We arrived on Christmas Eve, after 14 hours travel, including a night bus (which was just a normal coach, aka bloody uncomfortable) which dropped us at the pier at 3am. Where we sat for 4 hours awaiting our 7am ferry. When we finally arrived on Koh Tao at 10am we were like zombies. It also looked like we’d just got a ferry to the Isle of Sheppey, it was totally grey and bleak looking. Fair to say we weren’t the happiest chappies at that moment. 

Luckily our hotel did free transport when we arrived, and despite the guy looking us up and down and asking if we’re sure we’re staying at that hotel (to be fair we did look rough, and the hotel was really nice)…I’ve lost my thread now, but off we went! 

When we arrived we gave our names, to discover we weren’t in the system. This was a fancy hotel we booked months ago to treat ourselves at Christmas. After some confusion, we discovered we’d booked from the 25th…so we were one day early! Luckily they had a cheap room spare that we had for one night before moving the next day. 

Christmas Eve was a day of admin primarily – we needed to book accommodation for the rest of our stay on the island, book our diving course (I’ll come to that later!) and book somewhere for Christmas dinner. Finally by about 5pm we had all our admin sorted and could finally relax and enjoy Christmas! 

That evening we went for dinner at a nice restaurant by the beach and had some Prosecco! A few beach bars later, we were wiped out so we headed straight to bed, ready for Christmas! 

Christmas Day

After an amazing breakfast buffet (we didn’t hold back), we moved to our new room. We both got a little bit emotional as the guy showed us in – a poolside room with sliding bay doors – it had air con, amazing comfy beds with 2 pillows, a fridge, a nice bathroom, dressing gowns and slippers, a lounge area. We were in heaven, and very pleased with our Christmas present to ourselves. I think the hotel guy thought our reaction was a little strange! 

After a quick trip out to stock up the fridge with as much booze and chocolate as we could possibly fit, we spent the day sunbathing by the pool, slowly getting more and more pissed (and of course skyping our families and stuff too). In the evening we had booked a Christmas dinner at Breeze bar a few minutes walk away. A beach view for sunset, and a 3 course meal and plenty of wine was absolutely perfect. Ironically, as we sat eating a traditional English Christmas dinner, my family were at home having a Thai curry for dinner! 

In the following pictures, we actually look like a honeymoon couple…

We stumbled back, so full we could hardly move, and ended Christmas the way one always should – with an argument …a Christmas film! Home Alone was the obvious choice. 

Hotel Bliss

Boxing Day was much of the same – a breakfast buffet and a day sunbathing in paradise! 

Roctopus Diving

One of the things we both really wanted to do on this trip was a scuba diving qualification. I’d been diving once before when I was younger, and Chloe was keen to try it. Koh Tao is place to do it! The island is packed with many dive shops, and more people get certified each year on Koh Tao than anywhere else in the world. After some walking around we came across Roctopus, a medium-sized dive shop and we instantly had a good feeling about it. Plus their T-shirts were well cool. We booked to start a 4-day Open Water Course on Boxing Day, and so it began! 

Day 1 was all theory – the course has a lot of academics into the science of diving, so you understand the effects of the pressure on your body as you go deeper, and understand about monitoring your air supply (pretty important, that one!). After a homework session that evening, we were up early the next day ready for day 2!

Diving: Day 2 – The Pool Session

The second day we began with a pool session – this can vary in length but our group took it slowly, and ended up spending 5 hours in the pool running through the basic skills. By the end of the session we were exhausted and shrivelled like prunes – but we had proved that we could breathe underwater without drowning and would (probably) not die if we went in the sea! Our instructor Frankie was incredibly patient with us, which at times we definitely needed! The afternoon was another academics session, and it felt like being back in a school science lesson. It was very cool to learn about how being underwater affects your body, and reasonably scary to learn about decompression sickness! Then back home we went, with more homework to do and an early start ahead of us for our first 2 open water Dives.

Diving: Day 3 – First Two Dives

We were on the boat nice and early, heading to 2 dive sites – Twins and White Rock. Our first 2 dives were to a maximum depth of 12 metres, but as we had previously only gone to about 3 metres in the dive pool, this seemed deep enough. On the boat we set up and tested our equipment, and Frankie gave us a briefing on what we’d be doing. A lot of the open water course involves underwater drills – proving you can cope with a number of different situations safely. So our first dives were to include skills such as removing your regulator, helping your buddy who was ‘out of air’ by giving them your spare regulator, filling your mask with water and clearing it, completely removing your mask and putting it back on again, and plenty more! 

