By this Author: cblanc102

I'm mid way through writing a blog about my diving experience, but at this point I may as well get to the end of it, I finish (the first bit) tomorrow.

In the meanwhile, here's some things I've learned about island life:

1. 1 It's perfect for an addled brained fool like me: At this moment, I'm pretty sure my swim stuff and water bottle are at my diving school. It'll turn up, it did this morning when I left it all there yesterday. This island is great for that, no one takes anything! I left my wallet on the bar for two hours tonight and no one went near it!. I did lose my cap, as anyone who's been on holiday with me before will tell you, that's a record!!

1. 2 Sand gets everywhere - I don't have a shower fitted above my front door, it's a bit much to ask.. But that would be the only way to keep the sand from my bed, body, clothes, cat, laptop, everything! It get's everywhere!

1. 3 Flipflops are great (for 100 meters) - I somehow walked 11km on Tuesday. This is on an Island 6km from top to bottom (and I've seen 5% of it). While flipflops are great to have, any extended use ruins your feet! I've been forced to wear trainers now for 2 days because of how badly that one day ruined my feet and it's a pain in the arse as you have to remove them when you go anywhere at all!

1. 4 Bumblasters - A new one for me. I've seen bidets and nonsense like that, and avoided them completely, then someone said something to me yesterday that changed my mind completely.....

Of course not! So why do it with your but? Buttblasters are weird, but actually pretty great!

1. 5 The stars are the wrong way around, probably no one cares about that but me

1. 6 We may be filthy, but we're cleaner than ever! - My feet are like a hobbit's. Everything is covered in sand (see above) and everyone just throws their stuff everywhere. I wash my clothes in the shower and I walk without shoes on because that's what they ask for. The toilets are mostly filthy (although I have a great bathroom in my room) and we eat in the open with people smoking everywhere, sharing our food and drinks. It's a Coronovirus dream!

In summary. Living on an Island, is the same as living anywhere, but filthier, warmer and better

I sit here after one of the most relaxing days of my life, covered in mosquito repellent (how much is enough?? How much is too much???) and thinking of an early night so I can get up real early and play with the drone tomorrow.

The journey to Koh Tao was not an easy one, but could have been so much harder. It took around 15 hours hostel to hotel and involved a cab, a bus, a boat and a fair bit of walking with my famously heavy backpack. But was so well organised that I barely had any worries travelling the 300 plus miles needed to get me here. I would definitely recommend Lamprayah buses. They were excellent, cheap too.

I should digress for a second about the backpack, and a video on that should come tomorrow, but there's a story I like to tell about doing the Himalayas where I wrecked my feet and then agreeing to do Snowdon a month later cursing myself all the way, only to feel ridiculous when I saw a group of one legged soldiers storming it down the mountain.

Something similar has happened here. After lugging my pack around for 5 days, lamenting the weight and feeling sorry for myself and the four more months of slogging I have ahead, I saw loads of young girls today, half my size with packs bigger than mine. Time to shut the moaning lol.

That being said, I get excited every time I figure out a way of losing some stuff from the bag... Although I freak out every time I think I've lost something, which is often, as I have the memory of a goldfish.

I've done so little today a blog is barely worth it. I had lunch, looked at the view, slept, had dinner, looked at the view. But what a view. I've been on a tropical island before but this place beats it hands down! And no attacking monkey's (so far). The whole atmosphere here is so relaxed it's a wonder anyone ever leaves, and I think I may have problems there too. I've already been checking out third week options..

Picture postcard views

This morning I got talking to a woman that I've seen about the place over the last few days. She spoke to me first as I'm rubbish at all that.

She's been here a while and within an hour had not only sorted out my lunch, but completely adapted my plans. It turned out that the boat I was gonna catch, a tourist boat (devil word tourist) would cost me about 5 times as much as just getting the normal boat. She then told me about a few excellent other places to go, including a £3.50 massage that turned out to be excellent.

After having a great day, largely due to her, I returned to the hostel for the rest of the evening. She arrived with a friend and we were then joined by someone else just wanting to hang out, we hadn't me her before.

So there I am, 47 English, offering nothing but my witty repartee for what that's worth (nothing), Sandra, my Bangkok guide, German, on her way to Singapore after leaving Hong Kong and it's troubles, Victor, a young Thai guy with loads of booze and Anna, a young (South) Korean woman who lives in California and is travelling solo around Asia. In theory we have very little in common, but we had a fantastic evening.

The hostel I'm staying in is pretty great. The room is nice, although I could do without the guy who's been setting the snoring world record the past few days, the view is amazing and it's pretty central. It only cost £6 a night as well, which helps. But it's only a bed really.

Where hostels really come into their own is the people. Other travellers with similar or (usually) better experiences than you getting together and sharing stories. Anna is off to Cambodia tomorrow and then on to India, between us we'd been to everywhere she's planning on going to. I have no doubt her trip will be better for tonight. We share stories, we share food, drink and laughs. We're a group of solo people bought together by convenience, need and luck.

Tomorrow we'll mostly all say goodbye, probably forever apart from Facebook and Instagram, but personally, I'll take a bigger message, a lesson. I'll take the tools I need to carry on this trip, because I was starting to worry there for a while that travelling solo actually meant travelling solo.

Back in 2015 I walked some 10km through Reykjavik at 1am to photograph the Northern Lights. It was November, very cold and an extraordinarily dull walk through residential streets on one side and the black of the Atlantic on the other. When I arrived, there was nothing, no Northern lights, no mosre than a green tinge to the photos after a long exposure. I drudged back at 3am tired, cold and annoyed at myself.

