A hurried post

So, despite pages and pages of handwritten journal, I've yet to write a full fledged travel post.
There's been teasing, a little tidbit here and there, but mostly, you've had to glean what I'm doing from my Flickr photostream.

Sorry everyone (by which I mean: the two people who've actually examined the blog)!

For the past week or so I've been relaxing on the sunny beaches of Koh Tao, sunny, because against all expectation and forecast, we've had an almost rain-free time here (at the start of the monsoon season!).
Ok, that's not quite accurate either--diving took up a startling amount of time every day. I'd like to think that my posts would've been far more frequent and detailed if I'd actually been on the beach. As it was, our morning dives required us to be at the diveshop by 7:30am, and we had afternoon debriefings on each day's dives around 5:30pm. You may have noticed that these times are roughly around mealtimes and sort of tie you to the dive shop, breaking up time you could otherwise spend exploring. This is absolutely true--the dive shop was actually part of a "resort" (which in Thailand can mean anything from "motel" to an actual resort, spa, etc.), which just happened to have a restaurant conveniently handy (guess where we did our debriefings), and a hotel above the restaurant.
Unfortunately, we arrived on the island with a massive influx of tourists and vacationers fresh from the nearby moon festival (on Champhon), so the diveshop's hotel was full. Not only was it full-- the nearby hotels were (according to our "helpful" diveshop guide) also full. The only thing he could get us were a pair of incredibly hot, squalid rooms around the corner for 480 baht each.
Anya and Nadav (who were both getting rather sick at this point from something Anya caught earlier in Thailand) discovered there was a rather nice place just off the end of the beach called the "Viewpoint Resort". There we stayed for a mere 800-1300 baht a night (I paid 1000-$25) in unairconditioned but beautiful and spacious rooms with balconies overlooking the ocean. We had the essential luxuries of flushing toilets, private bathrooms/showers, and mosquito nets, with the added benefit of floor to ceiling sliding glass doors facing the balcony. Even without the fan in each room, the sea breeze was enough to keep you relatively comfortable.

Diving was amazing, I'll probably have to make a separate post on that alone (sadly, no pictures--the underwater case for my camera cost roughly what the camera did, new).

I will say that it's very easy (especially for me, as anyone who knows me can quickly guess) to get dehydrated on Koh Tao, and dehydration hits you like an anvil. You suddenly start feeling tired, and if you don't up your fluid intake to rehydrate, your limbs rapidly take on the apparent weight of neutronium. Sleeping doesn't help, as I established one increasingly frustrated/irritable morning, so you simply end up consuming really astonishing amounts of water. I'd go down to our "resort"'s restaurant and consume a liter of water and 20oz of gatorade every morning--no sweat (ha.ha.).

I'm back in Bangkok today for a whirlwind tour with Nadav, Anya, Sarah, and Michelle. Next stop--Tokyo and Evelyn!