Dive number one can only be described as a total clusterfuck (but I think that’s normal!). Although we were all correctly weighted, we were all floating all over the place, some of the group had problems with equalisation, and generally just trying to stay in any kind of form or order proved almost impossible. 

Dive 2 was more successful, where we demonstrated some skills and actually did some swimming around to see some of the awesome underwater life. Coral reefs and a variety of amazing fish awaited us – included trigger fish, groupers, sea anemone, angel fish, banner fish, and more!

We ended the day on a high feeling more confident (read as: less terrified) for the next day of diving! 

Diving: Day 4 – Last Two Dives

On our last day we were up even earlier – a 6am start to get to the dive sites before everyone else! Unfortunately things didn’t go quite to plan – after sailing for half an hour to our dive sites for the day, the instructors decided the currents were too strong so we had to abandon the plan and return to the same 2 sites from day one. A bit of a shame as there was the potential to see whale sharks and other cool creatures at this site, but I think we were all more apprehensive about actually being able to breathe and stuff than what we saw, so no big deal. (AKA if we saw a shark I think we all would’ve had a full blown panic attack and failed our course!)

Dive 3 and 4 are all a bit of a blur, but as a group we had our shit together a little bit more and managed a decent amount of time (40 mins on the longest one) exploring the underwater world. We demonstrated the last of the necessary skills and all went, for the most part, pretty swimmingly.

I discovered I’m a very buoyant human who really seems to like to float upwards. On the first dive of the day I floated a short distance up, and Chloe swum underneath me in an attempt to help me down. Unfortunately she didn’t realise that by being underneath me, blowing bubbles up she was just sending me up! Moments later another group swum underneath me too, so I floated even further up! In the end the underwater photographer had to come and get me haha! All a good experience, but after that I realised that buoyancy is certainly something I need to work on! 

Here is some of the wildlife captured by our underwater photographer, Lee Jellyman at Roctopus dive. I’d love to say we saw all of these creatures…but I’d be lying. We were more focussed on staying alive.

By the time we’d completed dive 4, we had seen so much cool sea life! We were also absolutely exhausted. 

The whole experience was absolutely amazing, and made even better by having Lee from Koh Tao ProVideo down with us on our second day of diving, taking pictures and videos of our adventures.

You can watch the video below (password: scuba)

After packing down our gear and heading back to the dive shop, we were told we had all passed – we were certified open Water divers to 20 metres, hooray! 

This means we can literally hire some equipment now and go out diving with a buddy anywhere in the world. Obviously we will absolutely not be doing that any time soon, but we will definitely be keeping up the diving in 2019 with some fun dives with dive schools (bring on the Great Barrier Reef!), and maybe even going on to complete our Advanced Diving Qualification.

It’s the first qualification either of us have got in some years, and it was one of the most challenging and exhilarating things I’ve done in my life. As Frankie said, 80% of the world is underworld, so there’s so much ahead of us to discover! 

Our overall verdict? AWESOMEEEEE.

We were finished and back at the shop by midday, but all that was on the agenda for the afternoon was sleep!

That evening all the groups met at Victor Bar, where they showed the videos from our dives. We then had drinks and ended up staying out until 1.30am to celebrate! 

Final Day – Koh Nang Yuan

On our final day in Koh Tao, after a well-deserved lie in, we got the taxi boat across to Koh Nang Yuan, and nearby small island. We spent the day on the beach and seeing the iconic Koh Tao View from the viewpoint. Its the only place in the world where three islands are connected by sand strips, and it was WELL COOL sitting on the beach with the sea on both sides of you! 

That evening we went for dinner with our new dive buddies, Ruth and Chris, and then Chloe, Chris and I went to a beach bar and watched a fire show. Ruth headed off early as she decided to start the Advanced course the next day – good luck Ruth! 

One thing I forgot to add is how bloody marvellous the sunsets are on Koh Tao. The best I’ve ever seen. Here’s a few (no colour correction, this is pretty much how our eyes saw them!)

And with that, our week on Koh Tao had come to an end. Despite some unfortunate bad press the island gets, it was absolute paradise. We met so many great people, had a great boozy Christmas, and learnt to scuba dive! 

We are definitely not finished with Koh Tao, and I’d love to return and do my advanced qualification with Roctopus! Watch this space. 

Annie x