Koh Tao (Turtle Island, "co tow", rhymes with wow) is our first island stop on our tour of the south, which stretches from Day 28 until we leave Thailand on Day 45. When we arrive, we haven't yet decided how long we'll stay but we're hoping for a change of pace. Koh Tao turns out to be exactly what we're looking for.
Koh Tao is the smallest of the three easter islands and the least developed. Most tourists go there for the cheap diving certification and for the snorkeling. We do neither - instead, we do a lot of this:
Fruit shakes. We can't get enough of them. Mango, dragon fruit, banana... our fruit shake addiction doesn't really pick up until we hit the next island (Koh Pha Ngan) but the love affair starts here.
Until now, our trip has centered around finding cultural sites and taking full days (afternoons) to see all we can. In Koh Tao, we take 7 days to do not much of anything. I call it our Yen Crawl, a modified Pub Crawl since we're not doing much drinking. Got a yen for a burger and fries? Walk 5 minutes to Chopper's Pub for burgers better than any you'll find in Canada. Got a yen for a movie and dinner? Walk down the beach to the Seashell Restaurant for some Thai food, a fruit shake and a viewing of Superbad. The restaurants are some of the best Western food restaurants that we find in Thailand - great prices, amazing quality. And since the island is only 21 square km and only the west and southwest coasts are especially developed, it's very easy to get around on foot.
Less easy are the hiking trails we try to do - all the maps show them, but A) I don't think they get used very often and B) all the maps show roads that I think they meant to finish but never did. All new maps are just based on the old incorrect maps. On top of that, several roads were built but have been ruined by washouts and erosion. This leads to a few thwarted hikes, one of which finds us at a dead end, picking our way through the woods for about 30 minutes. Pierre does manage to do one successful hike through the south of the island on a very vague trail (again, not very well used so Pierre had to rely on the kindness of strangers who pointed him in very vague directions) :
For the first few days, the sky is always overcast and the tide is in all day and covers up the beach on our side, so we hike over to the East side of the island (a 25 minute walk) where the water is a bit too rough and rocky for swimming, but great for wading:
Eventually, the sun comes out and the beach emerges on our side of the island, Sairee Beach. Our bungalow is less than a 2 minute walk from this Sairee (rhymes with "buy me"), the best beach on the island, and we swim and have at least two meals and/or a snack next to the beach every day:
We do our best to stay out of the sun when it's at its hottest:
The only real excitement that we have comes on Day 28 when we have unwelcome visitors in our bungalow. The bungalow at the Blue Wind Bungalows where we're staying is sturdy but pretty rustic, in 5 foot stilts over a pool of rainwater that never seems to dry up, large gaps under the front door, a cold shower and an enclosed bathroom with large unmeshed portholes for light and air circulation. The mosquitoes wander in and out of the bathroom at will, so part of our night time routine involves letting as few bugs into our room and under our bed's mosquito net as possible. We forget to take cockroaches into consideration in our efforts, and a couple of 2.5 inchers break in one night.
After these two are evicted, I immediately propose to Pierre that we refer to them as "jungle beetles" for the remainder of our stay in the bungalow. The word "cockroach" makes my skin crawl and reminds me exactly what could wander into the room in the middle of the night. Jungle beetle is accurate (their natural habitat is jungle/forest) and way more Disney. Pierre seconds the motion and is a trooper, ejecting the bugs whenever they invade courtesy of his Jungle Beetle Expulsion System which consists of a cut off water bottle (the top of the bottle was his solution to our leaky sink).
On our trip so far, we note down in a slim square-a-day agenda those things that we've done and seen each day of our trip - visited such and such a wat, travelled from A to B, evicted jungle beetles, etc - and the Koh Tao portion of the trip is no different. When we don't have the book in front of us we usually don't know what day of the week, date or time it is for sure. Our parents have gotten used to getting messages from us that sound like Hi, it's me, I think it's Friday, but it could be Thursday. I think it's about 10:00 am here... But this time we top ourselves and discover, once we leave the island, that our book is one day out of sync with the rest of the world. Somewhere, among the movies and swims and hikes and dinners, we lose an entire day and we don't which one it was or what we did on it.
photo credits: All P. D's picture eye took a vacation.
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