Koh Tao

I'm here on Koh Tao, the Turtle Island, at a restaurant just next to where we're staying. The checkout time there is 11, so we can't get into our rooms yet. We woke up this morning on the train, waited quietly for a bit, got off, waited at the station for a while. I grabbed a roll with some sort of filling, and John got some tasty dough ball-type thing that he shared too. Eventually the bus came and we all got on, a double decker. Sat there quietly next to a guy in a Metallica shirt and camo pants, slept part of the ride, half-watched The Mummy 3 part of the ride, and got to the ferry. It was a looooong pier. Ridiculously long pier. We got to the high-speed catamaran, didn't see much room downstairs, headed upstairs and sat/stood on the deck (just plastic stools, not much there). The wind felt great, the ocean was beautiful, the islands around us were lush, it was a fantastic ride. There's this color that occurs when the sun shines off the right ocean, sort of a gold-on-blue, I'm not sure the English language has a good word for it. It's absolutely gorgeous, I'd never seen it before. We saw a lot of flying fish especially. At one point we got into rain... rain on the ocean is an interesting thing, especially when you're going through it so fast it comes at you sideways. I had been wondering what that dark patch on the water was.... eventually we got to Koh Tao, boat pulled into a small island, dropped a few people off, then dropped us off on the island itself. We were ASSAULTED with people offering us taxis, it was insane how many there were. It was almost hard to walk through them, quite frankly. We just shook our heads and said “no, thank you” and pushed through, eventually finding a spot to wait for our transportation. Unfortunately, this was right behind a truck with a loudspeaker blasting a recording about a Muay Thai Fight Night, which led to me explaining to Nate some of my objections to Muay Thai (as it is in the modern age, that is, not the art itself). Eventually the first truck pulled up, half the group got in and went, the rest of us waited a bit, second truck came in, we piled onto benches in the back of a pick-up (Denny mentioned a real name for this specific type of truck but I don't remember it now), and headed up. The driving was a little bit insane, very fast, very hilly (which meant we couldn't see very far), narrow roads... a bit reckless, let's say. Fun though. We got to the resort, they told us about the checkout time and suggested we grab some food, I had Pad Se-ew with chicken, which involves both absolutely delicious noodles and fantastic chicken, along with a watermelon lassi, which is a sort of fruit-milk-drink thing. It was tasty. Some people headed out for the beach and such, but I'm desperate for a shower after the night on the train, so I'm waiting a bit to get into our rooms first. That, and I'm a little tired of carrying around my massive backpack. But yeah, Koh Tao is absolutely beautiful. The water's outstandingly clear, there's amazing plants, tomorrow we dive and it's going to be fantastic.

Monday, January 25th, roughly 10:55-11 AM local time