We left Bangkok flooded from torrential rain to head down to the islands to the east of Thailand and had to walk to our overnight bus through knee deep water! we changed to a ferry at about 6am and arrived on Koh Tao at about 9am, where we were convinced to start our Open Water dive course that afternoon! The first couple of das were fairly boring just watching theory videos so we had some idea of what we were doing later!We then swapped groups to join Team Switzerland and our crazy German instructor Carsten to do skills in the pool and then our first 4 proper dives. Ended up being a really good laugh, we saw lotsof nemos etc and was good to finally be vaguely in control of our buoyancy as we had both done a couple of Discover Scuba dives before where you basically rely on the instructor to do everything for you!

We went to the office to book one last night of accommodation before we left the island and ended up being convinced to cram our Advanced Open Water into our last day and a half! It was quitea rush not to miss our ferry the next day but we just about managed it! the AOW is basically 5 adventure dives and no theory which suited us well! We chose to do the deep dive (30m), night dive, peak performance buoyancy, multilevel computer diving and navigation. Definite highlight was on the deep dive where we were surrounded by reef sharks, one circled us about a meter away, very cool!

We also randomly ,met up with Fay and Jenny who were doing there open water at the same place but a couple of days behind us, which was cool to catch up, unfortunately we booked our travel to Malaysia just before we met them tho!