Okay I had written an absolute corker about Koh Tao and the power went! Great so I am really sorry if this is poor quality.

Anyway as I was saying before I was rudely interrupted. We took the ferry from the Koh Samui to Koh Tao which actually means Turtle Island. The island used to be a prison, they don't call me Statto for nothing! Anyway the boat pulls into the harbour and the only thing they give you to get off the boat is a small 2 ft wide piece of wood. I have a 15kg backpack on my back and a 5kg day sack on my front and there is quite a lot of swell, I was fairly confident I was going to fall in! Thankfully I didn't. Anyway we found our way to our transfer and then got into the back of a pickup truck. It was pretty cool actually, I felt like a real traveler now!

We are staying at a place called Buddah View which is supposed to be the best on the island, after checking in we were taken to a class room where we had to endure a 1.5 hour video on diving and safety. It was pretty boring and the power outages every 20 minutes didn't help. Basically the whole island is powered by a small generator at the side of the road and a monkey or a wild bore knocking a switch throws the whole island into darkness (well obviously not if its during the day)

The hotel was a nice set up, they had a really nice BBQ area which had its own meat and fish counter, you could go and select you fish, they would gut it there and then, spice it up for you and wack it on the Barbie! Beautiful stuff! That night we had a quiet one getting to know our class mates as tomorrow we were in the class room.

We were studying for our Open Water qualification which involved 2 boring class room sessions, 1 pool dive and 3 open water dives going down to a max of 18m. We just about endured the class room sessions before getting into the pool to do some basic skills like removing your mask while underwater and stuff like that. The first dive was at a place called Ow Leuk which was about 6m deep with a sandy bottom. We learnt how to control our buoyancy and also improve on the skills we had learnt in the pool.

The rest of the dives in the course were pretty cool, we saw Barracudas, Butterfly fish, Parrot Fish, small fish, big Fish but we were unlucky to be paired with an Italian couple who had problems equalizing, which basically meant that it always took us a lot longer to get down to the bottom and therefore leaving us with less time to see the cool stuff. Oh well, these things happen.

Everyone had passed their Open Water so we hit the beers. It was immense! We went to a place called Sarai Beach which is basically a strip of bars right on the sea, it was so amazing. You could drink beer and sit in the ocean at the same time and then move to the next bar and do exactly the same! It was the most beautiful location I have ever seen in my life!

With our failure to see any of the cool fish and aquatic life we decided to take the Advanced Water course, this meant we could dive down to 30m instead of 18m which would be good! The only problem was that it was starting the morning after our heavy night out! Needless to say we had a 'Chang Over'

We had to complete 5 dives in total to complete this and we had to do it in 1.5 days so it was going to be tough! I won't bore you with the details of each individual dive but there were some compulsory dives which included, Multi Level Diving, Peak Performance Diving, Deep Diving & Navigation. Then you could choose another dive to be an optional one we chose the Fish AWARE dive which meant we could just go down and look at the fish!

The deep dive was absolutely amazing; I have never been so stoked in my entire life. We got down to 30 mtrs where we were doing a nitrogen narcosis test, basically a test to see if you get a drunken like feeling because of all of the nitrogen in your system. Well as I was doing the test a whale shark about 3-4m long swam right over us, everyone was going mad! It was out of this world it was so gracefull. Then to top it all off we had sharks swimming around us, not just little sharks but ones that were about 2m long! They were super cool.

I think that Koh Tao has been the highlight of the trip so far, the resort, the instructor (Camilo Torres) and the surroundings were really laid back and cool! Definitely a place I want to go back to!