Family visit: walk on Ko Tao – 20th day – Trip April 2012

Koh Tao, Southern Provinces, Surat Thani, Travel to Thailand

Discovering the island on foot

A short leisurely walk for today after struggling to book our return trip to Bangkok. In fact, I had originally booked plane tickets from Surat Thani to return to Bangkok. However, the flight schedule (around 16pm) was too early to be sure of getting it on time. There is no direct connection Ko Tao – Donsak (name of the port of Surat Thani) so you would have to do Ko Tao – Samui which takes at least 2 hours, then from Samui take the 12pm boat and so it takes about 1h30 extra to reach the continent, which is already 13h30, counting the prot journey to the airport which adds around 1h15 that makes roughly 15h for a 15h55 plane it is more than fair and potentially unfeasible given the too many changes and therefore possible delays/shifts.

One possibility was to take a cargo ship making the night trip, so we would have left the hotel one night earlier to arrive around 5:30 in the morning in Surat Thani, leaving a lot of time to wait. In the end we chose the solution that was the best compromise, a catamaran trip to Chumphon from Ko Tao directly, then a Chumphon-Bangkok trip by bus. The Lomprayah company offers this for the very reasonable price of 1000 baht! It takes around 12 hours in total, including 2 hours by boat.

Please note that this same company, in partnership with the new small airline Solar Air [EDIT 2019, don't bother looking, it doesn't exist anymore...] offers a boat/plane combo, a 19-seater plane that can be taken to Samui or Chumphon. While the journey is obviously faster, the price is more expensive, you have to count 3500 baht (excluding promotions, as is the case right now where the price is 2900 baht, more info here http://www.lomprayah.com/ )

Next to the docks where we had arrived the day before is the main village with all the shops and restaurants that go with it.

On the way to the main beach of the island, by main I mean above all the largest, Sairee Beach. There is always a main beach, not necessarily the largest or even the most beautiful but often designated as the one with the most tourists and therefore also the most developed accordingly, here it is Sairee, on Phangan it is Haad Rin, on Samui it is Chaweng, Patong on Phuket etc…

Arrived on the beach after about 10 minutes of walking.

The signature of King Rama V.

The beach is almost opposite Nang Yuan.

"Spatial" offer, the offer from space lol or when Thais make unintentional jokes with their English mistakes.

The decor is…special…too gloomy for us.

We will choose this restaurant for our lunch break while my parents will prefer the beach and swimming.

The trees give us shade, it's perfect.

Another brand new building.

We will stay there for a good 2 hours, hanging out, a real vacation.

Many restaurants offer a place to relax.

This is the kind of thing that repulses me, however, as I see this group of men cutting down these coconut trees just to clear the view of this newly built hotel.

The coconut tree seeks the sun and finds it.

Still Burmese by the way, just like Ko Phangan many of the employees here are Burmese.

Most of the buildings are recent.

After this little walk we came back to the same restaurant to sit down again, this time for a little refreshment, for my part I wanted to go for a little dip to feel some small fish. It was also the opportunity to test the waterproof bag that I had bought the day before for my compact camera, 390 baht. If the bag is quite correct it is mainly my aging camera that is lacking ... This test is for the next day while we had booked a "classic" tour of the island including several diving spots, in this case for us snorkeling (mask / snorkel) A priori all the tour operators offer the same tour at the same price so no real risk of scam.