Koh Tao
After a good three days in Bangkok, we headed to the main railway station with some trepidation after some fairly unpleasant recent land journeys. However, our journey south to Chumpon was very pleasant if a little delayed and even included a surprisingly nice airline style meal and free tea and coffee.
We stayed one night in Chumpon in a very basic bar/hostel that had the appealing prospect, before kick off, of showing the Tottenham v Stoke game. Although as it turned out this was actually an unappealing prospect. I found out that Tottenham's inability to break down a no more than workmanlike defence is as frustrating sat on a different continent as it is sat in the same borough. Anyway…
We had a 5.30am rise for the hour journey to the coast where the fast ferry awaited us, the sea was a perfect blue and totally flat so we arrived on Ko Tao ahead of schedule. We were greeted by our resort and herded into a pick-up truck for the short journey to what would be home for almost a week. Soon the concrete road gave way to an uneven and extremely hilly dust track and it was obvious why there are only four wheel drive vehicles on the island.
Ko Tao (turtle island - although they have since mostly moved elsewhere) is only 21km square and according to Lonely Planet only has one site of cultural interest so the need to sight see was not great, which made a pleasant change. We spent the days doing a combination of lying on the beach, swimming, snorkelling, kayaking, cribbage, petanque, chess, mini golf, and mountain biking (David only).
Our accommodation was a wooden hut on stilts that gave great sea views and was 30 seconds from the beach. It also seemed to come with its own cat which was named (I think you will know by who) Boris.
After a week of resting up we decided to move on, the next stop being Khao Sok National Park when hopefully the cat will be replaced by monkeys…