Day 187! It’s been 8 days since my last day off and I was very much needing one! As much as I’m loving diving every day, it’s exhausting work. So today, I chilled out, and enjoyed my day!

Today was my day off, so I took a slow morning to get up… also after a late night out, a lie in in bed was very much needed.

So around 10am, I woke up, wrote my blog post for the day before, and then rolled out of bed to get ready for my day.

My first part of my day off was spent at Echo Hostel! My friend Immy was around and wanted to hang out. I went over on my motorbike and enjoyed an exceptional breakfast at the hostel.

I hadn’t had a breakfast like this in a while! I got avocado toast on sourdough bread, with lox (smoked salmon), AND fried eggs. It was incredibly delicious!

I spent the next couple hours hanging out with Immy and some of the other Echo Hostel volunteers and friends of the volunteers. We played some pool and also chatted a ton.

One of the people there was a friend of a friend who was visiting Koh Tao just for a couple weeks. But unfortunately, already had a motorbike accident. This led to her sharing many more stories about the unfortunate car accidents and other random accidents (falling off horses, tripping down stairs, etc). It was a pretty intense way to start the day, but it was also crazy to hear how unlucky, and lucky, this person was.

I was still pretty tired from the night’s festivities, so I left Echo and went back to my room for a much needed nap!

I woke up, ready to take on the rest of the day. I played a bit of guitar, which I’m still needing to replace the strings.

I then went over to a guys house to try on a wetsuit. I’ve been checking Facebook marketplace fairly constantly, trying to find a cheap wetsuit. I’ve started getting a bit cold in the water and want to stop using the shared shorty wetsuits we have at Taco Shack (they’re also giving me a very bad farmers tan).

The wetsuit appeared to fit but the guy told me I could try it out before buying it, which was super nice of him. So tomorrow I’ll try and see if I like it or not!

I was pretty hungry by this point, so I headed over to Taco for lunch around 3pm.

Butttt, before I could even order, the diving manager, Iris, asked for my help moving things to our new boat… which I of course said I was more than happy to help with.

Originally, Taco Divers plan was to rent spaces on Dive Point until our boat was back from the shop… but with a stroke of luck, and one of our instructors incredible connections, we were able to rent a boat for the next few weeks instead. This is lucky because today, Dive Point decided to have 80 people on their boat which left no room for extra tanks. This led to a 2.5 hour delay in between the morning’s first and second dives.

I’m very glad I missed that and very happy I hopefully won’t ever have to experience that!

We got to the pier and unloaded everything from our taxi. The boat was supposed to come to the pier 20 minutes after we arrived, but it ended up taking around an hour. I was starting to get very hungry by this point, but I was glad to be able to help move things.

I also got a chance to check out the boat, I didn’t have my phone on me to take any pictures, but there’s a lot more space on it than our Taco Shack boat. It’ll be nice to have our own space again!

I then finally got to have lunch around 5:30pm, so basically dinner. But I enjoyed my chicken quesadilla and then played some pool against some travelers and Taco employees.

I sat and chatted with Till, Albert, Phil, and Chelsea for a bit. I also watched Chelsea edit some pictures which was fun to watch. Hopefully I’ll get some of the ones she took of me soon!

After that, I went back to my room and started reading more Science of Diving. I’ll have my section 2 lecture soon enough.

I also had a very nice FaceTime with my parents!

It’s always great catching up with them and seeing them, as much in person as possible at the moment.

After the FaceTime I continued reading and then called it a night to rest up for more diving tomorrow!

– Elie