Day 144! Today ended up being insanely fun… but also very turbulent. From relaxing on a beach, to having almost all of my important things stolen, it was a bit of a whirlwind. But I ended up very lucky and the story has a more positive ending!

I woke up on the earlier side this morning and I didn’t feel like lounging around in my bed. So I headed straight over to Taco Shack to start my day.

I kicked it off with a game of pool against one of the dive masters in training, Olly. After narrowly beating him, I played the other dive master in training, Albert, and had a tight game but I beat him too! It was off to a great start.

Feeling victorious, I chowed down on a muesli bowl for breakfast.

I played some more pool against various travelers that were on their way in and out. Some wins and some losses, but I had another great morning chatting with people and fulfilling my role of making everyone feel welcome and “maintaining the vibe.”

For lunch I got a pad see ew from the hostel, which ended up being one of the best I’ve had in Thailand. It was super rich with flavor and was just a joy for my tastebuds, the only thing it was lacking was spice!

My morning shift came to a close so my friends and I started getting ready to go to the beach. But just as we were about to leave, I remembered I needed to schedule my visa run! So I told them I’d meet them at the beach and zoomed to the office down the road.

For those of you who don’t know, a visa run is when someone leaves a country, steps into another country, and then heads straight back into the original country just to extend their visa. In Thailand, this is very common because you can only get a 30 day visa on arrival, you can extend it once at the embassy for 30 more days (maybe 60 sometimes) for 1900 Baht, and then you have to leave the country again.

I’m pretty fortunate that I went today, because I didn’t realize they were closed on Sundays. But today I was all good. For 4,100 Baht, I got 3 tickets. A night ferry to the mainland, a long boat and bus ticket to the Myanmar border and back, and then another ferry to Koh Tao.

This is when the first minor turbulent part of my day started… the lady scanning my passport wasn’t paying attention… and ripped a page of my passport while taking it out of the scanner! Hopefully this doesn’t cause any headaches down the line, but I’ve heard of stickler immigration officers that might give me troubles. I guess we’ll see.

Now keep in mind, I just spent 4,100 Baht. This was almost ALL the money in my fanny pack. This will be a key detail for later in the day.

I went back to the hostel to drop off my very important envelope. And also to pick up my friend Emma, from the Netherlands!

We drove to Freedom Bar, where all my friends had already been. One of my friends had their diving goggles and they let me borrow them! So I had a fun time swimming around and seeing all the beautiful fish and corral. It honestly got me very excited to try out scuba diving in the next week or so.

A few of us also decided to swim around and we ended up treading water while chatting for around 30 minutes! I honestly didn’t know I had that in me, but it was a lovely conversation… and a tiring one.

We hung out in the shallow end a bit longer and ended up staying in the ocean for around 2 hours! I was a very pruny man.

The clouds started rolling in and we decided it was time to go. So we all headed out to shower and get dinner.

I ended up going to Mama Tams again, with Emma and Zach (from England). And I just had to get a mango smoothie and the fried chicken again. It’s far too good to pass up!

Dinner ran a bit longer than I expected and I was a bit late for the night shift. But it was a very slow start to the night shift, so Yi (my manager) didn’t mind.

This slow night ramped up to one of the craziest karaoke nights we’ve had since I’ve arrived! It was so much fun… but a little too crazy, especially when Yi had to leave the lobby to fix an AC in a room and I had to take over running the karaoke night.

The staff was a bit stressed, but when Yi came back it all smoothed back out and turned into a wonderful night of singing and dancing. There was also more people that were pretty anti-karaoke and then after I got them to do one song, they sang 3 more! This honestly really warms my heart.

A group of us headed to the bars after karaoke and this is when the night took an interesting turn.

We started at a bar called the Fishbowl, nothing out of the ordinary, just the regular singing and dancing. We decided it’d be a fun idea to go swimming on the beach nearby, under the stars, which was in fact a very fun idea. But when we got out of the water… my fanny pack was no where to be found.

This was not a good situation. My phone, wallet, and passport were in this bag to prevent this exact thing from happening! We searched everywhere for it and it was nowhere to be found.

I was very stressed because if I didn’t have my passport, I couldn’t leave the country until I got an emergency one, and I had no idea how that’d work… and it would completely ruin my plans of my visa run I just paid for.

I thought I had looked everywhere so I sat down in a spot in defeat to collect my thoughts and figure out what I needed to do. But with one more stroke of persistence I checked behind where we put our stuff… AND MY FANNY PACK WAS THERE!

Now, I was freaking relieved. My passport, phone, and wallet were all in there… but both pockets of my fanny pack were open. Andddd my money was gone. So was my friend Emma’s. But since I spent all that money on the visa run, I had just under 1,000 Baht left so the thief really didn’t make away with much.

It saddens me that this happened, but obviously whoever took the money needed it a lot more than me. I’m just so thankful they didn’t decide to keep my documents.

This was a tough way to end the night, but it did end up with a positive that I found what I needed! It also didn’t take away from the amazing day and night I had… and honestly, I guess it was just the price I had to pay for the story.

Tomorrow, I’ll be debuting my very own Taco Shack pub quiz! There’s a lot of people that haven’t been able to play because they’ve seen all four of our quizzes… that haven’t changed in the past two years. So I’m excited to see what they think of this one.

But no spoilers on that, I’ll let you know what the categories are and how it goes tomorrow!

Tschüss!

– Elie