Koh Tao in a sentence: Should be renamed diving island

Bangkok - again!

Arrived back to Bangkok....again! We got here in the evening and our bus isn't until 5am, and given that it departs from Khao San Road it only made sense to comeback here. Having experienced the road before, and after working our way around SE Asia for a bit we found ourselves to be seasoned professionals in shrugging off the persistent Thai people trying to sell us stuff we really don't need (although some of it's really cool).

We got the bus to the ferry, which when we arrived turned out to be a catamaran. Pretty cool! Unfortunately there was some heavy rain not long before we departed making for some rough seas! Although Emily is an experienced pirate from Cornwall, she did struggle on the extremely bumpy catamaran as it raced through the waters. It really didn't help that we bought a sandwich on board right before the damn thing left. So 2 hours after we left on the ferry we got to Koh Tao and wow, this looked liked just the beach getaway we needed with white sands and aqua blue sea. We consulted our lonely planet map, checked the scaling and figured we had about 600m to walk to our hostel, 800max!! 45 minutes later in hot and humid conditions, lugging our backpacks and rucksacks around, we were most definitely wrong!!

Regardless, we found our hostel...eventually, and feeling quite accomplished after such a hike. So now were at the Big Blue Resort where we will be doing our Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus course...AKA SCUBA diving! This idea to scuba dive stemmed from a conversation I had with one of my lecturers, highly recommending that we do this while we travel Thailand. We sat down with one of the instructors enjoying our welcome drink which was well deserved and signed ourselves up to start the following day :).

We met up with some friends from the elephant sanctuary (Rosie, Janet and Misa) for a catch up over some dinner and drinks, taking us to some of Koh Tao's best bars. This island (more specifically Sairee Beach) is crazy, with the best bars having fire dancers putting on a show on the beach in front of the bar, while a pool party is in full swing behind!

Our course has 6 people of which is more than we would have liked, but we really got on well with the team (almost anyway) and spent most of our free time with them. We had two Canadians - Gary and Dwayne, Louise from Australia and Eric - a chemist from Germany. Our instructor was Ant - a British instructor with over 1500 dives under his belt! Ant was a great instructor, moved out here when he was 27 being here for nearly 3 years now after leaving his job as a Project Manager working for Persimmon Homes. Having left the job from all the stress it was causing I now feel very very very happy I took this year to unwind before I spend the rest of my life pursuing a similar career path.

We had a relaxed start to the course, firstly doing our academics before they let us in the pool. I must admit it was nice to engage the brain again and have something to concentrate on. This was all followed up by an exam which we had to pass before they let us out to sea. Before we went into the pool we spent quite a while getting to know our equipment that would hopefully allow us to breathe and swim underwater - it was all quite boring really. They did manage to spice things up though offering beers for the person who could take what we just learnt and assemble and check the gear the quickest. Adequately motivated, it's safe to say that I walked over the competition earning myself an evening treat. It was also important to note that if you ever called your mask - goggles, or your fins - flippers, or stuck your thumb up for "cool" or "ok" (this meaning you want to surface when your scuba diving) then you owed the instructor a beer.

Walking around in scuba gear was pretty awful, and you didn't look very cool either. But in the water it was great, although it did take some getting used to. The afternoon was then spent getting used to the sensation of breathing underwater and practising some skills such as mask removal and replacement, helping your buddy when they have run out of air, buoyancy control and a load of other stuff. It got really interesting when the instructor turned our air off underwater. Apparently you have to experience the sensation of running out of air while underwater.

Sooo all the boring stuff out of the way it was finally time to head out to the open sea :). We left at 12:30 on our boat named Wave Runner, what a beauty. The sea temperature in Koh Tao was a wonderful 29-30 degrees whenever we dived, so there was no need for a wetsuit (thankfully!), although wearing a Tshirt was strongly recommended incase we got stung by jellyfish.

Our first dive was more of a fun dive just to get used to the feeling of diving and because we were inevadabily going to be staring at fish rather than paying attention to our instructor. The dive site was called Japanese Gardens. This was fun, but it did take us 20 minutes to get down the line (only going to about 15m) because people struggled to equalise their ears underwater. I had what they call a sinus squeeze which was caused from my nose getting bunged up from water in the mask, resulting in a very sore head and blood and mucous coming from my nose. Perfectly fine though apparently. Our second dive was at Junk Yard where we just ended up sitting in some sand completing some skills, not getting a chance to explore because Eric in our group (who wasn't a very good diver to put it politely) used up so much air that we had to surface and failed to notice that he lost his weight belt during the dive, how you would not notice this is beyond us.

