The night train from Bangkok to Chumphon was a pleasant affair despite only having fan cooling rather than air conditioning which our guide book had urged us to take. The beds were big and comfortable and the compartment spacious. We got off the train at Chumphon at 4am then transferred onto a coach then to a high speed catamaran arriving on the island of Koh Tao around 10am.

Once again we hadn't booked any accommodation in advance so faced the prospect of a walk up the beach making enquiries. The scuba diving schools in Koh Tao do deals on accommodation (on the days that you dive) which complicated our calculations of the cheapest place to stay somewhat. Gemma was sure that she didn't want to move around the island and wanted to stay in the same place for all of our 17 nights on the island. We didn't know how much scuba diving we wanted to do given the poor visibility we'd experienced in both Goa and Vietnam. Eventually we got a beach hut very near the sea at the northern end of Sairee Beach and arranged our scuba diving with The Grand Coral Resort next door. There is lots of competition between dive schools and some of them are massive operations the Coral had the advantages of being close by, small and the first school out on the reef each morning.

When we first saw Sairee Beach we (and especially Craig) were delighted, the beach is sandy, clean and sparsely populated with sunbathers, the sea is warm, beautiful, greeny-blue in colour and barely even rippled it was so calm. Beach bars and restaurants were in abundance on the beach, but were sympathetic to their setting and blended in well with the surrounding foliage, a far cry from the brash noisy beaches of Goa. We were both so happy to be spending 17 days in such an idyll. And enjoy it we did, the temperature rarely dipped below 30c, we sunbathed, swam, lay on our lilo, sea kayaked around half the island (sea kayaking is hard work into the wind and tide), ate well at the innumerable eateries, found a great sports bar, went to the cinema and sipped cocktails watching sunsets and fire twirlers. The food in Koh Tao was generally very good although we found the Thai food a little disappointing however, this might have been because the western food (especially Chopper's Sunday roast) was excellent.

On top of all the other activities previously mentioned there was of course also scuba diving at some of Thailand's premier dive sites. In the end we only did 3 days of diving, mainly because on our first day of diving the visibility was poor and it took Craig several days to persuade Gemma to give it another go. We also decided to refrain from taking our advanced diving course which we had hoped to take in Koh Tao. Gemma was sick (again) on our first day of diving, however, some seasickness tables and taking malaria tablets in the evening seemed to sort her out. Our first dive was disappointing for other reasons, Craig's mask kept flooding so had to surface to replace it, a heavy set man with whom we were diving seemed to drink his air and could last no more than 30 mins underwater, also Craig didn't much like the divemaster leading us. All of this was soon forgotten on our second day of diving however, when as soon as we descended into the sea an enormous whale shark (and its entourage of a dozen smaller fish) swam right up to us. We were super lucky to see this huge shark so close up and for such a long time, as an added bonus it was very playful swimming above us so our air bubbles tickled its underbelly. We spent almost the entire dive following the whale shark around and later our divemaster told us he'd only seen one whale shark in over 500 dives prior to this encounter. On our final day of diving we hired an underwater camera. The weather early in the morning look o.k., if a little grey. Visibility at the dive site was again poor, but the sea was like fish soup so there was plenty to see. Whilst making our ascent at the end of our first dive one of the other big dive boats went right over us and our 'divers below' inflatable, something was amiss. When we surfaced it was like a scene from the movie A Perfect Strom, 15ft waves tossed the dive boat around, the wind howled and rain lashed down. All of this culminated in making diving conditions very dangerous although we did manage to struggle back onto the boat to ponder whether the second dive of the day would take place. Fortunately by the time we moved to a different site, sheltered by Koh Nang Yuan, dive conditions and visibility improved and we were lucky enough to see a seahorse and a poisonous devil scorpionfish. After that morning we discovered that all the afternoon dives had been cancelled due to the weather as were the next day's dive trips. Fortunately it was our last day on the island and we had been lucky enough to enjoy over 2 weeks of peace, tranquility and Sun on this beautiful island.

Our scuba experiences prior to Koh Tao had made us wonder if it was all worthwhile. Koh Tao is Thailand's premier diving location, but while we were there visibility was sometimes as low as 5 metres and (save for our experience with the whale shark) we would have been unconvinced that scuba diving was all it's cracked up to be. Maybe we were just unlucky as the reviews we had read about Koh Tao were excellent. We are looking forward to seeing if scuba diving on The Great Barrier Reef can instil some confidence.