Fast forward more than 4 years and it's midnight in Bangkok as I return from a three hour walk on blistered feet with three bottles of beer that dissolved their cardboard packaging half an hour before, but I had to buy them then as 7/11 obviously closes at 11 (It doesn't, I could have bought them at the 7/11 200m up the road).

I had decided to visit Khao San Rd, THE popular backpacking destination in Bangkok, nay Thailand or the whole world if you believe the hype. I had avoided it so far, not wanting to stay anywhere nearby, but I thought I should at least give it a look...

The whole walk was only about 6km, but I'd had a couple of stops, one to find a toilet without success (after half an hour of busting to go I found a deserted hole where a building once was) and another to eat some ropey roadside chicken for my dinner (didn't kill me}.

Some of the walk was nice. There's an area near the Grand Palace where all the shops sell flowers. All of them . It's something that I've only seen in Asia, whole areas all selling the same product. There are two roads next to my hostel that just sell shoes. I'm not sure how they compete, they all seem to charge the same. Go figure.

Eventually I arrived at Khao San Road. Immediately experiencing a barrage of noise, scorpions on sticks and offers of ping pong shows. I avoided everyone as much as possible, but sat down in the least crowded bar I could find to at least have a drink while I was there. It was here I saw my first Asian cockroach, which ran out, looked around in disgust at the filth and disappeared.

Finally, after using the bar's wifi to video my old work colleagues to show them how what I was doing with my amazing new life I left, not before being propositioned by two women of questionable sex and then escaping away from them into the Bangkok night. My job was done.

My point is that Google Maps lies. Things always looks far closer than they are! They trick you into walking, into going places that you wouldn't bother visiting if you really knew how far away they were. They tricked me into a three hour trek to an Icelandic Lighthouse and they tricked me into visiting a Thai hive of scum and villainy that would make Han Solo run screaming.

At least it was warm this time.

I did none of these, nor did I drink buckets, have a happy ending or enjoy a ping pong show or anything else other than drink a beer (Go Singha!)

1. Edit: This entry is a lot longer than I expected, with no pictures, I'll do better next time

I first started thinking about travelling a couple of years ago. I was bored with work, had a load of old comics to sell and thought I could get enough money to go travel for a while.

The practicality of it all ended up being far more difficult than I'd though it would be.

For a start, it took me about a year longer to sell the comics than I thought it would and I got a lot less for them than I'd hoped. Also, clearing my house of all the crap I'd amassed over the years took me forever, I was still moving stuff into my Mum's house the morning I left! But that's just stuff.. It was actually pretty liberating getting rid of 80% of my belongings, giving thousands of books away, bags of clothes to charity, hundreds of Blu Rays sold on eBay, it turns out I didn't need them.

The biggest difficulty was leaving my family and friends. I have a very close knit group of people surrounding me that bring me strength and love. How am I supposed to survive without that? The longest I think I've ever been away from home was about 6 weeks when I was at Uni, and that was a LONG time ago. This would be over 16 weeks.

The biggest help with this is that technology has changed so much since I went to Uni. The internet was very much in it's infancy then and letters and phone calls were the only way to communicate. Now there are so many ways to reach out to loved ones that you're spoilt for choice. Video calls are easy and free, everyone has email, social media is everywhere and I can write a blog (hello!) to let people know what I'm doing. Should be easy.

Or not.

As the leaving day approached, there were goodbye parties, drinks, gatherings and visits. I realised that leaving all these amazing people would be far harder than I could have imagined. These people I'd had around me all the time, worked with, lived life with, they are my life. How do I leave all that behind? Just by doing it I guess.

I'm especially close to my Mum, in a very non Norman Bates kinda way. She's getting on a bit and has no idea how to use the her TV, but supports me as much as I support her. It was even her idea that I do this (as much as she hates that fact now I'm sure). Leaving her was the hardest thing I've ever done. But it was with the support of all these people in so many ways that I was able to leave. Encouraging me to go, being excited for me, helping me plan, helping me move, there are too many people who made this possible to list here.

Which brings me to the day of travelling, which as you can imagine, is the least interesting bit. I love to travel, but I hate travelling. I'm too impatient, I get bored easily and my arse gets numb when I have to sit for any length of time. Planes drive me mad.

After a final packing frenzy where I tried unsuccessfully to get rid of stuff from my stupidly heavy backpack (there's a whole video of that coming next week) my friend Jane arrived to take me to the airport. It was too soon, I wasn't ready to go, to say goodbye, but the plane won't wait and I have to go. After a teary goodbye to my Mum and friend Emma I was off.

For about 5 minutes before I realised I'd forgotten something and had to go back home, much to everyone's amusement.

We arrived at Heathrow where we sat and had something to eat and coffee (free refills!), there was an unexpected video chat with my work family, then finally it was time to say goodbye to Jane and go through security.

The airport was fine, a bit of a delay, but nothing much, then on to Vienna, where they made me unpack my backpack at security ("Too many electronics!") which was a pain, and then a 6 hour wait for my flight to Bangkok. Nothing much to say there other than ours was the final flight of the day and it's a bit strange sitting in an almost empty airport.

As before, I managed to sneak through with my heavy backpack (8kg limit, 15kg bag, £55 charge if caught) and I got on my plane to Bangkok.