With our considerably lightened load, we kissed our pals goodbye and jumped on a Lomprayah high speed ferry to Ko Tao, a tiny speck of an island in the Gulf of Thailand. We had high hopes for this little spot – a place where we could finally get away from the hustle and bustle of it’s bigger, brasher sister, Koh Samui. Having heard great things about Ko Tao, we expected to fall in love and sink into a sort of ‘never-going-to-leave’ rhythm with the kids. More practically, we also needed to get our budget and schoolwork back on track. And from what we’d heard, Ko Tao was just the place to settle in for a few weeks.
Ummm….WRONG. So, turns out that Ko Tao is no longer the little hippy bliss that it once was. It’s crazy busy, fairly expensive and it started raining the day that we arrived. To add to it’s charm, it’s positively overrun with those laugh-too-loud backpackers who are too cool for school – tattied-up and lurching down the street with their ‘booze buckets’, all dreadlocks, dirty fingernails and way too many piercings in hard-to-explain places. Thank you, no thank you. Please, let this not be karma from my own 22-year-old backpacker days. I’m sure I was better behaved, listening to mixed tapes on my yellow Sony Walkman and wearing my Canada-flag-festooned-MEC fanny pack. Bah. Karma, for sure.
We stayed in a completely marginal, totally indifferent ‘hotel’ (term used loosely) arranged by the scuba school that we’d enrolled Henry in. The front office staff were either absent or fast asleep the entire time we stayed there. When we checked out, they charged us $5 for a water glass that the kids broke (the shards of which they’d fished out of our garbage as ‘proof’). Ha!
I spent the first few days trying to find something better, with no luck. Everything was triple the price with no noticeable improvement. I’ve found, on this trip, that where we stay has an enormous impact on my overall state of mind. The world is a nicer place with clean sheets, flushing toilets, a sturdy deadbolt and a few niceties. Towels, no bugs, a kettle. Maybe even a bed for each body. This place barely met our low-ish standards, but I wound up sucked into the lethargy of the indifferent. It didn’t bode well for our time on Ko Tao.
Henry, on the other hand, absolutely blossomed. “I feel happy here”, he told us one night. He spent 5 days at Crystal Dive, working towards his PADI Open Water Diver certification and I think it was just the right amount of independence and structure at just the right time for him.
It was nice to see Henry so focussed. And Crystal Dive was absolutely awesome. They assigned him a 1:1 instructor – a hilarious, game, vivacious 25 year old Danish gal named Line. Each day, he’d trot off down the beach for his classes and practice dives and wouldn’t return until dinner time. It meant that we were suddenly a family of four. It was odd, after so many months of 24/7 togetherness. I couldn’t shake the feeling that we’d lost someone or left somebody behind.
The dive centre is run by a bunch of expats – mostly young 20-something guys from all over the world. Everyone was so great with Henry – encouraging, inclusive and fun. They seemed really happy to have him in their midst and he loved hanging out with them. They’d take him out on the boats and, after their dives, spend all afternoon jumping from the boat’s roof into the water, eating cookies and drinking tea. He confided to me that they didn’t even curb their swearing or smoking around him (gasp!) which was particularly thrilling for a 12 year old. I think he kinda liked feeling part of an older crowd after so many months with only two younger siblings to hang with.
One day, we returned to the ‘hotel’ at about 6pm and there was no Henry. He’d left a note saying that we were gone too long, he was hungry and he’d gone off in search of dinner. Sure enough, a short while later, he came ambling down the road swinging his take-out pad thai. When I asked where he went, he mentioned that he’d gone for lunch with ‘some of the guys’ that day and they’d shown him the best little spot on the island for his favourite dish – in the little village of Mae Head. So he returned on his own for dinner with whatever baht he had left.
While Henry was busy with his diving, we took the two littles and tried to find some good snorkelling. Tom is an avid, rabid snorkeler. It’s, apparently, “ALL” that he wants to do. Ko Tao is meant to be a diving and snorkelling mecca, but the latter was really disappointing. All the rain seemed to have dredged up a lot of sand and silt and there was very little to see except floating garbage. One day, between jellyfish stings (oh, be still my heart), Tom and Lucy spent the better part of an afternoon on an ‘ocean clean-up’ mission while Mike and I huddled under a cafe’s roof, trying to stay dry-ish.
one of the piles of garbage they removed from the ocean
On Henry’s final day, we asked Crystal if we could accompany him for his last certification dive. They had no problem with that, though I’m sure that having his parents along made him look extra cool. We tried not to embarrass him too much. Bahahaha. But still, it was a huge thrill to dive alongside him. It definitely wasn’t the most awe-inspiring diving that Mike or I have ever done in terms of sea life, but seeing Henry so excited and competent was worth all the bloody effort.
