Laa Gon, Koh Tao

OH MY GOD!!! So, I’ll start with my last piece of daily news first. It being my last day on the island, Gaudette and Heather convinced me to climb the mountain with them to a view point called “Two Views”. There’s a “road” to get to the view point, but it’s a loose description at best. It is in fact better described as a former river gully that has dried out a bit, but then turned into slippy slippy gravel. It was a treacherous climb. The bike didn’t even make it a third of the way up. In fact, at one point I was walking faster than the bike was moving underneath me. And then it started giving out what can only be described as it’s death rattle and an acrid smell of burning motor hit my nostrils. It was at this point I decided to cut the engine and give the ol’ girl a rest.
The only problem was that we were halfway up a very steep incline. So DG and I ended up pushing the bike up a near vertical incline with its full weight on us. This road made the route up to Noé and Célia’s place look like a flat desert stretch. And the sun was baking us.

After abandoning the bike on the side of the road, we hiked up the gully for about 25 to 35 minutes. Damn it was hot. Damn it was steep. Damn we could have slipped to a jungly fugly death. So hot in fact that by the time we reached the top, it looked like I had pissed myself:

Honestly, it is not urine, DG can attest. It is almost as gross and it is a bunch of belly and chest sweat that ran in small torrents down my torso. Small fleas that took weeks to build their brand new houses on my belly button lost all their worldy possessions in one foul flood of Chris Sweat. Poor fuckers.

Anyway, despite the exhausting and perilous trek, the view was fantastic:

Only slightly soured by the fact that while we had trekked and trekked, when we got there, three guys were sitting there on their mopeds!! Anyway, I was simply sopping, as was DG:

In fact, I recorded how I felt.....(warning, expletive included....by the way, I am having difficulty uploading the two videos...if they are not here, sorry, I'll edit when I can....by the way, check the bottom of the blog too to see if they posted there):

Oh….and did I forget to mention, we lost Heather. Before we even started trekking. After abandoning the bike we waited, expecting Heather to be right behind us. We yelled, we waited, we yelled some more. There was no Landymore. You see, we had taken a brief wrong turn as a group before leaving the bike on the right road. And when we went on the right road, Heather must have turned back down the mountain instead of up.

We felt bad, but figured that as we had struggled to make it this far that we had to make it to the top. Of course, we didn’t realize that it meant a further half hour trek. But on the way down we felt bad for Landym and figured she’d be pissed, so we tried to apologize on digital celluloid (shut up, Steve Hoyles, I know that makes no sense):

Well, we’re now here in Café del Sol…..luckily we guessed right in that Heather would be waiting for us here, rather than back at Sunshine in a huff or in a crumpled heap halfway up some mountain. And the best bit is, she isn’t even grumpy, in fact, she has a beer in front of her. That’s right, Heather’s tanked.

Ok, now let’s rewind and fill you in on events from yesterday afternoon. We went diving yesterday on the afternoon Ban’s boat. The first dive was shit. We went to a place called Hin Wong pinnacle. It is on the far side of the island and fairly deep. We started going deep, but the viz was so bad, that at 25 metres it was like very cloudy chicken soup. Noé was leading. At which point we got separated. So it was Heather and me and we imagined DG and Noé (we didn’t know, because they were completely gone). I headed us up a bit to see if we could reach better viz, which we did. The other bad part of the dive was that as we had been following Noé, I hadn’t been taking any navigational headings at all. And I had never been to Hin Wong before either. So I just started heading south in the hope that Noé had started by heading north. All I can say is that there is a little bit of luck in me and a boot load of kick-arse diving skills. I got us back to the buoy line. In fact, I am so damn good that we still had time to dive for another twenty minutes and I ended up giving directions to other lost instructors and DM’s on how to get back to the boat.

The next dive was better, even though it was Twins (dived about 50 times or so now). We saw EVERYTHING except for a sea snake. It was awesome for the amount of marine life we saw. A good dive.

Then a quick clean up back on land, a little cricket on the beach with Jon and Ben, then a shower and meet the ladies for dinner. They initially wanted to surprise me by taking me to a cool restaurant they had been advised of…..Porto Bello’s. Well, I may have mentioned this previously in a blog, but I went there with the missus, Jon and James and Noé and Celia. And it was crap. So we went instead to Morava instead. It was pretty good. Then we walked down to Papa’s Tapas and enjoyed a couple of raspberry martinis. At this point, the ladies wanted badly to go to Queen’s, the island’s resident drag show. It wasn’t really all that, so DG and I got bored and headed over to Hippo’s for some apple crumble, leaving the Landym to soak up some lady-boy action. Then off to Nelly’s to say hi to Ben who was working there last night. In time for last call. Although I also found out by hitting Nelly’s that the Six Nations started yesterday!! Wales plays Scotland tonight!! I’ll have to see if I can convince people to head to Nelly’s or Choppers for a few beers at my farewell tonight….

Fairly late night, especially because we went diving this morning and had to be at Sunshine for 7 a.m. But the silliest thing happened last night, which, because it involved Heather, is probably to have been expected…..Heather decided to use the small basket on the front of her moped as a safe location to store her purse during transit. So on the way home at 12:30 a.m., her purse flew out somewhere between Mae Haad and Chalok. Luckily it only had money and her bank card in it. Yes, this is a pain in the bum for her, because now she cannot withdraw cash and she lost about 2,000baht, but at least she has her credit cards, passport, etc. We had to call Lee this morning to approve a cash advance for Heather to survive on. The missus and I had almost exactly the same phrase on our lips at almost exactly the same moment: “Ahhhh, Heather!!”

But she was still there for diving at 7:00 a.m. this morning. Great dives, even if they were Twins and White Rock (well, really, what more fitting dive sites could there be for my very last dives on Koh Tao? I mean, I know them so well, it was like saying goodbye to old friends). And I also used student gear today, because I have had my stuff drying out for a day to pack it all away. Euuuuuwwww, nasty. I had to wear two shorties in order to stay warm.

We went diving with German Chris and his ex-girlfriend. Nice people. Noé and Ben were also on the boat and both attempted a last friendly underwater farewell attack. Ben succeeded in getting one of my fins off, but then couldn’t escape because I had hold of his air tank…..he nicely surrendered the fin. Noé didn’t fare so well….he attacked and tried to grab mask, but I ended up with his fin and he with nothing. Off he went trying to lead a fun diver with only one fin. I relented and let him carry on. Here are some pics from getting ready and on the boat this morning:

One last item from today and then a parting observation. I am feeling quite sad about Red and Spot. Poor little buggers. They are on my porch every morning. I am leaving some food with Scott and with strict instructions to feed both of them, not just Red. I think they can sense my imminent departure….they were quite clingy this morning and stayed close by on the porch:

And so, my Koh Tao blog will either end with this post or with a final post tomorrow if I get a chance. As I mentioned, I will likely convert the blog to one concerning the start-up our Peter and my new business, but that will be after a very short hiatus.

Surprisingly, I am not quite melancholy right now, although I expect I will be either tomorrow or when I am mid-flight. It’s the end of a time. I am so excited to be getting home, but there is a little sadness to say farewell, evenif I know I could never keep a lifestyle like this up. Even if the missus and my pooch were here, it just doesn’t smack of permanency for me. But it was fun. It was a blast. I learnt a lot, I grew in some ways I didn’t expect and I saw some very bizarre and odd things from my regionalized and Westernized perspective. Still, a unique opportunity and one I will always remember.

We have the farewell tonight, then I head out tomorrow….One thing above all else I have learnt: if you have the love and support of a great woman, then try and realize your dreams while you still can.

Laa gòn, amigos…