Koh Tao, an island of sun, sand and insanity, is a tropical paradise whose entire economy appears to be based around the vast number SCUBA diving schools that populate the beaches much in the same way as trees populate a forest. It reminds me very much of a planet in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, whose entire economy is dictated by shoe shops, the production of shoes and the sale of shoe related paraphernalia.
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| Water Water Everywhere |
As a result Koh Tao is predominantly SCUBA diving equipment shops, beachware stalls, restaurants named after SCUBA terminology and bars run by washed up divers who need to fund their diving habit. Whilst this makes the little place very much a one trick pony in terms of tourist attractions, it does do what it's set up to do very well. The SCUBA certificates are cheaper than anywhere else in the world, diving with a dive school will inevitably make diving with them again cheaper still, there are a whole host of reefs, wrecks and underwater landscapes to explore and the sheer volume of tourists that all of this brings means that Koh Tao has a formidable nightlife.
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| Hard Life this travelling thing... |
I took my Advanced Open Water Diver course whilst I was there (when in Rome... ) and I more than enjoyed the whole experience, from the great people I dived with to the beautiful dive sites that we got to see, diving on a wrecked military destroyer and diving a reef by night being the highlights. The social aspect of diving is almost just as amazing as the diving itself, on the first evening of our course, we were invited, by our instructor, to a "Snorkel Test" at a nearby bar. The Snorkel Test is basically a way of ceremonially completing the Dive Masters course, where newly qualified DMs are, for want of a better description, drowned in alcohol. They put on a snorkel and mask, and then a concoction of spirits is dumped down the snorkel forcing them to drink it before they can breathe again, they are then made to complete a series of embarrassing challenges much to the amusement of a bar full of sadistic onlookers.... It was very funny though.
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| That's probably safe right? |
Later on in the trip there was a 2 day music festival with a number of world DJs taking to the stage on a makeshift stage on the beach, with fire dancers playing with flaming batons, flails and even diy flamethrowers that could fire 15-20ft into the air. You'd think that such a display would be best kept off the 'dance floor', but not in Thailand. People were mingling and dancing in between the flames, sporadic Flaming Limbo and Hurdling contests would break out occasionally and the fire dancers would sometimes encircle somebody in a ring of fire on the floor for a laugh or play catch over the heads of the revellers using burning rope maces. One feature of this particular event was, for a select few at least, that you could jump on a 'longtail' boat and be ferried from the dancefloor/beach over to the aptly named "party boat", an effectively homemade yacht, owned and run by a pair of eccentric scandanavians. The ships mascot is a piglet called "Baconne" (they added the "-ne" because they thought he would be more classy with a French name) who freely wanders around the ship, probably wondering what hell he's doing there. I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to jump aboard and enjoy a few hours to enjoy the sunset and a few beers from the top deck. Not a bad evening by any standards.
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| A colourful island |
Every day on the island would produce new oddities, like when I mounted my scooter and a little dog casually clambered into the footwell and refused to move until I drove him along a few metres, waking up with a geko perched on my pillow who was eating a fly or just wandering along the beach between bars watching people fall over in hysterics from laughing gas. That such a small place can relentlessly churn out so much fun is commendable, but it definitely came at the price... But then again, sanity is overrated.