And as we get older, Mike and I both agree that diving is kinda a young person’s game. I haven’t been diving in years and completely forgot…it’s SO MUCH EFFORT. The weight belts and wetsuits and clearing of masks and ears and buoyancy and O-rings and watching depth and oxygen gauges (not to mention keeping an eye out for box jellyfish). Blah blah blah. I think I’d rather lie on the beach and read People Magazine. Been there, done that, got the tattoo to prove it (not really). My diving log is full.
We’d sort of planned about two weeks on Ko Tao, but once Henry was officially certified, there was very little motivation to stay. The family we’d met in Bangkok had raved about a quiet little stretch of beach on a neighbouring island, so we decided to give it a try.
We left Ko Tao and headed to Ko Pha Ngan, the island sandwiched between Tao and Samui. This time, the ferry ride was super intense. Within 1o minutes of leaving Ko Tao, the crew was handing out barf bags. Mike, Tom and Lucy were green and suffering, as were most of the passengers. The swells were enormous. I kept a nervous eye on all the passengers’ bags that kept falling in front of the emergency exits. Not our favourite trip. But we made it to Koh Pha Ngan in one piece and, from there, jumped into a songtheuw (a pick-up type taxi) and headed to a little pier on the other side of the island. From there, we had to jump into a long-tail boat to make the final leg of our journey to Bottle Beach. It was a long day’s travel to cover quite a modest distance, but wow…was it ever worth it.
After the frenetic pace of both Koh Samui and Ko Tao, Bottle Beach was heaven. It was finally like the “old” Thailand that I remembered from 1995. Boat access only, it’s inexpensive, low-key, beautiful beyond words. The beach is clean, the staff are lovely and the accommodation, though barebones is clean and serviceable. In fact, Mike still gets all blissed out when he talks about Bottle Beach.
We stayed for 6 days and would have stayed longer if we weren’t about to exceed our 30 day visitors’ permits. Most countries we’ve visited have had a standard 90 day maximum stay and we assumed that Thailand was the same. And as the saying goes…to assume…something about a donkey and me. It meant that we had to leave before meeting up with other friends on Koh Lanta – a disappointment for all of us. Preferable, however, to the red tape involved with trying to extend our stay and/or the fines for staying beyond without authorization. I would not look good in a Thai prison.
We loved our time at Bottle Beach and it’s probably the first spot we’d return to if we ever go back to Thailand. I managed to keep my box jellyfish phobia mostly at bay, and the kids spent lots of time making friends on the beach, playing Jenga in the restaurant, joking with the friendly staff and doing more schoolwork. There was absolutely nothing else to do – no stores, no hordes of tourists, no road access, no TV, no internet, nothing. Just a beautiful crescent of beach with 3 basic hotels and 3 beachfront bars/restaurants.
I’m so glad that we shook off the ho-hum of Ko Tao and spent our last week at this special spot. By that point, I was feeling a bit let-down by Thailand – it just didn’t measure up to my memories of pristine beaches, inexpensive, laid-back living and friendly locals. Of course, being with our friends on Samui had offset much of that, but it still wasn’t quite what we were expecting.
On both Samui and Ko Tao, it was so distressing to see the beaches cluttered with all manner of detritus – from plastic water bottles to cigarette butts and beer bottles, random flip flops, styrofoam and plastic. The crowds were daunting, the people seemed more harried and the tourists were often loud, rude and embarrassing. Bottle Beach fixed all of that. Mike finally felt like he got a glimpse of what I’ve been talking about all these years. The kids could roam and run around with complete freedom and the staff were happy and quirky and friendly.
We left Bottle Beach on our last possible day in Thailand and made our way back to the mainland. Again, we had a long few days of planes, trains, ferries, longboats, buses and taxis, but it was time for somewhere new. We’d found a crazy deal on flights to Western Australia and were excited to start our Antipodean adventures.
Of course, it would have been nice if someone had told me that Canadians actually need a visa to get into Australia….but that’s another story.
