Day 249! 3 more days till I leave for Australia! As the days roll by, lots of long term residents are leaving the island from Taco Shack. I guess a lot of people are realizing they want some sort of change or change of scenery, but today was my instructor friend, Kevin’s last day on the island… soon it’ll be mine!

After a bit of a late night, it was time to get up bright and early for (what I didn’t realize was) my last morning dive at Taco Shack.

I had a fun diver today, whose name is Constantine! He is doing a semester in Bangkok and was around a week or so ago, but he came back for some more diving.

Our dives for this morning started with Leam Thien Caves, a dive site Constantine hadn’t been to yet.

I was excited to come here again because I knew Constantine was a good diver and we’d be able to try out a number of the more challenging swim throughs!

On the first swim through we saw a beautiful giant puffer fish was chilling inside it.

The details on its pattern were insane! It had been a while since I’d seen a giant one, but this one has to be the coolest I’ve seen while on Koh Tao.

We ended up going through 6 or 7 different swim throughs and definitely attempted more.

I’d pop my head or half my body through and then come back out to tell Constantine if it was okay or not… some were not. I tried one and was fine and then I saw the exit was tiny, so I aborted that one real quick. But it was a ton of fun!

At one point, I dove past my instructor friend Tom and I started following him. He led us to a couple new swim throughs that were awesome. One you dove in, came up to the left and then we were able to immediately go through another hole back out the way we came in.

Our second dive of the morning was at Aow Mao… again. Since we are on the east side of the island for a bit, there’s only so many dive sites we can do, especially if an advanced course needs to see a shipwreck.

Luckily, Constantine is a deep diver too, so we could actually go down to the wreck (my second time seeing it)!

The visibility around the wreck is always really bad… I’m not sure why, but even when the bay has perfect visibility, there’s a thermocline around it.

The visibility was in fact bad today as well, but we were able to see at least a meter at the bottom of the wreck. So we circled it for a bit before coming up and circling the rest. This proved to be a nice navigational challenge as dive groups were emerging from the fog left and right.

After finishing at the wreck, we made our way to the reef cubes that are further into the bay. My plan was to see the big city of them… but somehow missed them and only found a smaller grouping of them. We also did a little bit of the coral wall as we made our way back to where I thought the boat was… and somehow came up right next to it!

This marked dive 199! One more day of diving and I’ll reach (and surpass) my goal of 200 divers!

I went back home to shower and then ate a couple tacos before playing a bit of pool.

I played Ko Lay and Myo at killer pool for 10 baht… they just like taking my money I feel like. I played realllly bad, but it was still fun to play and goof around with them.

I then went to take a nap back at my apartment and when I woke up, I listed a couple things on Facebook marketplace that I want to get rid of before I leave. My diving fins, boots, and unfortunately my guitar.

But all of them got hits immediately and I’ll be selling my guitar to my landlord. We’ll see about my boots and fins, but on a diving island people are always buying and selling diving gear so I’m not too worried.

I also worked on my resume a little bit and started looking at potential jobs in Melbourne… getting real and exciting!

I went to Taco a bit later in the day to play more pool and then once everyone got back from diving, we headed to Bamboo bar to watch the Sunset for Kevin’s last day on the island.

Kevin’s an awesome guy! We spent a ton of time hanging out on the boat and at Taco Shack. He also has a beautiful daughter, who was always scared of me, but was very cute to have around. They’ll all be heading back home to Chile for the birth of their second child!! So maybe next time I see him all four of them will be traveling around the world.

The sun set, so Tom, Chris, and I went off to Buddy restaurant for dinner. Bee was, of course, happy to see us again and we enjoyed another one of her wonderful meals.

I’ll definitely be eating here one more time before I go!

We finished off our night with a Taco Shack karaoke night! I believe Yi is wanting to make my last night a karaoke night as well, so this will be my second to last one…. I’m honestly not sure how many I’ve gone to, but I’m sure it’d be easy to count up.

At first the karaoke night started with just Tom, Chris, and I. But as always, as the night progressed, everyone got involved and were dancing and singing to the songs.

With another late night in the books, I went to bed… only a couple more nights in Koh Tao!

– Elie