Our initial impressions of Koh Tao were not great. It was certainly pretty but it was another tropical island and one that seemed to have even more tourists than Koh Phangan. They were a different sort of tourists, mostly people here to dive, but the near total lack of Thai faces around town was a little disheartening.
This was however island number 6 for us and we gave a great deal of thought to quickly moving on to the mainland. However, after we had thought long and hard, we decided that we needed to be a bit more disciplined with our schedule. While we only work around 4 hours a day we do try to stick to the regular Monday through Friday work week. Moving again so quickly would cause our move to overflow the weekend to take up Monday and maybe Tuesday as well. As we've said previously in a post about motivation, having a schedule is important. Consequently, we would spend a week on Koh Tao then move on during the next weekend leaving our work week intact.
We also briefly considered doing a diving course. Very briefly. There are masses of people who will happily sell you a dive course. I'm not sure how many of them actually provide the training Vs just selling you courses run by other people. Whatever the case, there are dozens of dive schools on Koh Tao.
If we were to stay a week and we weren't going to do a dive course then what would we do? Well, as it turns out, not a great deal. We worked, we went to the beach, we drank some $3 cocktails and just generally hung out.
Barring us developing a particular desire to learn how to scuba dive I am however doubtful that we'll ever return to Koh Tao. It was nice. It was pretty. It just wasn't really remarkable. Maybe we've just been to too many islands lately.
We would however recommend the place if you do want to learn to scuba dive. On Koh Tao you can well and truly immerse yourself in the world of diving. The schools here are plentiful and can take you all the way from a newbie through to becoming an instructor yourself, which is where a lot of the dive instructors employed on Koh Tao come from I suspect. Diving appears to be everyone's favourite activity and everyone's favourite topic of conversation.