Oh Samui part II

---

After our gut busting howl late last night and one heck of a great sleep, we were up early as we had signed up for a snorkeling tour. Funny enough, no movement next door. Guess they were tired from all that work last night.

The minibus dropped us off at a restaurant on the beach where we had breakfast (included in the tour price) and then boarded a speed boat which would take us to Koh Tao. The ride across was very rough and as luck would have it, we were sitting in the front again with a couple that worked in Afghanistan 3 guys from France and a lady boy in the making. As we bounced along, the lady boy, a brother of one of the crew members seemed to take delight in banging hard down on the seat after crashing through the waves and squealed with manic laughter each time. The rest of us weren't sure if perhaps he was on something but his laugh was quite infectious and made the trip very funny.

Our first stop was Koh Tao. We moored and did some snorkeling. The fish we saw swarmed when we feed them bread and it was quite like snorkeling on the other side of the country. We quickly moved onto another snorkel site and experienced more of the same thing. After some great photo ops we headed to Koh Nang Yuan.

Koh Nang Yuan is a truly amazing spot. 3 small islands are connected by a sandbar. Candace and along with the couple from Afghanistan ended up suntanning and snorkeling together. Although the majority of the fish were the same, we did see some really large lion fish. We also had a bit of scare when we came across a school of baby barracuda.

At first we didn't seem them as they were only 6 to 10 inches long, silvery and swam just beneath the surface. Occasionally, you would just catch the movement out of the corner of your eye but upon looking in that direction, you wouldn't see anything. Seemed rather spooky. As we swam along trying to figure out what kind of fish they were, we passed over a massive boulder that seemed out of place. As we did the school of barracuda suddenly swarmed together and darted right past us. There must have been 30 of them.
Unbeknown to us, they had been scared away. When we turned to continue on, I saw a long fish swim away at the surface very quickly.

I tried to get my dive buddy's attention but by the time she looked the fish was gone. We surfaced and I explained what I saw but she claimed to have not seen it. Well when we went back down, we had drifted over that large rock and when we dove down, out came a very large barracuda. He had to be 5 - 6 feet long. I hope he wasn't attracted to pee.
She didn't miss seeing him that time.

As we quickly swam away, the fish would follow us and then quickly veer off when we stopped and looked at it. Needless to say, it was time a beer and some sun tanning.
We ended up leaving later that day and headed to Koh Pha Ngan for a quick bit of lunch.

The speed boat trip back to Koh Samui was extremely rough and a few people were sick. Of course we had the laughing maniac with us and were quite happy when we finally go back.

We ended up eating supper just down the road from our guesthouse and had decided to turn in early as we had planned to catch a 6:00am flight back to BKK the next morning. We had the guest house set us up with a ride to be there for 5:00am.

---