wow, hello people of britain

I am just about to finish the advanced open water dive course, so I will have been diving for nearly a week every day, and i have to say, it is a must if in thailand, it is sooo cool.

The first two days were a balance between classroom work in the morning, and dives to practise practical skills in the afternoons.

We practised things like clearing your mask of water when submerged, and taking off you r gear and putting it back on underwater. We also practised becoming neutrally buoyant (basically in a state of buoyancy where you neither sink nor float).

I have done a lot of table learning as well, so i can now effectively plan my own dive by myself, not that id want to, but i can,

In my group i had two jewish vegitarian girls from canda, and a guy called dan, who was about 24, who used to play for harlequins full time before doing his acl (mum youll understand how that feelsi think !) and he knows loads of the young england stars like james haskell and tom rees, as he used to play with them when hee was younger, how cool is that!

so after dives we were mostly too tired to party, bar one night, but eating was never out of the question...

and that nrings me to the next best thing here besides the diving, th Hippo bar anbd grill. It was recommmended to me by the divemasters here, and they were right to recommend! the first sirloin steak ive had sincei left was incredible, and then they served giant racks of ribs as well, which were also good.

needless to say ive been there every night since i found it, and has always impressed. back to cheap food now!

So i dived at various sights around ko tao, mostly to the west side of the island, including places such as white rock, chumpon pinnacle, and mongo bay.

I have seen some wicked stuff, such as a giant school of barracuda ( though they were not big ones) and cool starfish, and amazing coral, though i have not seen a whale shark yet.

however, the last dive did, was a night dive,,, scary!? surprisingly not, but was very eery, adn i did see the one ting i wanted to see on that dive; a giant great barracuda, which are about 1.5m long, and quick as lightning, maybe quicker, havent compared yet,

but the best thing was i saw it three times! the first time was at a distance, by myself, lightly unnerving, but the second time, it was about a metre away from me, and then shot ino the dark, and then a third time as we were surfacing about two metres away from me, so i know what they look like!

other than that, ther were the usual colourful fish, swimming around slowly, and wicked cliffs and rocks covered in colour.

So the next stop starting tomorrow, will be phuket, to collect my credit card off arrabellas friend, and then off the the similian islands, to hopefully see, get this, MANTA RAY, WHALE SHARKS, AND GIANT SQUID?~!

cool im sure youll agree, i also heard that one of our dogs rocco passed on the other day, which was sad to hear....

so tonight i shall rest up for my long journey tomorrow, and shall be speaking to some of you very soon

lots of love to all

George xxxxx