Yet again apologies for the late blog.... we've just been having too much fun!!!

So..... we left Luang Prabang on a very turbulent flight to Bangkok and spent a further 6 days on the Khao San Rd. We did the usual Bangkok stuff as before (drinking Chang beer and Sangsom buckets and eating way too much Pad Thai street food). This time round however we did venture to the seedy area of Patpong with one of Charlotte's friends from uni. No we didn't go and see a ping pong show - we went to a place called Radio City and saw the legendary Thai Elvis instead. Elvis put on a good show with all the hits but as for the Thai Tom Jones we were very disappointed. He absolutely massacred Delilah!!!! The other highlight of our stay in bangkok was the trip to the dentist!!! Seriously now if you need dental work doing go to Bangkok!! Its so much cheaper than at home and the standard of care is fab!

We left Bangkok on the Monday night to cathch the over night bus and then boat to Koh Tao. The bus was very luxurious in comparison to the other buses we have been on (especially in Laos) but at 3am we were woken from our sleep and thrown off the bus to sleep on the hardest floor in the world at the boat jetty until 6am! Wasn't too pleasant but we eventually got to Koh Tao around midday on the Tuesday. When we were in bangkok we arranged our diving course and accommodation with BAN's diving resort as we had heard good things about them. Its the biggest dive resort in Koh Tao and we were able to get our accommodation thrown in for free which is always a bonus. We were met off the boat from a BAN's rep who then took us ton the resort on Sairee Beach. Where we're staying is really nice set right on the beach it has two swimming pools and a lively bar and restaurant. The atmosphere is great here as there are lots of people diving and on courses so its always busy and since we've been here we've met lots of people.

We started our PADI open water diving course on the Tuesday evening with a 1hr orientation lecture and videa - this was just an intro to diving and outlined the course. We were given 3 chapters reading homework to do so we weren't happy!

Day 2 was full on with the morning spent in the class room learning about all the equipment etc and then the afternoon was spent in the swimming pool. This was 4 hours of practicing with the equipment and learning skills that we would have to perform in the sea. Some of the skills involved taking off your mask underwater and putting it back on again and clearing it and also swapping regulators with your buddy. This was really good fun but a really weird feeling to be doing this at the bottom of a swimming pool!

Day 3 was a morning dive to Mango Bay and Twins - these are shallow dive sites around Koh Tao. Each dive lasted for 40 mins with the first 15-20 mins practicing our skills and working on our bouyancy. The rest of the time we then followed our instructor around the site to see all the lovely fishy's and coral!! Beautiful! It was just like swimmming in an aquarium. In the afternoon we were back in the class room to do our exam which you have to get 75% to pass so we all passed with flying colours.

Day 4 we had the morning off and then in the afternoon we visited White Rock and Twins dive sites to practice again more skills which included taking off our scuba gear on the surface and putting it back on and basic navigation skills. Our last dive was a 'fun dive' where we could just follow the instructor around the site for the full 40 mins. This was so much fun and we got to see all sorts of fish including bat fish; angel fish; a black version of finding nemo and trigger fish. In the evening to celebrate completing our course we all met up for dinner along with our instructors and Dive Master Trainees. The alcohol was flowing and we ended up in Lotus Bar where we met up with a couple of guys that we met in India. It was over dinner talking to the instructors that we decided to sign up for our advanced diving course. Open water only lets you dive to 18m and apparently in Oz they prefer you to have your advanced certificate so that you can dive to 30m.. we also thought it would be a good thing to do to build our confidence as ther are numerous places on our trip that we go to where we hope to dive. We were sticking with the same instructors so they let us have a day off to recover and nurse our hangovers.

We started our advanced course on the sunday spending the morning in the class room with more homework and in the afternoon we visited White Rock to do our navigation skills where they just left us both on our own to find our way back to the boat... as you probably can guss we surfaced miles away from it! White rock was awesome with really good visibility and to make things better we spotted a giant hawkesbill turtle. The next dive site was Chumpon pinnacle to do our 30 metre deep dive. It was a little bit murky here but we got to see a reef shark which was about 80ft long we nearly jumped out of our scuba gear!

Day 2 we were really lucky to get to go to Sail Rock which is apparently the best dive site in the gulf of Thailand. BAN's don't do that many trips there because it is about a 2hr boat ride away. Sail Rock is an island with lots of aquatic life around it.. the mani highlight being there is a chimney that you can dive down. Due to one couple in our group who decided to get engaged underwater we missed out on the chimney but sail rock was still amazing and we got to see lots. The next dive site was South West which was another 1hr and 30 mins away so we had our lunch on the boat. South West was our naturalist dive where we were given slates with lots of images of fish on there so we could point them out while diving. As we are now advanced divers we are now able to navigate ourselves around a dive site so this last dive we just went on our own without our instructor. To celebrate finishing our advanced diving we had a messy night in the BAN's bar where far too many Sangsom buckets were consumed!! See the photos!!

We've now almost had another week in Koh Tao just bumming around and topping up our tans. Yesterday we did our first fun dives to South West where the current was terrible and then again to White Rock - now we have 11 dives in our log book...hopefully we will get to add to this in Malaysia. We really like it here and we'll be really sad to leave (we have booked our boat to Koh Panghan on Monday) we've met a really good group of people here everyone has been really friendly. Maybe one day we'll come back here and do our Dive Masters!!!