We caught the 9.30 Lomprayah boat to Koh Samui  as I had a 12pm hospital appointment.  I was quite looking forward to the mini break away and we were booked into a lovely hotel, thanks to Jace’s girlfriend.

On arrival at the hospital, I was seen straight away and was only in there for 10 minutes and came out feeling ‘what a waste of time.’  Last time I was there I was told that I had to come back to get the stitches taken out only to be told this time that they were dissolveable  ..ARGHHH  ..but they did tell me that I can dive again  HOORAY!!!  ..and that I needed more antibiotics as I still had an infection so told me to go to a pharmacy as it was cheaper  ..well at least that was nice of them.

We left the hospital and caught a taxi to the hotel. After being shown to our room, we unpacked what little we had.   We hadn’t had breakfast so I suggested that we’d get supplies from Tesco Lotus (big supermarket) and have a picnic on the beach    ..It’s really sad but I was so excited to be at a big superstore.I was in heaven, aisle and aisles of food, clothes, electrical etc..   We bought batteries, shampoo, shower gel, cheese, salad, french stick, crisp, water and  a few other necessities.   It was a lot cheaper than Koh Tao.  We did have a bottle of wine and beer in our basket but they had a 5pm selling licence, so we had leave them behind.

Instead of gong to the beach and getting sand in everything, we sat on our terrace and had our picnic whilst watching Dr Who on Si’s laptop.  It was lovely.  We then decided to collect our free non alcoholic drink from the pool bar where we sat and read in a comfy wicker double chair until the mozzies came out.

That evening, we went for a stroll along the main shopping strip.  It wasn’t too busy which was nice but the stagnant smells along the way, nearly made us heave.  We stopped in one trendy bar to have a mojito and then walked back to the hotel.

Oh yes, our room had a lovely bath in it, so not having one since we visited KL, it was a real treat and had a lovely soak whilst watching Big Brother ..the last ever series!

Neither of us were very hungry so we skipped dinner and just munched on fruit, crisps and chocolate cookies.

This is a dive at Chumpon on the 9th of June, to capture some of the bleaching occuring… The guy in the video is Nathan Cook, head dude of Eco Koh Tao..

Early mornings are great but it’s just the ‘getting out of bed’ that I hate 🙂   06:00 the alarm went off and Si jumped out  ..sorry, should say, staggered out of bed and put the kettle on whilst I jumped in the shower.  After sipping out tea and packing our bags with the days essentials, we hopped on the bike and rode to Crystal to grab Si’s dive bag and then popped to Deep Down to collect Si’s camera.  Today, Simon’s went out with Nathan to film some of the bleaching at ‘Chumpon’ one of Koh Tao’s deepest dive sites.  It’s good to have this documented and they may put together a short film for ‘ECO Koh Tao’

I’m still not allowed back in the water for a few more days so stayed on the boat with Nathans son Kailash whilst everyone went diving.   It was nice to have the company, even though Kailash was feeling pretty sea sick and threw up several times.

With everyone back on the boat after a fabulous dive, we headed to ‘White Rock’ where the visibility was really poor, I think when everyone came up from that 2nd dive and moaned that they didn’t see much at all.  I was sat on the boat and heard one of the girls shriek, looked over and beside her was a massive sea snake popping it’s head out for air.  My first sea snake and I didnt even have to get wet.  How cool is that?

Back on dry land, Si headed up to Deep Down with his monstrous camera that weighs a ton whilst I quickly nipped back to Crystal to drop his dive bag off.
At Deep Down, Si was helping Nathan pull off some footage off his harddrive which didnt work very well, so then Si decided to take Nathans HD home to see what he could do. We spent the rest of the afternoon on the computers, sorting stuff out.