We left Bangkok on the night train at 5pm and after 25hrs of trains, buses and boats we eventually got to Koh Tao island. When I actually looked at a map I realized that we could of got a ferry to Koh Tao from Champon which would of cut the journey in half but it's not like we haven't got the time. We were wanting to do a PADI course and Koh Tao is the cheapest place in the world to do one. We had been recommended to do it with Bans diving resort. So we booked ourselves in the deal was we got free accommodation while we were doing the course all for only 9000 baht about £180 for a three day course. We were meeting up with Poppy and Jamie and some other friends Harry and Stacey on the island, Harry and Stacey were also doing the diving with us. After a chill out day we started the course with a video, then the pool for a day, then they let us loose in the sea!! Mel was rather nervous in the beginning although she was more scared of jumping off the boat than the diving. The diving itself was awesome its like descending into another world! As soon as you go under the water there was just fish everywhere of every different shape and colour, when you got down to the coral it was like it's own little city. We did four dives in total on the open water course and we loved it so much that we paid to do the advanced course as well which was another five dives including a wreck dive and night dive. The night dive was the coolest of the lot we each got a touch so we could see where we were going, there were so many different fish out at night we saw some blue spotted stingrays which have really bright blue spots and yellow eyes. We also all knelt down on the sand and turned off our torches, then waved our arms and legs around so it stirred up all the plankton which then starts glowing so you see big swirls of glowing plankton.
On the last two dives we hired a camera and took loads of pics, the very end dive they let us go alone and your supposed to stick to the dive time that is set at the beginning of the dive but we were enjoying ourselves that much that we overran the time by 11 minutes. We were doing a navigation excise on one of the dives and we were concentrating that much we nearly missed a turtle right underneath us! We also saw a sea snake on that dive. Other than diving we haven't done a great deal else other than boozing! We wanted to go snorkelling in a place called shark bay where you can see reef sharks but it rained all day the day we wanted to go. Ko Phangan is the next stop for the Full Moon party.