We booked an overnight train for ~£20 each to Chumphon from Bangkok, arriving at 4am to transfer to a bus then ferry to Koh Tao- exhausting!

Koh Tao is just the right size with a mixture of touristy shops and café’s along with street food and side stalls. One thing that surprised me was the number of Crepe stands there were (maybe even outnumbering the hundreds of diving shops) which was bizarre.

The first thing we did was hire a scooter for £3/day.

3 rucksacks + 2 people + 1 scooter = travelling Thai style!

The scooter packed a punch and got us up the steepest dirt tracks.

See the map at the bottom for where these places are!

Bars

Jim’s Bar

We met a chap from Nottingham who had spent 3 of his 5 week holiday on Koh Tao and knew the island inside out. Safe to say, he took us to one of the best bars on the island- ‘Jim’s bar’ located on the top of a mountain near Mango Bay. The dirt road up to the bar was so steep, the scooter conked out and we both had to bail (and I then had to walk up the hill while Ian drove). The bar is small (8 seats) and owned by a happy Thai man (Jim) who will inevitably get the rice whisky out and beat you at a game of Connect 4 (and roll you a joint if you’re so inclined).

Lotus Bar

Whilst walking along the beach, we saw people playing with a skipping rope… Which was on fire.. outside of Lotus Bar. They had allsorts of fire displays from fire poi and staff to flaming limbo and skipping. Being quite flexible, I was very good at limbo-ing, and consequently got very drunk as you win a shot for every completed notch. Of course, I had to have a go at the fire poi and burnt my nose when trying to do the butterfly move.

Snorkelling

We met a fellow Brit from London who had trained his dog to stand in the footwell of his scooter whilst driving. He had lived on the island for a few years and took us to a small beach called Aow Leuk Bay. One cheeky restaurant charges you 100 THB to get on the beach, but if you walk down a dirty looking road through a different bar, it’s free!

This bay was the best place we found to go snorkelling (we even saw a handful of young black tipped reef sharks at 3ft depth).  The coral was colourful, alive and full of sea life. It costs 200THB to rent snorkels and masks for the day so we bought a set and made our money back after the first swim.

Beaches

We met our Nottingham friend on the way to Shark Bay (which lived up to it’s name- we saw about 30 young reef sharks) which had quite poor visibility and very little coral & sea life. It’s a nice enough bay but the place we went next was incredible.

Cape Jeda Gang was the most secluded little beach with rope swings and a slack line set-up. It’s very picturesque although perhaps that’s because we watched the sunset there. It’s VERY hard to get to with some incredibly steep inclines, which is probably why we were one of the two groups there.

Map of Koh Tao: