If there was a moment when it felt like I’d arrived back in Thailand properly it certainly wasn’t at the airport. It was on the boat from Chumpon, feet hanging over the edge of the fibreglass hull of the longboat, watching the schools of flying fish dart away from the boat’s wake; each one a little black bodied bullet kept aloft by see-through fins/wings, bouncing across the sea like skipping stones on a pond. Before that moment it was all Bangkok, the money driven tourist machine seemingly designed to do nothing but sap travelers of cash, time and energy. Everyone wants something, nothing is free and we’re all just farang, there to make the locals quick baht by selling us t-shirts or henna tattoos. Mai ow krap! I don’t want it. I don’t want it at all.

Even the overnight bus ride down to the port through anonymous Thai towns and darkened motorways was the same tiresome fussing. They delay us all for 30 minutes just by forcing us all to sit in very particular seats for no apparent reason, leading to dark jokes among the tourists that when we arrive at our various destinations they simply eject the appropriate seats, chair, baggage, passenger and all. The stopovers are at carefully selected cafes where a sandwich costs the same as a three course meal, and it’s 5 baht to use the loo which is nothing more than a porcelain hole in the ground. Even the other passengers seem frustrating, my neighbor for the journey is a Brazilian called Enrique, complete with stereotypical baggy pants, dread-locked mullet and the ability to slip into a coma like slumber five minutes after we pull out of Bangkok despite lying over half my seat. All of it is draining and terrible.

But as the longboat pulls out of Chumpon harbour, just as dawn breaks over the Gulf of Thailand revealing scattered little islands covered in green blankets of coconut and banana palms and blue and red fishing boats laden with the morning’s catch, all of a sudden no one is trying to sell you anything and even the people are better company. Within minutes I’m chatting to a geordie chef called Jimmy and his Italian girlfriend Sarah, Troy and Charlotte from Colorado, a Finnish guy I didn’t get the name of but who want’s to know where’s best to rent a bungalow on the island. Ten minutes ago we’re all strangers and yet now Troy’s offering us all the use of his apartment for next years ski season, I know that Jimmy worked in the Slug and Lettuce on Harpenden high street and the Finnish guy recommends Perth, Australia as the best place to make money in the eastern hemisphere. By the time the longboat noses it’s way up to the wooden jetty, through the maze of shallow coral that rings the small harbour of Mae Head, Koh Tao’s only port, everyone has swapped emails and Facebook’s and promises to meet up for drinks or meals or just a longer chat. We’ll probably never see each other again given none of us have Thai phone number yet to actually arrange anything, but that’s not the point because suddenly this is the place I came back for. This is Thailand as I love it and the last few days were just getting here.

And the welcome at Ban’s is just as warm as the weather. A local guy is waiting at the pier in a battered old pickup to take me and my gear along to the resort, all piled up in the flatbed grinning madly as we race along bumpy roads that follow the contours of the island, up and down in constant vertiginous climbs and descents, rather than cutting a straighter flatter artificial path. Within minutes of arriving at the resort, in a blur of wai-ing and handshakes I’m meeting with head of the IDC programme Guillame, who until now has just been a name on an email but is now a tall balding Frenchman with flecks of grey in his beard and Lee, head of DM training, a big deeply tanned south Londoner with a dark pencil like soul patch and heavily tattooed arms. With unchecked enthusiasm they show me back around the place but not much has changed. I recognise some of the old faces and to my surprise and pleasure they recognise me, because the moment I walk through the doors of the dive office I’m greeted with a chorus of welcome backs and Som, the fantastic Thai lady that runs the dive shop with an iron fist doesn’t initially believe its three years since I was here last. If I’m honest I’d have thought they get through so many DMTs (divemaster trainees) that I wouldn’t even have registered, and the fact that clearly I must have done something to be memorable last time, immediately makes me feel coming back wasn’t such a crazy idea after all.

