Welcome to the Thai tourism machine

Our accommodations for the evening. Night boat to Ko Tao.
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Ko Tao is freakin beautiful.  Sure, we were weirded out by the foreign script on all the signs, and dealing with a new language, and being in an entire region which is run by tourism (Southern Thailand isn't known for much else), but there is no denying that it's pretty.  And we did figure out how to get mangoes and sticky rice within minutes of arriving, so we can't complain.

We passed through Hat Yai and Surat Thani on our way to a night boat, which is a backpacker's dream because you wake up on the beach and didn't have to pay for a hotel.  Well, these two backpackers were not prepared for this type of travel, and have never slept in such close contact with so many dreadlocks in our lives.  We cuddled up on one giant mattress, Thais on one side, foreigners on the other (live pigs on the lower level), and tried our best to sleep.

What we woke up to in the morning. Night boat was worth it.
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When we woke up it was all worth it, because this island is breathtaking.  We got a bungalow perched high on a cliff with views that would make you weep.  And then we tried going to the beach.  Not to sound picky, but the beach was covered in trash (supposedly washed up from the mainland), the sand was coarse, invisible things stung the skin in the water, and there was some kind of mutant sardine fish that kept attacking us.  We wandered around a bit to find the best patch of sand, and eventually settled on the spot closest to us, which became perfect on our last day there (the mutant fish must have suffocated in the previous day's trash).