The next day was our 3rd and 4th dive. Again our third dive was more of a fun dive, taking place at Chumphon Pinnacle but having to come up early again because team Germany couldn't control his breathing!! So instead of ruining our dives, Eric now gets a big boy tank so he has more air to consume. Typically you would take a long stride off the boat and into the water, but our instructor decided that this was too boring and got us all doing the "Dead Mexican". Essentially just falling backwards off of the boat and into the water.

Our fourth dive was at White Rock, opting for the "James Bond" to enter the water. This was sooo fun! Basically rolling over the edge head first and landing on your tank. Unfortunately Eric couldn't grasp the concept, despite being the last one to attempt it, just ended up jumping with no roll and landing flat on his front. Needless to say this was entertaining for all of us. This dive was filled with yet more skills we had to complete in order to get our certification. We all nailed it, except team Germany who started to have a panic attack. Shame, I did actually feel quite bad for him but our instructor was really good, managed to calm him down and he gave the mask removal and replacement test another shot managing to do it successfully this time around. Woop!

Our instructor then scribbled on his slate informing us that we had all completed our Open Water certification!! Awesome :). We made our way back to land, went to the bar where our instructor bought us all a drink and debriefed us before handing out our open water diving cards. It was such a great achievement and something that Emily and I enjoyed so much. In fact we ended up signing ourselves straight onto the Advance Adventurer course along with Gary, Dwayne and Louise, with Eric deciding not to go further.

The advance course was more enjoyable than the Open Water and the 5 additional dives really made a difference to our diving ability. This basically allows us to now to do deep dives down to 30m and are generally recognised as capable divers having done navigation, deep, wreck, buoyancy and night dives now.

Our wreck dive was around a WW2 battleship called HTMS Sattakut. Captured from the Germans by the British and given to Thailand. Once it was no longer needed the ship was purposely cuttled off the coast from Koh Tao. This was a really cool dive site, with the ship still fully intact, displaying some huge guns now making home to some Giant Moray Eels.

Navigation dive was essential and learned quickly how hard it is to navigate underwater, particularly in bad visibility and strong swells. Though Emily and I managed to complete the tasks, after figuring out a means to have a domestic with each other underwater over directions, team Canada managed to get very very lost! And also not abiding to the one minute rule to surface when lost meaning we had to end our dives after 26 minutes of bottom time so that the instructors could go and find them. Once we were on the boat and out of our gear they were found and had to go back down to complete the task. This was frustrating, but hilarious at the same time, we never let the guys live this down throughout the trip.

Our night dive also didn't go as smoothly as planned. We had done over half the dive with no problems, until my torch lost it's spark and being at the back this was not ideal. Luckily my dive buddy Emily wasn't too far and we went to grab a spare one off of our instructor. So now I'm swimming a long happy as Larry with my amazing torch that is now actually allowing me to see some really cool stuff all by myself, like a small jelly fish, ohh wow cool and another jelly fish, and another and ohh crap! A swarm of these tiny jelly fish had descended on us like the apocalypse. By the time we realised what was going on we couldn't even turn back because they had completely surrounded us. No choice but to swim straight through them. Because the water is so warm here Emily and I didn't opt to wear our wetsuits, although we did wear tshirts should a jellyfish situation come about, although we never expected this! This would have saved us some pain, but their stings only felt as bad stinging nettles. The worst was when a jellyfish found itself between the gap of my mask and my regulator! Anyway we made it through the swarm and continued our dive, later hitting another two swarms and having to surface earlier then we were hoping. Again, frustrating but hilarious at the same time. Back to the bar to log our dives and numb the pain. This was the night where we ended at a pool party which was insane! Feeling proud that I can still back flip into the pool after 13 years of not trying it.

So again we enjoyed ourselves so much that we now signed up to do some fun dives, but giving ourselves a day off to sleep and giving Emily a chance to really get over her cold she brilliantly manned up to during our open water and advance course. Damn our budget is taking a beating, but when your in the cheapest place on the planet to dive how can you possibly say no? These went brilliantly, and not going to lie kinda felt a bit smug getting onto Wave Runner being a fully competent diver and diving for pleasure without all the learning rubbish. Our dive instructor Jai was Australian and showed us some really cool stuff on our dives, no turtles though, which is still on my bucket to swim with one.

All dived out we booked our tickets to Khao Sok! Really reluctant to leave the island as we hadn't really explored much of it but having spent about a week here (the longest we have spent anywhere since the Elephant Sanctuary) it was time to leave.

C & E x