Once back in Thailand we stayed one night in Bangkok and as ever enjoyed a few too many beers and said goodbye to Chris who was now off home.

Someone came up with the idea to eat bugs and the lack of good judgement meant most of us said "why not!?!?". You can see the pictures for yourselves, i don't plan on eating bugs again but they did taste of beef crisps.

The next night we were on a bus to Champon to catch the boat to Koh Tao, the bus was over booked Steve and i sat next to horrible Polish louts and we got to the ferry station with a 3 hour wait till the ferry left.

Once in Koh Tao I knew i wanted to get my PADI so we set about looking for a good dive centre and also accommodation. After a night of thinking we settled with the island dive club who made me feel comfortable and the equipment looked in good condition, also the accommodation was free during the course.

I decided to start the 3 day course the next day and Steve thought about it over night and decided to join me, yay diving together!!

The course was tiring and the first day was spent watching videos and theory, really boring. Our first confined dive which is where you practice the skills was 5m in depth and actually in the sea at Japanese gardens.

The first time you use the respirator and mask under the water and sink to the bottom (like a rock only if your me) is really quite scary and i was all to tempted to rush for the surface, bubbles rush over your mask and being a bit paniced your breathing quickens.

Once we'd calmed down we began to learn the skills, removing the respirator, removing your mask and blowing air out of your nose to clear it, bouyancy (i have an extreme lack of bouyancy finding it doesn't come that easy to me!) learning what it feels like to run out of air (the instructor turns your air supply off and you signal you're out etc.

2nd day morining we took our final exam and passed!! Steve passed with only 5 wrong out of 50 and i got 6 wrong. That afternoon we had 2 dives to 12m accompanied by Mike and Casey who were on a separate fun dive. We went over the skills again, removing the mask is Steve and my least favourite thing to do, really not nice. The rest of the time we spent diving around the reef spotting, parrot fish, banner fish, barracuda, titan fish there were loads.

3rd day we had another 2 dives to 18m at the famous dive spot Chumpon Pinnacle and white rock. Chumpon Pinnacle was really busy which kind of took the fun away but still great to see all the marine life. The 2nd dive of the day was at White rock our instructor made us remove our mask again, that's 6 times in total! And we had to do our emergency ascent, with those all done we had 40mins to dive around the rock which had great visability.

Because we were so tired every night after the diving we were in bed by 9pm and no beers, so we had a very healthy time on Koh Tao!

We would have loved to have seen more of the island, we stayed on Sairee beach which was beautiful and know that we wil return to Koh Tao one day.