There are three islands close to one another on the east coast of southern Thailand: Ko Samui, Ko Phagnan, and Ko Tao. None of them are cheap like Laos is cheap (all you can eat buffet for $1.25!), due to their being beautiful tropical islands, but I listed them above in decreasing cost. Ko Samui is a well developed resort island, Ko Phagnan is famous for its beach dance parties, and Ko Tao, the little brother to the others, has become a diving mecca. Here you can see dive boats clustered around a dive site (I think this is Twin Pinnacles):
Of course it has fine diving (we dove today and it was the best dive of my life, except maybe the time I swam alongside a turtle off the Kohala coast in Hawaii), but other places in the region have fantastic diving. As the cheapest of the three islands, Ko Tao is the place to learn how to dive and to take more advanced diving courses. Half of the places you can stay have dive schools, and in the afternoon every pool is filled with classes of people learning.
So this is our first stop in tropical Southeast Asia. The Private Eye and I haven’t dived in two and a half years, so we wanted to stop here to refresh our skills, maybe learn some new ones, and get recommendations from the local divers. After this, we’re thinking we want to dive Sail Rock (either from here or Ko Phagnan), I’m excited about the wreck dive near Bali (the Liberty), and we are considering going to the east coast of Thailand to dive the Similan islands. Originally the Similans had been high on our list, but it can be expensive, since it’s near the higher-end resort beaches of Phuket. So depending on how money is feeling when we wrap up here, we might head to Phuket, or, if money is tight, we might instead head to Railay Beach and Krabi, also on the east coast, for some oceanside cliff climbing.
Arriving here was, for lack of a better word, a bitch. We took the night train from Bangkok to Chumphon. We wanted a sleeper car, but it’s still busy enough around here, and we did it the day of, that all we could get were 2nd class seats. Since there was no AC, the windows were open, which meant passing trains were a deafening roar. A lot of other uncomfortable things meant each of us slept 3 hours at most. One night of poor sleep is not too hard, but we’d also only slept 3-4 hours the night before. We arrived in Chumphon at 5 am to take a bus at 6 am to a high speed catamaran to Ko Tao, departing at 7. The sea was rough enough that I started to become queasy, and almost lost it as I made my way to the back of the boat. What made it especially hard was that my eyes were so tired I couldn’t stay focused on the horizon – looking at the horizon I was fine, eyes closed or unfocused was bad. But once I was at the stern and could watch the churn of the water from the engines, I was fine. I actually feel asleep, sitting down, head resting on the railing. I arrived soaked in salt water, but with a stable stomach.
We caught a soorng-tao to Sairee beach, where a few of the most recommended dive schools are, found a too-expensive room that was fine for one night (B1200/$40) since we needed to sleep so badly, arranged for a refresher class the next day (Friday the 18th) with Scuba Junction, a seemingly awesome diving school (they are), and crashed out.
So this is a tropical island, with all that entails: beautiful white sand beaches whose sand is so fine in parts it feels like clay. The beach itself is all bars, restaurants, and dive schools. So you can, for B60 ($2), get a cup of coffee as well as toast with jam and butter, and eat them lounging on a patio that ends 10 feet from the surf. All of the beach is free access, so you can walk up and down it as much as you want. It’s not crowded. While it might be hard to find a patch of beach which has no one else for 30 feet, it’s trivial to find a spot for your towel. Sairee beach is about a kilometer long, with rocks at both of its ends, so you can walk it in 15 minutes.
I woke up before The Private Eye so did exactly that, walked up and down the beach, sitting down a few times, for an hour or so. Three people gave me fliers for events that evening as I walked: a new yoga studio, a flying trapeze show with free trials, and a bikini/trunk fashion show. I tried to be in the Burning Man spirit; rather than say no, I took every one offered with genuine interest. The Private Eye awoke, we had grilled barracuda for dinner (actually a big, square meal) and went to the trapeze show, whose details I’ll elide because I think The Private Eye night have more to say.
So we went to be early, woke up at 8 or so, booked a cheaper room, and made our way to Scuba Junction for our refresher course at 10AM.
— The Professor
The Professor and the Private Eye: Adventures Abroad 