DAY 480: Noelle had been taken in by a group of British divers that were on the ship during her two-day PADI Advanced Open Water certification course. The night before she had gone drinking with them for happy hour at nearby Bernie's, while I stayed in and worked, the Blogwriting nerd I am. During happy hour, Noelle had befriended a British couple that invited her to share the cost of a private longtail boat to go snorkeling at some of the five islands off the coast of Ao Nang. I was invited as well, to split the cost four ways instead of three, and gladly accepted. We were to meet the British couple at The Irish Rover in the morning at eleven o'clock.

"Are we being stood up?" Noelle questioned at close to 11:30.

"Yeah, I think so."

The couple never showed, even by noon, but it was no matter; we ventured out on our own, with borrowed snorkel gear from Phra Nang Divers again, and went down to the beach where all the longboat guys desperately tried to get fares. During the non-tsunami high season, the rate should be around 1200 baht, but Dash, the friendly Thai woman of The Irish Rover, said that we could probably get it for 600.

"Longboat?" asked one of the longboat touts as they always did whenever we walked by. This time we actually gave them a positive response.

"How much to go to Chicken Island?"

"Five hundred baht."

"Okay." Wow, that was easy.

Well, it wasn't that easy; the driver took us in his boat to what he said was Chicken Island, but it didn't look like it from the pictures we had seen on the posters. Chicken Island was named for the chicken head-shaped rock formation on one end of the island, which I thought looked more like a turkey. "They should call it Turkey Island," I'd say. After some picture analysis after the fact, it appeared that he took us not to Chicken Island but to Tap Island, which was just as good as Chicken anyway, I assumed.

We landed on Tap and arranged a pick-up time, then picked out a spot on the beach. Noelle and I were just a couple of snorkelers amidst only about a dozen on the secluded island. Noelle felt like the minority in the small group for, "I'm the only one wearing a bikini top," she said. Nearby were two topless British women trying to get rid of their tan lines in the bosom region. For one of them, it wasn't working, she just turned red like a lobster -- with a tan line.

The sand on Tap Island was white and fine and reminiscent of the kind on White Beach in Boracay, Philippines, and it graced the floor of the shallow crystal waters hugging the coast. Underwater there were plenty of tropical fish (picture above) swimming above the rock formations, and they swam around and under me as I took pictures of them with my little spy camera in the clear waterproof AquaPac camera case I bought at Tokyu Hands in Hiroshima. Afterwards I sat on the beach with a pen and notepad to continue my duties as a Blogwriting nerd since I was behind, until I felt asleep under the warm sun.

AFTER OUR AFTERNOON ON TAP, we were back in Ao Nang to check out the scene for it was our last night in Thailand together. After some Pad Thai at a food stall, Noelle went over to Bernie's to see if her English dive group was there again for happy hour like they said they might, but there was no one to be found.

"You got stood up again," I said. No matter, we were redeemed by "tap" again, this time by the drinks on tap at The Irish Rover, namely the Strongbow English ciders they proudly served. Better than that, we simply took our drinks up to our room -- one of the great perks of staying at an inn above an Irish pub -- so that we could veg in with booze while watching music videos on Asia's Channel V (9 p.m. Astro, 8 p.m. Philippines) and The Man With The Golden Gun on bootleg. Normally I wouldn't have bought such an old DVD, but I did it solely for research for that last entry of the Blog.

Didn't I mention I was a Blogwriting nerd? (At least was working with a pint in my hand.)