Koh Tao is where diving entered my life.
I first came to the island as a beginner and completed my Open Water certification. Then I left for Australia. When I eventually returned, I continued from Advanced through to Divemaster.
By then, Koh Tao was no longer simply somewhere I had travelled to dive.
I was spending enough time there for the island to become ordinary life — the dive centres, boats, students, beach bars, cheap rooms, familiar faces and the strange rhythm of a place where people constantly arrive, stay longer than planned and eventually disappear again.
When island life becomes a habit
Koh Tao makes it very easy to let yourself go.
You finish diving, somebody suggests a beer, students join, instructors join, and suddenly what began as an occasional night out becomes part of the routine.
The next day you dive again.
Then you do the same thing again that evening.
Nobody forces you into it. That is almost the problem.
Everything is close. The bars are close. Your friends are close. Your students are often socialising in the same places. Work and nightlife start bleeding into each other until drinking several nights a week — sometimes effectively every night — stops feeling unusual.
An island can swallow you without anything dramatic happening.
Your habits simply become your life.
There is another side to that routine.
If drinking, partying and sometimes drugs are part of how people around you socialise, choosing not to join in can slowly separate you from the group.
Nobody necessarily tells you directly that you are different.
You just start noticing it.
You are not there every night. You stop participating in some of the routines everyone else shares. Invitations can become less frequent and, over time, you can feel yourself moving further outside the circle.
Sometimes simply deciding not to do what everyone else is doing can make people uncomfortable, even if you never judge them for it.
It is easier to belong when you play the same game.
Stepping outside of it can mean accepting that some people may no longer want you around in quite the same way.
Paradise got expensive
Koh Tao was also changing.
The island's reputation as both a diving destination and backpacker stop brought more people, more dive centres, more development and more money.
Things that once made the island extraordinarily cheap gradually stopped being cheap.
A basic beach bungalow that could once be found for roughly $8 a night could later cost around $40.
The island was still beautiful. But the version people kept talking about — cheap rooms, cheap food, cheap diving and the feeling of having discovered something — was becoming harder to find.
Tourism had helped build the lifestyle people came for, while slowly changing the conditions that had made that lifestyle possible in the first place.
Koh Tao taught me how to dive.
It also taught me something less obvious: a place does not need to be unpleasant to become unhealthy for you.
Sometimes the places that are easiest to stay in are precisely the places where it becomes easiest to stop paying attention to what your habits are becoming.
Would I go back?
Yes.
But I would go back under very different circumstances.
Once you are confident enough not to join the routine simply because everyone around you is doing it — and, more importantly, once you are not dependent on having a job there or making money from the island — Koh Tao can be a very different place.
You can dive because you want to dive.
You can go for a drink because you actually want one, not because that is simply what happens every evening.
You can spend time on the island without needing to fit into the cycle that once became normal.
That is probably how I would enjoy Koh Tao now.
The island is still beautiful. The diving is still there. There are still people arriving from everywhere, and there is something about the simplicity of island life that I would happily experience again.
And they still have the best fruit shakes I have ever had: Mama Nid.
I would absolutely go back.
Just on my own terms.
This chapter became Island Collapse
Koh Tao was the beginning of a much longer period of living and working around tropical islands and the diving industry. What initially looked like freedom gradually became something more complicated.
That story continued in the Maldives and eventually became Island Collapse.