Koh Tao: the end!

✋ Hiya from…NORTHERN IRELAND!!

Yep. We are home! Although you probably all know this by now! I still can’t quite believe our year of adventure is over. But all good things must come to an end 🔚

Our final week in Thailand consisted of a whole load of relaxation, snorkelling, more relaxation, too many mojitos, and oh yeah! an engagement 💍

As soon as we arrived in Bangkok we got the sleeper train to Koh Tao – we didn’t want to waste a minute of island time! We ditched our big backpacks in a hostel so we didn’t have much to carry. We chilled with a Singha before heading to the train station. The train turned out to be a pretty horrible experience 🚂👎 we seemed to have got stuck in the noisiest carriage EVER! It was impossible to get a decent sleep. But knowing Koh Tao was just a few hours away made it a little more bearable.

Singha's at Lub D!

A look back at our travel highlights from 2015!

I know I said that my last post would be my final one for 2015 but it wouldn’t be the end of the year if I didn’t do a bit of reminiscing. So I thought I’d do a little round up of the main highlights since we started this journey in April.

In 9 months we have explored 8 different countries over three different continents 🌏🌍 We have flown 13 times ✈ Slept in 80 different beds, 2 tents ⛺ and a camper van 🚐

It was a difficult task trying to think of only a few highlights. As you can see I got a little carried away…

Our final days on Tao: in pictures!

Here’s what we got up to on our final 10 days in Koh Tao…

Jonny tricked me into walking up the steepest hills of my life to Mango viewpoint. It would have been worth it if we didn’t have to leave 5 minutes later to beat sunset…

Seen on the way to Mango...

When travel plans don’t quite go to plan…

We have finally left Koh Tao after 4 weeks on our favourite little island. We felt ready to leave and excited for the next part of our adventure: Bali & the Gili Islands. However, leaving was still very sad 😥 it’s amazing how you can make yourself so at home when you spend a lot of time in a place you love!

Oh how we will miss this...

Before I go into what we got up to on our last few days I should explain why we were even still in Koh Tao (remember i told you we were heading to the Perhentian islands in Malaysia…)

Koh Tao: Eat, sleep, dive, repeat…

We’ve spent so much time in Koh Tao that we’ve sampled our fair share of accommodation, restaurants, snorkelling etc etc. Here’s a little insight into our favourite places to eat, sleep, dive, drink and snorkel…

Beautiful Tao…

The Koh Tao Effect: my PADI Open Water experience & love for this island…

It didn’t take me long to work out why people love Koh Tao so much. You meet people here who planned to stay for 3 days and ten years later they haven’t bothered leaving (with the exception of visa runs of course!)

How could you not love that view?!

A slow boat & our return to the land of smiles…

Sawadee-ka from Thailand (again!) Sorry for the lack of updates recently – poor WiFi + a very busy schedule has delayed this one! I don’t know how people do blogging as a job when travelling 😮

Soooo let’s start with the slow boat. After my horrible sickness we left our guesthouse in a tuk tuk to the pier (I’ll also mention here the itchy rash that I left with which I am convinced was from bed bugs munching on me – boke!) From the pier we boarded our first slow boat. Thankfully for us most people seem to do the journey from Thailand to Laos so we ended up pretty comfy with very few people on board. We were able to rearrange the furniture (old car/van seats!) so that we could lie down for the majority of the journey – score! The scenery was beautiful along the Mekong river – no surprise really as I’ve already mentioned a trillion times that Laos is beautiful!