Ko Tao with Mommy

 

Mommy arrived the day after Valentine's Day and we stayed one night together at Chewang beach. The area is so popular that lounge chairs for sunbathing vistors are lined up nearly into the ocean.

  

Here is the bungalow we stayed in for 5 nights on Ko Tao. Most people reached it by water taxi ride - although mom and I took the narrow and steep trail to get to the closest villages.

The resort we were staying at was called Sai Thong. Every morning and every evening we ate at the little outdoor restaurant. Here is the view complete with ocean and granite boulders.

On the first full day in Ko Tao, mom and I took a snorkeling trip with 5 stops around the island. The picture above is a small island off the northwest corner of Ko Tao where I had some of the best snorkeling of my trip in the "japanese garden"

Mom and I hiked to the top of a nearby peak to get the picture I took from above. We split a mango without having a knife which was a delicious but messy operation.

Here is a ferry boat carrying passengers on a similar around-the-island snorkeling tour.

It turns out, that we didn't need to pay money to go see wildlife, since the wildlife would come directly into our bungalow and visit us. This orange and black from would crawl out of the drainage pipe in our outdoor sink every night and hang out, which made tooth-brushing a rather awkward affair.

Why are you such a puffy frog?
The next day I was speaking with my bungalow neighbor from my balcony to her balcony while we both sat in our respective hammocks. She told me how they were coming home after dark through the jungle with flashlights and saw a 2 meter python sitting in the trail and had to scare it off by rolling a coconut at it.
The next day, one of girls who works at the resort tripped over a 3 meter python and we could hear her screeming after the shock....the next day I went to the internet cafe and looked up poisenous wildlife in south east asia. I was calmed to see that there were no poison dart frogs in southeast asia but disturbed to realize that I had been within several feet of some of the most poisenous fish in the world while scuba diving.
Meet the Stonefish (I saw 3 of them in Ko Lanta and at the time didn't understand why other divers were so excited about these unattractive bottom-dwellers):

This is what the website said: Maybe Stonefish would never win a beauty contest, but it would definitely win the top prize for being “The World's Most Venomous Fish”. Its venom causes such a severe pain that the victims of its sting want the affected limb to be amputated. It is described as the worst pain known to man. It is accompanied with possible shock, paralysis, and tissue death. If not given medical attention within a couple of hours It can be fatal to humans.
Stonefish stores its toxins in gruesome-looking spines that are designed to hurt would-be predators.
Stonefish mostly live above the tropic of Capricorn, often found in the shallow tropical marine waters of the Pacific and Indian oceans, ranging from the Red Sea to the Queensland Great Barrier Reef.

But there are also lots of pretty things that won't kill me and those were lovely to see as well