Diving Koh Tao

After a sad farewell from Kamala town, we set sail for Koh Tao…. Or rather we got up ridiculously early and jumped in the car. Koh Tao is an island about a 5 hour drive from Phuket, about halfway up the coast to Bangkok.

After arriving in Koh Tao we discovered tourists and backpackers, and plenty of them. But at least these tourists had a purpose. Diving. Koh Tao was supposed to be one of the premier diving locations of Thailand. We had 3 days of diving to discover this. Basically our days on Koh Tao consisted of…

Eat. Sleep. Dive. Repeat.

Throw in some amazing sunsets with drinks on the beach, snorkelling with turtles and almost 4wdriving on scooters and that pretty much summed up our trip.

The diving really was fabulous. The upside of diving off the island was that you could get 2 dives done in the morning and be home by 10.30am and have the whole day in front of you. The downside of this is that it means you have to get up at 5.30am each morning…bleh. But there are worse things than waking up early in your bungalow on a stunning beach 🙂

While we didn’t see Whale Sharks (the main purpose of the diving) the marine life was spectacular. We saw sting rays, a white moray eel, huge angel fish and giant grouper. We also learnt to swim throughs (or cave diving as we like to call it!) and felt like Jacques Cousteau. The second day the seas were quite rough so a few sea sickness tablets were popped, but day 3 was much improved.

Koh Tao itself was geared towards tourists (diving backpackers specifically) so didn’t really feel much like Thailand. But, it had triangle pillows on the beach, piña coladas and nice restaurants so we were happy. The snorkelling was pretty spectacular too. It’s not everywhere that you can walk in off the beach and swim with an 80 year old turtle or black tipped reef shark.

Added bonus of the island – the samosa man who walks through town and up the beach selling samosas for 20 baht. Heaven!