This is a joke right? Coconuts? Are you serious? I thought that this was an) urban myth – or rather a tropical island myth.

Nope. No joke – this is serious stuff. Sharks might not be waiting just off the beach to bite your leg off, but that coconut tree you are lying under for a bit of shade, may just bite you in the ass in its own particular way.

A new ‘stem’ of coconuts starts with hundreds of tiny coconuts on it, but as they grow the vast majority of these fall off and no one notices. Once they get to the size of a fist, there may be just 30 or 40 of these fledgling coconuts left on the stem. And the process continues – as they continue to grow there is not enough room on the stem of all of them, so they squeeze their fellow coconuts off and they (of course) fall to the ground. These are not killer coconuts but they will still give you a nice bruise if one of these things falling from 40 feet up hit you. But, this process continues and once the coconuts get to ‘head’ size they weigh a couple of kilograms and you really don’t want one of these bad boys hitting you.

So when we first started our business of renting apartments and our villa on Koh Tao 7 years ago there was only a couple of other similar places on the island. Now-a-days there are dozens of such places – mostly westerners who have come to Koh Tao, fell in love with it and have dreamed of staying here. So they built a nice house for themselves and then, usually after a period of time, thought about renting it out whilst they are not on the island to generate a little bit of cash. That is all well and good and it does work to some extent but as we have seen so, so many times they fail to hit the targets of professionalism and service that are needed to make their guest’s stay outstanding and memorable.