Howdy Doody!?!
We haven’t been updating the last few days because we really haven’t done much here. Ko Tao has been pure relaxation, lots of swimming, reading and eating. The Amanjirah Resort, where we are staying here, is located on the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean (spectacular), however it is not so conveniently located. It’s about a 20 minute walk to town down some very rugged, very hilly “roads”.
On Friday night, our first night here, we opted to stay at the hotel for dinner. We had a decent meal overlooking the sea and retired early. As I mentioned before, our first room here was decent but both of us are pretty sure it was not a real room (it was located directly behind the reception desk, and I’m pretty sure they store stuff in the room when people are not saying in there—but that’s besides the point).
Saturday morning we woke up, ate breakfast down by the pool, and moved rooms to our ocean view bungalow aka “Sunset Ocean Dream” as it’s called here—a definite upgrade (especially since we are paying the equivalent of $75 for a room that costs $140 per night), not so bad! That morning we read an article on Business Insider about a new trend emerging among teenage girls who create videos about their morning routines. Considering that we have nothing but time on our hands, and have both reverted to being teenage girls, we decided to make one ourselves.
In the early afternoon we went to the infinity pool, swam, read and ate lunch. We met a Dutch couple (who live in Amsterdam and host on Airbnb) in the pool and they introduced us to Coconut Shakes here. All my life I’ve pretty much detested all forms of coconut aside from coconut water—but these coconut shakes are the most magical and most delicious shakes of all time, I’ve become absolutely addicted over the past few days. With coconut shakes in hand, we watched the sunset.
For dinner we decided to be “adventurous” and leave the hotel. We used the headlamps we had packed in our bags to navigate the hilly, gravely, roads until we found our way into town. The town was cute, unlike Ko Phangan it didn’t feel overly touristy or loud. We found a little Italian restaurant (which for some reason feels weird for an island in Thailand) called Farango Pizza and decided to eat there. The food was great! We also had our first glasses of wine in over a month (pretty sure it came from a box even though they insisted it came from a bottle). After dinner we walked down to the strip of beach bars to check out the scene. Exhausted from a tough day, we schlepped back up the hills to our hotel.
Sunday morning we woke up, ate breakfast, and had virtually the same day at the pool as we did the day before. At dinner time we walked back into town, but this time headed to a sushi restaurant we spotted the night before, called Oishi Kaiso. The food was great (we’d been missing sushi for almost as long as wine). After dinner we ran into someone we met on the beach in Ko Phangan—who also got stung but the jellyfish larval or sea lice—before going back to our hotel.
Monday morning (yesterday) we woke up a bit later than usual and brought our breakfast from the pool back into our air-conditioned bungalow. We spend the early afternoon reading in the room before walking into town (so wild and crazy of us). We found a restaurant on the beach called Island Resort that served edible food and then found a place to rent paddle boards for 200 Baht ($7). Paddle boarding was awesome because the water here is crystal clear and there are coral reefs everywhere you look. For those of you who don’t know, Ko Tao is a scuba divers paradise—almost all of the people we’ve spoken to on this island have come here to get scuba certified.
One thing that we noticed here is that there are tons of horizontal/bent palm trees that seem to be uprooted and growing parallel to the ground, except for the last three feet which are bent upwards towards the sky—very unique. After we spent the afternoon standing on the ocean, we hustled with a taxi-truck driver to take us back to our hotel. The drivers on Ko Tao are extremely lazy, as in they sit in a line of beach chairs on the street and wait for people to come offer to overpay them before they so much as acknowledge you.
Back at the hotel we resumed our daily activities of swimming, lounging, reading, and enjoying the spectacular sunset. We have some serious footage of the sunsets here—it’s magnificent. We ate dinner at the hotel pool (I fed a decent amount of my food to one of the stray cats meandering around the table) and came back to our room to pack up and try to get an early night’s rest.
Today (Tuesday) it’s 5:30 AM—way too early for those of us who haven’t needed to be up early in over a month—and we are taking a taxi-truck down to the pier to catch a 6:30 AM ferry to Ko Samui (our last island).
TTFN
xx
LJ + DS