Sunshine Sunshine!
(source: Liza's Reef)
Being well and truly over Koh Samui, we were glad to get on a slow boat to Koh Tao -- especially after having to spend most of an afternoon trying to find an agent that didn't charge us a 'tourist' tax on the tickets and then still paying a 100B (about C$3) more than we had to! Oh Samui ...
Koh Tao is, as most of you know, where Lee and I met, did most of our diving, and spent about nine months in 2000 and 2001. Of course, spending so much time in one place means that it has a lot of good memories associated with it, so naturally we were a bit anxious about going back. Would it still be the same laid-back place or had it become all resort-y? Would Sunshine Divers (where we learned to dive and worked) still be around, and would the people still be as fun? At one point we even discussed not going just in case it wouldn't be as we remembered it and we would be disappointed -- you know what they say about not being able to go home again .... In the end we decided to go if for no reason other than that we were so close. Besides, we would likely regret if we didn't.
So there we were; on a boat crossing azure blue waters with a bright sunny sky above us. So far so good. Our first impression on pulling into the pier at Mae Haad (the main 'town' on Koh Tao) was that everything looked pretty much the same. Sure there were a few new buildings and a few more boats, but it sure did look like days of old. Wasting no time, we walked across the rickety wooden pier and bumped into a guy named David who, from the t-shirt he was wearing, was associated with Sunshine (turns out he's an instructor). He nicely arranged a free lift for us to Chalok Baan Kao ('our' beach) and the dive centre. Except for a few structural improvements, Sunshine looked very much like its old self and even though all our old colleagues had moved on (mostly to other parts of the island!), Soe was still running the restaurant. So we could enjoy our old lunch of chicken and cheese sandwiches. (And, yes, they tasted just as good as we remembered!) We sorted out a room, signed up for some diving, and breathed a sigh of relief that the place had the same vibe we remembered.
As we have dived all the sites numerous times, we focused on the most spectacular ones. Our strategy totally paid off, and on our second day of diving we spent more than 45mins diving with a playful, six meter long whale shark at Chumphon Pinnacle. Lee got a little mad at me for leaving her in the dust to follow it into the blue for a bit. Women can be so jealous sometimes ....
In addition to Soe and a few other non-dive staff who are still at Sunshine, we also bumped into Steve (my first instructor) who was now working at another dive centre, Pe-et who is married to Pi-mu who used to manage Sunshine and who now owns a shop in town, and Jonas (the course director of my instructor course) while checking out the changes in Mae Haad. They all remembered us, which was very nice. Some friends we didn't catch, as they were temporarily off island, were Darius and Jeff (both were instructors at Sunshine when we were there). Jeff now owns a very popular sports bar on Sairee beach and Darius owns a open-air gym!
After a few dives, we decided to do something we'd never done before; actually explore the rest of the 3km long island! Lee was all gung-ho about renting a scooter for some serious rubber burning, and I reluctantly agreed (being rather worried about life and limbs on Koh Tao's pot-holed roads). I needn't have worried though, and we ended up having a great day exploring some undiscovered (to us anyway) bays and beaches. We finished the day at our favorite pizzeria, La Matta, with Ben (who we crossed the border with) and his friend Claire.
All in all, it was a good trip down memory lane. Koh Tao may be more build up now than it was before, and some good people have moved on, but it's still definitely an amazing place to hang for a bit. It's likely that it'll be a while before we head back, but after seeing it again I am pretty sure we will.
For more photos, see our Thailand photo album.
