Day 158 – 164: Koh Tao (early starts and diving)

Koh Tao is a small Island in the Koh Samui archipelago. In theory, it is one of the quieter islands in Thailand, concentrating mainly on its excellent dive sites, but it is still quite developed and touristy. Having said that it is a lovely little place and has a quiet charm about it (with fantastic clear waters). The first few days we spent was Ban’s Dive resort. This was really nice and quite luxurious by our standards (it even had a pool) and so we felt like we were on a proper holiday!!!

 

We didn’t do any diving for the first few days because Gem had a bit of a cold (blocked sinuses make it difficult to equalise your pressure underwater) so we happily lay on the beach and by the pool for a few days. Unfortunately, when we went to pay for a few more nights (so we didn’t have a massive bill at the end), we were told we would have to check out the next day (they hadn’t bothered to tell us on check-in that they were fully booked for Monday even though we said we were going to stay about a week). Already a bit grumpy, we headed off to dinner, after which to find that some kind person had walked off with Gemma’s flip-flops (her beloved Havaianas)!!!!! This really put a downer on things as we thought we might have to leave the island due to lack of accommodation. Unbeknownst to us, Koh Tao gets quite busy a couple of days after Koh Phangan’s infamous Full Moon Party as everybody migrates from there to recover…

This changed (for the worse) the character of the island a little. It was much more busy and loutish but we managed to find a nice little place on top of the hill to get away from them all. Tommy Resort has an attached dive centre (LV) that was really good. We bought a package of 10 dives, that we could split between the two of us and spent the next few days underwater…

LV was a small dive centre, so a bit more personal than the massive operations in town and they started early, 6am departures – being as popular as it is, the dive sites can get really busy, so although we grumbled at first, it was worth it to be underwater with just the few who went with us.

We had always wanted to buy a waterproof casing for our camera, but they cost as much as the camera itself, so one day we paid Damo, our dive leader, to take some photos for us with his camera. All the photos of that day are here an I think you could say we got our money’s worth!!!

(For some reason I can’t embed video here at the moment so to seel some video of cool underwater stuff, as well as the rest of the photos from this set then go to our flickr site here, including some very extravagent forward roll entry vids)

Day 153 – 157: Southern Laos then a change of plan

Day 153 saw us getting up early and saying our goodbyes to Rachel and Adam and getting on a local bus to Savannakhet (south Laos).

The journey itself was quite uneventful but I am always am astounded at the amount of people that sell food on local transport in SE Asia – you certainly never could starve! After a 9 hour journey we arrived in Savannakhet to find (again) that the guidebook had naughtily mislead us – “has a good choice of accommodation” it says – we could not see much that nice at all and we had a right pain getting somewhere to stay (and had to make do with a very basic guesthouse) but we decided to stay one day and give it a chance.

We rented some bikes and had a look around the town – this took all of 2 hours so we decided to sack off the southern Laos idea (we had thought we would make our way down to the 4,000 islands and see the Khmer ruins down there and then possibly jump over the border to Cambodia) however, we made an executive decision to get to a beach as soon as possible.

The next day we got on the local bus and crossed over the friendship bridge into Thailand. We then jumped on another bus that took us to Udon (where the Thai trains go direct to Bangkok). This ride was hilarious as there were many boxes on the bus with ‘legs’ – live chickens in boxes with their legs poking through making quite a noise! Unfortunately, we got to Udon too late to get the ’sleeper’ seats on the train that got into Bangkok at 6am (they were all booked up). Even the 2nd class seats were all taken so we had to opt for the 3rd class seats on the overnight train and then wait 4 hours for the train (it was that or wait another day and try and find somewhere to stay in Udon).

To cut a long story short the 3rd class seats were awful. Rock hard (like benches really), squashed in and everyone on Thai local transport seems to be carrying so much food/rice with them – so we had the added bonus of lots of horrible gnats and cockroaches in the carriage (needless to say we felt so itchy the entire journey and for some time afterwards)! We did not sleep much (Stu not at all) and were very pleased to get to Bangkok ( after 12 hours). It was such a sureal journey with people getting on the train whenever it stopped (even in the middle of the night) selling god knows what to eat and shouting in your ears! In hindsight we should have taken some photos but by this point we were so grumpy we didn’t think to document the moment.

We had 2 nights in Bangkok and did not do that much apart from use the time there to get our supplies in and up to date with booking/changing flights etc.

Day 146 – 152: Vientiane and Rachel

After sitting on a bus with a very hairy french man that insisted on not wearing a top (where do these people come from!) we arrived in Vientiane safely. I must say at this point of the travels I have begun to get a bit sick of buses and generally any type of transport. I was very pleased to be arriving at Vientiane and knowing we did not have to jet off anywhere too soon!

After dumping our bags in Rachels’s luxury apartment we went for sundowner drinks on the Mekong waterfront which was lovely. We then made ourselves presentable and were whisked off to a 4th July party at one of Rachel’s friend’s houses. We met some really nice people and drank some beer. Apart from a relationship bust up and a few tears the party was quite uneventful and we got to bed at 2:30am. Poor Rachel had to stay at her friend’s house as did not have the spare mattress to sleep on yet (me and Stu had her bed and Adam had the other mattress).

Basically we had a great time in Vientiane (it was especially nice to see Rachel and meet some of her friends from her time there). We did relaxing things like go to the pool, drink (more) coffee, have lunch, ate dinner, cooked dinner for Rachel, wandered around the local markers and did some sightseeing.

 

There is not that much to see in Vientiane but we did go to the Pha That Luang (the national symbol of Buddhism in Laos – basically another Wat) and the Patuxay monument (which is very much like the Champs-Élysées).

We also did  lots of sleeping (much needed), chatting and drinking of Beer Laos. The Laos locals also did not know what had hit them when we went to the 10 pin bowling alley – lets just say we were all rather poor!

After a week of spending time with Rachel we decided to give her some space and move on (especially that she was leaving Laos in a few days anyway).

Adam had a flight booked to Siem Reap (we could not do this as we were over our budget) so we parted with him also, planning to make our way south and see how far we would get.