Koh Tao

Koh Tao had changed a lot in the 7 years since I visited it last. Recent additions included a bowling alley , a 7/11 and an ‘exclusive‘ spa resort which had privatised the best beach. It was certainly not the isolated paradise I remember, but thankfully it’s basic geography remained unadulterated, so the relentless juggernaut of progress had only managed to plough a thin strip of land along the three main beaches, before realising it was more profitable to build less and charge more. Just so long as people still have access to Pringles and M&M’s though. ‘People may come for the breathtaking scenery and the chance to swim with whale sharks, but they stay for western confectionary’, is the basic rule, applied liberally, throughout the Thai Islands.

But anyway, once we’d paid the 400 baht for a pick-up ride across the island to Tanote bay, we couldn’t afford to go back to civilization and it’s monosodium glutamate-rich fruits until we got the ferry out of there a week later. Which was a shame, as pick-up rides on Koh Tao’s roads are probably just as fun as swimming with whale sharks. The island is about as tall as it is wide with a dense rainforest interior and only rutted dirt tracks for roads, so the 400baht cost is relative to the odds of the pick-up truck actually making the journey. With each incline, the vehicle would wheel spin and snake wildly until it reached the crest of the hill, before skidding down the other side and doing it all over again. On the way back we even saw a girl on a quad bike, brakes fully locked, sliding down the road at increasing speed. We didn’t see how it ended. We had a ferry to catch.

Our second stay in Bangkok just prior to Koh Tao had not so much dented our budget, rather, driven it to an old industrial estate and shot it in the back of the head (Those Birkenstocks from the Khao San only lasted a week too). So our daily schedule was filled only by breakfast, lunch, dinner and the hours between them in which we would snorkel, read in hammocks, sleep in hammocks and ponder such decisions as, ‘fruit or pancakes for breakfast?’, and, ‘Pad Thai or noodle soup for lunch/dinner?’.

To break such backbreaking monotony, we changed accommodation half way through the week. Although it was actually because the bungalows were cheaper at the other end of the beach, and they had better hammocks too. The nightly walk back to our first bungalow was also strewn with giant millipedes, spiders, frogs, tockay geckos, cockroaches and a bright green snake, which was an adventure when our torch worked, but a gauntlet of fear when it broke. However, on downing our bags in our new bungalow, I went to open the shutters and a black cloud of ants flooded out of the window frame to greet us. We moved to another one.

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