“I came to Koh Tao for three days and I’ve been living here for a year now. I’ll show you to your room.” Famous last words from the guy working at my Koh Tao hostel… and a surprising amount of others that I met over the next week and a half of my stay on this popular little island.
Really though, I arrived on Koh Tao specifically for that reason. Everybody loves it. And I wanted to do some diving and hang out on beautiful beaches. Koh Tao delivered on all fronts. Within 24 hours of arriving, I was all, “Yeahhhhh, okay, I get it. This IS excellent. I could live here.” Kinda like with Mancora, I felt silly for being skeptical at the ability of a beach town to suck me in. Oh yeah, and if it even needs to be said, I totally pick Koh Tao over Koh Lanta.
Sairee Beach, where all the action is located, is super walkable, full of good food (I ate approximately 86 curries while I was there), and really social (um, there are a lot of bars). I will admit that, at first, I felt like everybody around me was traveling with their significant other or their three best friends from high school, and I roamed around on my own for a day before scheduling some dives.
which meant eating a lot of curries…
Luckily, on that first dive, I met Maria, a Swedish doctor about my age, and we hung out for the next couple days. We hit up the infamous Koh Tao Pub Crawl, which included a tank top, bucket of your choice, fire dancing show on the beach, and ladyboy cabaret. Totally worth it.
We also took a taxi boat to visit Sai Nuan, a more beautiful and secluded beach, for the day. Definitely don’t let the narrow and crowded Sairee be the only beach you frequent while in Koh Tao!
And of course, a couple of fun dives turned into getting my advanced open water certification, mainly because the folks at Roctopus Dive are just that convincing, professional, and good looking. Plus, I’d need to be certified to go down to 30 meters (100 feet!) anyway to dive in some of the places I want to go on my travels and to visit many of the wrecks off the North Carolina coast. (Oh, I’d also gotten a 10% discount for dives with Roctopus courtesy of the pub crawl, so in a sense all that drinking really paid for itself! Logic!) They even meet up at bars to some evenings to show video footage of all of the folks getting their open water certification. It’s a fun time, a good way to meet people, and I’m happy I decided to do a course with them.
one of our diving sites… yes, the water is really that blue.
Surprisingly, my dive instructor on that first day was from South Carolina – it’s a rarity to meet Southerners traveling Southeast Asia, for real! – and we chatted about home, university rivalries, and if the water off of our coast ever really gets that clear.
I scheduled my dive course for two days later, which meant I had a day to fill with activities before it began. I’d already taken one outdoor yoga class with Grounded Yoga while I was there, but I decided to make an attempt at being super active and set off in the afternoon to hike up to Mango Viewpoint. It provides a great panorama of Koh Tao’s west coast from above. And it was a surprisingly difficult hike, as in I considered turning the hell around at one point because it was so steep, but it ended up being totally worth it.
Since I was alone, I could take as many breaks as I needed without having to disguise them as photo ops, a technique I used a lot on the Inca Trail and other hikes in South America. I met some chatty folks at the top, where I chilled for about an hour enjoying the views before heading back down. (Not trying to wait on the sunset and bust my ass hiking down in the dark, though I’m sure it’s beautiful.)
a little hazy, but I don’t hate it
how I felt for the next 7 days
Of course, the sunset when I got down was worthwhile as well. Settling in at Lotus Bar’s happy hour on the beach made for a good spot to watch the colorful skies on multiple nights.
My advanced diving course consisted of five dives over two days. We had a group of five in our class, from Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy. The first day included two dives to practice buoyancy and navigation, and the third was a night dive. Not only was the ride out during sunset beautiful, but the bioluminescence that we saw as we sat on the ocean floor in the dark was amazing. Right about then, of course, my dengue symptoms started to kick in, the shivering began, and things got a little more interesting.
Not wanting to postpone my course and certification, I combatted the fever and soreness with Tylenol and headed back into the water for my deep dive and wreck dive. Shockingly, they were still incredibly fun and everything went well. Being that far underwater is pretty amazing, and I’m still surprised at how not scary it was. We then logged our dives, and I went off to recover in my bed for what turned out to be the next three and a half days.
My self-imposed DIY yoga detox retreat that I’d had planned for the end of the week in Chalok Bay turned into a sleep, recover, and watch bad movies solo in a hotel room retreat. But on the upside (I guess?), I’ve now seen Runaway Bride, Cinderella, and Taken 3 courtesy of a weird HBO channel provided by the hotel. More on that dengue recovery in a new post…
Where I stayed: CK Hostel in Sairee Beach for the first week of my stay. The hostel was solid and the location was right in the middle of the action. There was great AC and occasionally hot showers. It wasn’t super social though, as it’s more of a restaurant downstairs than a communal area. I paid between 400 and 430 baht per night ($10-11). In Chalok, Aukotahn Place really provided me with the recovery space I needed for three days. I had a beautiful room with a double bed, air condition, some English channels on the TV, and breakfast was included; it’s also a short walk to the beach and lots of restaurants. It was a bit of a (deserved) splurge as I paid about 1,342 baht per night ($37).
Where I ate: Everywhere. Favorites include Samosa (down a tiny side street right near CK Hostel) where the local woman cooked a delicious massaman curry and then remembered that I liked it spicy when I came back a few nights later, and Duck 995 where the duck noodle soup with egg noodles made a fantastic breakfast. Su Chili was very good the two times I visited (and they’ll actually make things spicy the first time you ask) and FIZZ beachlounge delivered a good curry with an even better atmosphere and cocktails right on the beach. Other restaurants were a bit tainted by the dengue.
Heading to nearby Koh Samui? Check out this list of the best things to do in Koh Samui.
