Love Shack...

Hello from the beautiful, magnificent, fantiliastic Island of Koh Tao in Thailand........ You may have guessed, but I kind of like it here :).

In fact I'm sad we have to leave :( .... but because our free 15 day Visa expires tomorrow and it'll take that long to get to Malaysia we must be on our way. We really have been thinking of doing a Visa run to Myanmar,  but the time and expense was hard to rationalize............ oh I miss the beach already and I've just left it :).

So Koh Tao is a divers paradise with tons of live coral and fishes galore :). I thought about getting my PADI here for scuba diving but even though it's about the cheapest place in the world to do it I just couldn't. My main reason was I know I'll fall in love with it and everywhere else to rent the equipment is expensive..... so I spent much of my time borrowing or renting a mask and snorkel and swimming from the beach in front of our shack :). PERFECT!!!!

The "bungalow"   we have really is a shack on stilts with 6 inch gaps between the walls and the ceiling and the walls and the floor. Also there are gaps in the floor boards where we can see the beach below us :). We do have our own bathroom though and a mosquito net for the bed, plus our very own balcony with  chairs and a hammock :). Perfect :). We just have to share the room with a few locals.... I think our room is a freeway for some singing geckos.... possibly a squirrel and definitely a cute little rat we saw one night on the rafters :).  That's nothing... the funniest thing we shared with only came in at night.

One night I couldn't get to sleep and I was being all spazzy and heard creepy scraping sounds??? It really freaked me out and I scared the crap out of Chris jumping up and scanning the room with my flashlight (yes I sleep with a flashlight). Nothing..... so I tried to sleep again.... and a few minutes later even Chris heard the same creepy sound.... we started searching the room through our mosquito net to see the funniest thing. A big Halloween crab  sauntering along making scraping sounds with his claws and pointy legs. Yes a big Halloween (AKA. Moon crab) purple crab with orange legs and crazy pattern on the side :). OK I am not afraid of crabs and it shouldn't have been a surprise that one could get from the rocks into our room from below, but why???? Tee hee. I tried to take a photo, but he was already trying to fit sideways through a crack at the foot of the bed. I guess he's a bit chunky since it took several tries, but in the end he made it through :).

That was my bit of excitement, and am couple days later we caught another for photo opportunities.... This is not as easy as it sounds, and Chris had his finger crushed by a death grip that took awhile to get out of :). Tee hee. We later caught the one who lives close to our shack and brought him into our room to see if it was him. We let him loose on the bed, and sure enough he went to the foot and to the corner of the room and took a few tries to get through. He seemed to know our room pretty well :).

All good. So besides the deathtrap ladder that is rotting out and wobbly  to our room our most excitement was had swimming with the fishes. YAY!!!! There are a ton of beautiful fishes all colourful and some very curious. Chris had one cool looking fish called a remora was nibbling at his stomach and eating stuff off his fins (rented ones, he doesn't sprout fins in the water) and finally bit his toe :). Tee hee. I don't know names of many kinds of fish, but there were colourful parrot fish, and tons of fish of every size and colour everywhere:). Yay!!! Amazing soft and hard corals and beautiful anemones :), massive brightly coloured clams over a foot long, tiny vivid coloured christmas tree worms and funny looking sea cucumbers :). Double YAY!!!

We did get in touch with a Spanish couple we met in Nepal when we were trekking. Andy and Doby are great and teach diving here. This made it even harder not to learn diving since it would be a friend teaching me, but I didn't do it. We met up a couple times, and it was great to see familiar faces :). Turns out Doby is teaching Free-diving where you can learn to snorkel very deep for up to 3 minutes. I seriously thought about this even more then diving. It would be so cool to be able to learn to stay under for longer :), but it was 5000 Baht for a 2 day course (Diving for PADI is about 7000 Baht and 3 days I think). I would really love to know how to do it, but to be honest I just wanted to play in the water and not take a class... I know I will regret it, but I promised myself I would buy a good mask instead. Doby was going to help me find a free-diving mask since they fit smaller and are closer to your eyes for good visibility, but the stores closed earlier then we though.... oh well maybe I can get one in Malaysia. I'm so excited :).

So mostly swimming and being beach bums, reading like maniacs and we did try to go snorkeling at the other side of the Island where it's suposed to be really cool, but  storms have been coming through and the East side has been way too rough and visibility brutal. Turns out we were lucky when we fist arrives since the last few days it's been cloudy and lots of colourful things hide in the shade. No biggie still nice. When we weren't on the beach we were usually walking the 20 minutes along the same trail to town to get food and treats.

Oops almost forgot..... at night we set out some candles in the sand and watched the stars... we weren't alone though since on the rocks close by were a ton of crabs on the rocks, and some cool looking fish that looked like mud skippers??? The stayed on the rocks just resting, but when you poked them they did summer-salt flips and jumped in the water.... from there they would swim back to the rock and jump walk with their fins to get back on top :). Also a bunch of ugly black sea cucumbers sticking to the side of the rocks. They get massive and blobby and look like they are shedding old skin that's got sand stuck to them??? Crazy crazy... and if that's not enough the glowing blue white plankton is wild. It's at the edge of the water where you can see them. After ages of trying to really see them up close I was able to get one on my finger. They glow so much for little guys and have a small body and little eyes. The glow seems to pulse through their bodies. Too cool :).

I wish we had another week just to lounge around and relax, but now we are off on another long trip. We take a ferry at 2:30PM today then have a couple hours to blow on the mainland before catching the overnight train close to the boarder.  Then catch a bus I think over the border... Guess I'll see soon. Should be a long day...............

Bye bye fishes, and hopefully I'll meet up with Andy and Doby somewhere else in the world :).

I REALLY wish we could stay. Silly Visa's.

Sheryl

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