Diving on Ko Tao

(1st-8th Jan)

The Canadians and I woke up on new years and decided to get the hell off Panyang ASAP. We jumped on a fast ferry to Ko Tao and collectively felt rough as dish water due to a combination of a hangover, lack of sleep, lack of sex and a pretty choppy boat ride. Got to Tao and made a bee line to meet up with my Russian counterpart Olga at her place. She'd promised to teach me diving so I figured as I was giving her some sweet loving that she would give me a good deal on the instructions. This was great in theory, and worked out ok for the first couple of days. Then due to a combination of living out of each others pockets, the two of us sharing her room with a couch surfing guy who had about 10 hammocks all over the place, the language barrier, her boss putting pressure on her to teach me the open water course in as little time as possible, we had a bit of a falling out. Not a major one, but enough to put an end to the romance element and put us just as friends afterwards. 

Moved out into a dorm after 3 days of living with her and we got on a lot better afterwards. The diving itself was pretty damn good, obviously beatifically fishes, fantastic coral, a giant jelly fish (which was pretty scary actually!) and I qualified with my open water within 5 days (a mere 3 more days than the Canadian girls took!) The day I moved into the dorm I bumped into the Aussie girl that I'd met at the mud bath in Vietnam. I think I said it at the time, but it's worth repeating, she was the hottest the girl I'd met on my travels so I thought I'd use my new found game skills to see if I could win her over. We arranged to meet that evening and by the time I got there she was already pretty drunk. Everything was going perfectly, I didn't buy a single drink because all the dutch guys she was with kept buying me shots and she was getting more free drinks from the bar staff than she could drink so was giving me hers! We all then went to a lady boy show which was bloody hilarious, at which point it all went Pete tong. This Swedish guy who looked like that sleaze ball from Good will hunting (the one that tries to embarrass will's mates in the pub) totally out gamed me. I'm not entirely sure how he did it, but he managed to go off somewhere with her and didn't return for about an hour. Then I realized that she'd given me the key to her room earlier in the evening which left me in a bit of a pickle. What was I suppose to do, she didn't know where I was staying, had no way of contacting me, and was effectively locked out of her room. I figured the best thing for it was to crash on her bed until she came home in the morning or that night and that way she would get the key back. Annoyingly about 2am she came up to the room, knocked on the door and was standing there soaking wet with the sleaze ball and the two of them had gone off for a 'swim'. I explained that I wasn't sure what to do about the fact I had her key and she was cool with it (I'm pretty sure it was the logical thing to do) and went off to my dorm. The next day I headed back to Panyang to meet up with Dave....