Okay - i'm getting a bit tired of the day by day account now so i'm going to try to do it in chunks. Hope you don't mind?

18th July - 27th July

During this time i have been on Koh Tao, the weather has been generally hot with a nice sea breeze. Saw a big red cock.
Koh Tao (Turtle island) is a very nice place, the beaches and the sea are beautiful. It's a very small island and almost everything here is geared to tourism, especially diving - lots of dive schools with lots of boats coming and going. The food is always good. I share a room with Liz which keeps the costs down and before you even think it, there's no funny business! Liz is also my dive buddy and during our stay we have done our open water course and our advanced open water course involving a fair amount of reading and 9 dives.
We have seen loads of fish but i managed to miss a distant grey reef shark that most of the others claim to have seen. The best dive was the last one which was a night dive with torches - there was no moonlight, pitch black and massive waves, the boat was all over the place but my travel sickness pill did the trick. We turned off the lights and waved our hands about while standing on the ocean floor - these weird green phospherous specks fly everywhere. I've seen rays, angel fish, clown fish (like Nemo), boxfish(pretty weird), batfish, barracudas, scorpion fish, trigger fish (that was scary because we had to swim slowly past - they can be aggresively territorial), cleaner wras (they nibble at you if you stay still for long enough) and loads of other stuff. Had really bad pain in my ear from the pressure on my first 2 dives but seemed to improve after that. One of the advanced dives went down to 28m which is the sort of depth that can bring on Nitrogen Narcosis which can make you feel giggly and drunk - the dive guide did some mental tests on us but we were fine - quite dissapointed really after we had heard and read so much about it. Craving ribena quite a lot. In between diving i've been mostly reading and lazing around in the sun and sometimes forcing down a beer - it's not been easy!!! Read 'Vernon God Little' strange but good. Eventually left Liz on the island with her dutch friend, and took a 1 hour boat ride to Koh Phanang...

27th July - 29th July (present)


Chose a bungalow resort called Cookies on the south west of the island because they advertise windsurfing (sounds like a challenge!) - my bungalow (a hut on stilts, made from mostly wood and wicker) is about 10m from the sea with my own little bathroom and a hammock on the porch. It feels like sleeping outside, sort of an adventure like when Carly and I used to camp in the back garden! This is the view from my hammock outside my bungalow

I can hear the crickets chirping and the waves washing against the beach. The resort is run by some nice Thai people, a lady called Bee is always very friendly. 250B per night for this paradise - fantastic.

The windsurfing is only on in the evenings and only when the conditions are right - eventually i have a lesson and can be seen falling off every 30 seconds as people eat in the restaurant watching the sun set - i am rubbish and the poor bloke with his tiny amount of English doesn't know how to tell me what I am doing wrong - he just shows me what to do - then i fail miserably. Oh well can't be good at every thing (or anything come to think of it!) I've spoken to several people while i've been here and took a taxi with Malachi to Haad Rin for an evening of drinking some evil stuff through straws from a bucket (regretting that today!)

That's all for now. Bye.