
Rachel and Matt go to Murder Island
Koh Tao, Hua Hin, Bangkok
We got to the hostel on Koh Tao, shaken after our near-capsized experience, at which point Matt had to immediately have a phone interview as our amazing year is coming to an end and real life beckons.
We decided to go have a beer on the beach and calm down. Our first little wander had us enamoured with Koh Tao, which is infinitely more charming than its over-developed neighbour Koh Samui.
The strip next to the beach is largely pedestrianised, and as opposed to large resorts backing onto the sea, there are an array of cute restaurants and bars ranging from rough and ready to pretty slick.

We had dinner and ended up at Fishbowl Bar, the center of gravity for the island after 10pm (also the center of gravity for multiple rapes and unexplained murders, but we didn’t know that at this point.) We played beer pong with some nice randomers, and many months after you all mastered it, we tried our hips at ‘flossing’ for the first time.
Rachel got the hang of it pretty quickly, though thinks her efforts are a bit too heavy on the sass front…
Matt, however, well words don’t do justice to Matt’s attempt at flossing. If you haven’t already, Rachel implores you to dedicate 15 seconds of your life to it.
The next day the hostel was organising a boat trip. They had just started running it so it was completely free — a trip around the island with swimming stops, BBQ food and live DJs. All punters had to do was buy drinks.
Sounds good right?
And it was, it was brilliant, but the slightly beleagued promoter Jack was struggling to get the word out and when we first arrived it was 4 of us from the hostel on one very, very big boat.

Rachel spent the next hour trying unsuccessfully to help a nervous dog called Steven join his dog friends, also called Steven, on to the boat. There was gonna be a lot of chicken on this boat, and Steven it seemed knew it, and was sobbing and howling on the dock (BREAKING RACHEL’S HEART), but he Just. Wouldn’t. Jump.
After gathering about 20 more people (still farcically few for the size of the vessel), we set off, leaving First Steven, running around completely beside himself, behind.
Dogs called Steven were to be a theme of the trip, as a little later, communal spirit was built around the efforts of Steven Two to get join his friend Steven Three on the top deck.
The above was one of Steven Two’s first attempts, and he spent the next hour or so experiencing a gamut of emotions about conquering the steps, having his friend already conquer the steps, and is he even a dog, and what is even is life anyway?

He did, eventually, make it. But what now?
Steven Two was soon alarmed to learn that Steven Three had made it back down to the bottom deck and he wanted to be there too.
As far as we know, Steven Two is still at the top of those stairs, staring down, at Steven Three feasting on chicken kebabs.
Philosophy, but dogs.

Meanwhile, fun was had.
Rachel jumped in, weeee!
Matt posed on the hammock (keeping his bandage dry), like one of your French girls.
And we all had a dance.

It was on the boat that talk first emerged of a serial killer on the island. Rachel, having a new found obsession with true crime due to the podcast My Favorite (sic) Murder which you should listen to, was enthralled and terrified in equal measure. More so when she got back to wi-fi to find a former colleague, foreign producer and general badass had messaged her to tell her to be careful because it’s “fucking dodge” on Koh Tao.
There has been a string of rapes and murders since 2014, when Hannah Witheridge and David Miller were brutally killed on Sairee beach. Rachel remembers working on the story for ITV and Channel 4 News vividly now, because of a particular obsession with finding images of Hannah that weren’t salaciously in a bikini (do what you can, which isn’t a lot, but do what you can.)
Since then there have been at least a dozen unexplained deaths, combined with alleged police cover ups, and a show-trial of two Burmese immigrants unlucky enough to have been in the vicinity of the murders.

Anyway, having put the hours in researching Rachel now thinks an active serial killer might be a bit of a stretch, but there is certainly a disregard for drunk Westerners lives, a mafia-like-culture, and a serious deficiency in policing.
But we were here, so we were just going to try and get not get murdered. Or SSDGM, as Karen and Georgia would say.
The next day the rest of the backpackers in Thailand were making the pilgrimage to Ko Pha-ngan for the Full Moon party. We did consider it, for about 3 seconds before deciding we are in our 30s and there is was a 5% chance of it being brilliant, and a 95% chance of being terrible, and we don’t like those odds.
We had met a couple of grown-ups heading to a 32-bed-dorm for 5 nights, and we couldn’t have been happier to jump on a jeep across the island to a tranquil beach hut on a quiet bay for some romantic time…
NOPE!
Of course our run of bad luck wasn’t over, and in a particularly memorable way which you don’t want to know about, Matt starting vomiting violently, so romance wasn’t on the cards.
Rachel, who had been vomiting consistently, joined in of course, and we both spent a long time groaning and dreaming of Brixton.
On our last day however, we made a cat friend who came to sooth us with dog-like levels of affection. Of course we called him Steven.

Our last night on Koh Tao we decided to pull ourselves together and jump right back into the deep end… on the Koh Tao pub crawl!
We met a group of friends, admittedly a decade younger than us friends, but friends none-the-less, and proceeded to go Full Thailand Backpackers with a pool party and a drag show.

Having recently discovered Ru-Paul’s Drag Race (late to the party again), Rachel was very excited for her first drag show albeit slightly concerned she would feel someone was being exploited in some way.
Which they weren’t, hooray! It was just a brilliant explosion of queer and we got well and truly involved.
Rachel, metaphorically…

And Matt literally…
After a dance and a smooch, we ducked out before they headed to the Fishbowl bar, in our ongoing attempt to get off Koh Tao unscathed.


Which we did, success!
We headed to Hua Hin for a couple of days of R&R after a bit of a rollercoaster week. There’s not a huge amount to say about Hua Hin except we ate some delicious street food, which Rachel kept down with various levels of success as it started to seem the vomiting was getting more ferocious in intensity.
By the time we got to Bangkok, Rachel. Was. Ill.
Very. Ill.
Any attempt to walk down the street was an assault on her senses, eventually leading to severe vomiting which reminded her suspiciously of when she had Salmonella in Bangkok almost exactly 10 years ago.
Having now had what strongly appeared to be salmonella THREE TIMES, and nearly making it back home to the sexy sexy NHS, we decided to skip the doctor and go straight to the pharmacy to pick up some antibiotics.
Our final day in Bangkok we had to get a late check out because Rachel was in bed, appearing to be dying, and we needed to catch a flight to back to Bali where our flight home was leaving from.
But we made the flight, and we had a week to go.
The salmonella was being vanquished, the budget was out the window, and the earthquakes, hopefully, were over.
Next and final stop, Bali and the Nusa islands.

