either side. We had tried to kayak to it one day but there was a storm (it wasn't so much a storm as a few trickles of rain but our arms were tired) so we turned back. The snorkel trip dropped us off there for an hour and it was beautiful.
Our eyes were spoiled rotten by all the beauty of Koh Tao. We didn't want to leave but we had to move on to our last stop, Bangkok, before our flight to Oz!
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