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I awoke just before docking, and got my things together before barging my way out onto the jetty and straight through the touts to the town beyond. I found a place to stay and a place to dive - the two most important things! I have wanted to do some specialty courses for a while - Enriched Air and Deep Diving and decided that with Ko Tao being a famous place to learn that this would be where I would do these courses. Of course the flip side is that that meant spending all day in the classroom....
I had forgotten her cheesy, poor quality and generally crap the PADI videos are, but I was soon reminded. My breakfast pork steamed bun kept me running until lunch - Tom Yum with seafood. For those who have not had it Tom Yum is a spicy soup with a strong lemongrass flavour (Deano... this one was ALMOST, but not quite as good as your Tom Yum. And a lot better than mine!).
More classroom in the afternoon, before going back to my bungalow for a powernap. It left me pretty dazed and confused - when I woke up I was convinced it was the next morning and that my watch was infact lying to me!
Koh Tao itself is a strange island - basically a collection of dive schools it is a very popular place to learn to dive. The streets are lined with more international restaurants than thai, and the standard irish bar, british bar collection is here. It caters for a certain crowd, and like most dive resorts that catering does not include any real local culture at all. Its a place to dive, eat and drink and it makes no excuses. What I like about this is the menus are in English! The challenge of ordering food is far harder here than in Malaysia and Indonesia as the bloody script is different - at least in Japan they had photos and models of the food! It does feel a bit like cheating though.
I went to get some Thai Green curry for dinner - delicious. The problem with Thailand is it seems that there really arent enough meals in the day!
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Duncan
non-member comment
Those cheeky thais....
Nice to see you are still enjoying yourself! Probably too late, but I did the enriched air course at Buddha View Dive school. It was really good! We liked Koh Tao a lot, but then we did learn to dive there. Where are you on the island? Im sure you found this elsewhere, but in thailand (+ Laos + Cambodia) any travel means a long stop somewhere, where you are encouraged to buy lunch/dinner/breakfast (no matter what the time - 4am 'dinner' stops are not uncommon!) at a certain cafe/shack with benches + cockroaches. They practically force you into having some food, and get shirty if you don't. It gets really frustrating and we resorted to just buying something and taking it with us. All good fun though!!