Koh Tao - 30/04-07/05

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Arrived in Koh Tao feeling a little zombified after our 14 hour trip from Bangkok which included a 4 hour stopover at a port in the middle of the night where we slept like homeless people on wooden benches. As you can imagine, not the most soundest of sleeps, massive respect for the homeless!

Got picked up in an open back truck and taken straight to the resort which was beautiful, right on the beach front, private pool, giant snails, lizards, frogs and lots of lovely people!

We checked in and signed straight up to start our PADI open water course that day as we were told the first day is only an hour or so... little did we know it also included 4.5hours of homework on the fake iPads.

When we got started on the practical we both absolutely loved it, pool work learning all the skills; sharing air supplies, mastering buoyancy (ish-mastering), clearing our masks of water, having our air supply turned off under water... It was all great fun but nothing compared to the actual dives in the ocean which were unbelievable, one of which was a 5:45amstart. During those we saw sting-rays, angel fish, eels, barracuda, grouper, longfin bannerfish, triggerfish, giant pufferfish to name a few. It was an incredible new world and it felt like how we'd imagine floating in space to be, a whole new planet, so cool! So we are now proudly qualified and can't wait to do another dive somewhere else and hopefully this time we will be able to GoPro the experience.

Once these very tiring four days were over we decided we deserved some down time 😉, went straight to the beach, Char fell asleep in the sun without any cream on and we both ended the day looking like lobsters, how fitting!

The next day we hauled our burnt arses off to hire a moped and explore some more of the island. On Joeys recommendation we headed straight for Au Leuk beach, to go snorkelling, unfortunately we weren't carrying enough cash for the deposit to hire snorkels but the crystal clear waters there meant you hardly needed them as the reef came right to the beach and was amazing.

The following day was much greyer but by no means cool, we stumbled across a place called high bar in the forest with a magnificent view of the canopy and bay. Whilst we were there, there was a huge storm, lightening, thunder and torrential rain which was awesome, couldn't have found a better place to chill and watch the show.

Our final day was sunshine once more and we headed back to Au Leuk with our newly purchased snorkels to see what the reef really had to offer and it was better than we could ever have expected. So many brightly coloured fish and coral, the water was as warm as a bath and we saw loads of reef sharks, unbelievable. Oops, once more we burnt ourselves stupid, who knew water magnified the sun's power?! Shoulders to ankles our backs were bright red.

We could barely sit down but felt another trip to the high bar would be the only possible medicine. Fresh out of cash after several hours chilling we thought it would be a good idea to save money and walk the entire length of the island back home.. it kinda was but kinda wasn't, an almost 5k walk in flip flops and 30 degree heat is actually quite hard. The beer at the end was well deserved and we slept face down, fan on full whack, covered in aftersun until checkout the next day! Next stop Koh Phangan.

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