We woke up at around 4:30 in Coco farm to get our 6am tour start.

We managed to catch a bike in and get there just in time. We got a boat out to see the dolphins jumping about not long after sunrise, our boat was intensely loud! The dolphins were cool though, I’ve never seen dolphins before. There were quite a lot of them! We didn’t manage to get very close to them, but they were fun to watch nonetheless.

Then we sailed on to an island that contained a fish sanctuary. When we arrived we had to wait for about an hour to get a smaller boat from our boat to the shore, then when we did land we had to wait quite a while for another boat out to the sanctuary, but we didn’t really know what was going on, so we were just enjoying ourselves and chatting to the other people from our boat.

We then got out to the sanctuary and got snorkelling about there were sooooooo many fish, of all sorts of amazing colours, shapes and sizes, you often found yourselves swimming through a school of fish. Unfortunately a lot of the corals were destroyed by people walking on them, but the cliff edges were amazing!! And so beautiful to swim down to closer check out particularly interesting fish. I heard a local calling out something that I couldn’t quite understand to start off with until I worked out he was called out “Turtle!” To which I located Amy to inform her and we along with about 10 other paddlers swam out into the open water in that direction. And there it was! A beautiful turtle serenely gliding through the water! We all swam towards it staying at the surface, I saw one girl swim in closer to get a better look, but she couldn’t get very close, so I thought I’d have a go and I got down right next to it and swam right alongside it for a bit, oh my it was so lovely! I was so close that I could have stroked it. I chose not to and I popped back up before I started to run out of breath, but it really was such a special moment. Definitely a highlight of my entire trip. After some more snorkeling I noticed in the distance that everyone else was back on the boat, so I swam back and when I got on, everyone was quite shocked at the blood pouring down my face: i’d dived so deep and hadn’t released the pressure in my mask that the blood vessels in my nose had burst, so I had my first ever nose bleed! 😀

After snorkeling we went off to a serene little island and enjoyed the intense sun, followed by intense rain… followed by intense sun again.

We spent the rest of the daylight hours lazing on the beach, freshening up, and then I put up my hammock in a palm tree that was almost horizontal, napped for about an hour as Amy explored and did her updates.

In the evening we met back up with the couples we did the tour, we watched a great fire show, in which Amy was used as an assistant and had some chap doing fire poi tricks just inches from her face! Exciting! We then went off to dinner and I enjoyed an amazing sizzling seafood platter, while a musician was playing acoustic covers of great classic rock, punk and grunge tunes, just to my taste.

We then started to walk back to Coco farm, and about an hour into our walk we realised that it was actually far too far away! And persuaded by a large number of very loud dogs, we turned back to try and find someone who’d give us a lift to our hostel.

When I got back to my dorm I fell asleep as soon as I touched the bed, still fully clothed 😛

A great day!