But the first day I’m too tired to do anything than crash in my newly acquired bungalow, down a leafy little soi, between the pharmacy and the 7/11 just up the busy little beach road that runs the length of Sairee bay in which Ban’s hold’s pride of place square in the middle. It’s basic and cheap but it has a bed, a cold shower, a fan, no holes in the walls and two out of three functioning plug sockets and that’s good enough for me. The bungalow seems to include a cat, a ginger tabby who has appropriated my balcony table as his primary lounging spot. I’ve nicknamed him ‘Scratch’ in my head because his real name is probably in thai and unpronounceable but when you stroke between his ears he scrapes away at the table with his claws, purring madly and huffs in a spoilt little sulk when you stop. I haven’t got used to the heat yet but it doesn’t stop me dozing the afternoon away until it’s time for dinner, which is a plate of proper Pad Thai at Ban’s own good but expensive restaurant The Fishbowl. The Pad Thai is great by the way, sweet and sticky, covered with a layer of omelette and whole dark roasted peanuts instead of the MSG soaked peanut crumbed imitations served up at twice the price in the cheap bars that line Khao San road for us farang who don’t know any better.

But I came here to dive and that’s what I’ve been doing. I had to borrow myself some regs to do it though. Six thousand miles by air and a further three hundred by bus seems to have done something to one of my own bad enough to make it leak like a sieve. In the end I borrowed a battered old shop set of regs while mine went off to the workshop to be fixed, for free fortunately this time. But the diving was brilliant. No worries about drysuits or the cold, or lugging around 24lbs of lead just to make you sink. Just the blue of the sea, warm as bath water and the fish! In my memory and by reputation Koh Tao reefs are suffering, too many divers, too much dead coral and a lack of fish. Compared to other places Koh Tao has only one thing in abundance and that’s divers. But whilst that maybe true, compared to Britain’s freezing, empty waters where frankly if you see a couple of spider crabs and a lobster on a dive you’re doing well, or the untouched splendour of some uninhabited south seas archipelago, the seas here are still bursting with life. Vast shoals of tiny black and grey reef fish floating on the current like falling ash from a bonfire, electric blue cleaner wrasse, rainbow hued parrotfish, the paddle like angel fish with it’s regal purple and gold stripes, yellow striped fusiliers being hunted by big predatory trevallys, sleek and silver like miniature tuna. Too many to name or to count and all in a place where the quality of diving in terms of marine life, is considered poor by some standards and the wildlife under threat.

In fact so concerned are they for the precarious balance of native life and the demands of mass tourism, they even have a save Koh Tao festival every year, to raise money for conservation and the preservation of what makes this place special, and this year as fortune would have it, was this Sunday. Accordingly after dinner that night it was the only place to be, a half hour walk away on the hill over looking Chaalok Baan Kao bay, the only other sizeable beach on the island apart from sairee. The festival was in dusty clearing of brown earth and gnarled fruit trees, with lanterns shaped like jellyfish and other sealife strung like fairy lights between the branches above, the whole place transformed for one night into a heaving party packed with funfair games and attractions, bouncy castles and food stalls. Most were simple school fete-esque games and competitions but by far the most popular attraction was a simple dunking stool that deposited a succession of local girls in conveniently translucent clothing into a big tub of water whenever someone hit a target with a thrown ball. Which given the crowds, happened pretty regularly. At the top of the hill though was a large stage and just as I and the others who’d come up with me arrived, we were just in time to see the staff of Ban’s Dive Centre perform a ludicrous dance routine in neon glow paint, dive fins and giant sombreros. But even that spectacle was promptly overshadowed by the arrival of the main event, a girl group in improbably short puffball skirts and pastel shaded corsets, who from the rush of Thais towards the stage, cameras in hand, are wildly popular here. For the westerners their singing was more of a grin and bear it cultural experience but the local Thais loved it and when they were replaced by an even more popular but decidedly less good looking Thai rock band many of the westerners retreated to the drink stalls leaving the local die hards to head bang until the early hours, whilst everyone else got suitably hammered for the sake of a good cause and all in the name of charity.

I hope it all works out in the end, that the money helps and the island continues to thrive. I really do. Everything here seems a bit more fragile than I remember. The marine life, the balance between Thais and westerner, native and farang. How easily it could tip over to being just another Bangkok or Pattaya, the other Thailand, all sex, scams and seedy bars. But right now it’s still about the diving and Pad Thai cooked right and strange midnight festivals where local pop stars share a stage with some drunken farang scuba instructors wearing snorkels and sombreros beneath lights that look like jellyfish and I don’t want it to change all that much at all, because despite all the trouble getting here right now, right here, it’s all good.

It’s really, really good.