5 days in paradise

I headed from the west to the east coast of southern Thailand and ended up on the small island of Koh Tao...aka turtle island, aptly named because there USED to be turtles all over, they have since left though so I saw zero turtles, I know, huge bummer. Despite seeing no turtles Koh Tao was hands down my favorite place that I have visited thus far.

I stayed on Sairee beach which is on the west side of the island, the island is only 5 square miles or so so its not all that big regardless. The views from the beach were amazing and the fact that its an island meant that development was somewhat limited. No buildings more than 2 stories and gorgeous walkways along the beach with cute shops all over. The only thing you have to watch out for are the motorbikes and coconuts, which combined to be the two leading forms of accidental death on the island apparently.

But the reason 90% of the people go to the island....the other 10% just like the quiet....is for the diving. Some 40+ shops are all eager for your services as its one of the best places in Thailand to dive. They have some "Walmarts" of dive companies that are huge and cheap and others that are quite small. Some of the places take out 2 or 3 (high season) boats everyday, each of which can handle about 30 divers. So the unfortunate thing is that a lot of dive sites can get pretty busy with divers. I went with a medium sized place called scuba junction and actually decided to get my advanced open water certificate with them, I got my open water cert in California before I left on the trip...good decision. The funny thing is, the quality of the dive shops in the States, or at least the one I went to, was complete crap compared to the quality of equipment and instructors in Thailand. I had a French Canadian teaching me and took the course with 3 other guys from Europe. The course is more fun than actual work. To get your open water cert you have to take tests, watch movies, and do a bunch of reading on the theory of it all. The advanced course is just 5 dives that help you work on your techniques and become a better diver. You have to do a deep dive (30m or 100ft), a navigation dive, and you pick the other 3. I did a buoyancy dive where they teach you so many useful things about staying buoyant at one depth...much harder than I thought it'd be...the best part of that is at one point you empty all your air and sink to the bottom, take off your fins and jump around like you are "on the moon". I was a fan. The other dives I did was a night dive which was different but fun as well. You carry a very powerful LED light with you and its probably easier to find your way at night, or at least stay with your group, than it is during the day because the divers just look like bright stars underwater. You don't see nearly as many fish and night diving is like a game to try to find things on the ground. We spotted some rays, jelly fish, eels, porcupine fish, and others that only come out at night when all the rest of the fish are sleeping. The best part of the night dive was the bio-luminescence though. I'm not entirely sure what it is, but there are some tiny organisms that light up when they are agitated. So we all got to the bottom, turned off our lights and shook our hands around as fast as we could and the sea just lit up. I started laughing and and ended up spitting my regulator out of my mouth...oops. The final dive I did was an underwater photography dive. Underwater photog is ridiculously tough. First of all I sucked at diving and getting into proper positions like hanging upside down to look around some coral at a fish. Second, the fish don't exactly pose for you. And third, there is much less light underwater which means the shutter has to be open for longer than it does on land meaning the pictures come out pretty blurry unless you are perfectly still, which is ridiculously hard because you can't stop breathing or hold your breath when you are diving and every time you inhale or exhale your buoyancy changes and you rise/fall. But I got about 200 photos, maybe one of them will turn out good I haven't actually seen them.

After my course was over (2 days) I got to do some fun diving as well the next day. We went to the "best" site off the island and it was amazing. It was deeper than most of the reefs there and we went down to about 100 feet but the life there was amazing. We dove around an underwater pinnacle, on top of which were hundreds and hundreds of anemone, which of course means plenty more clown fish. I think I saw 3-500 Nemo's on the dive. You also see gorgeously colored angelfish, butterfly fish, etc. but my favorite of all was the baby box fish. There is only 1 of them, no one really knows how they ever find mates because they live alone, and its about the size of your thumbnail but the divemaster knew the general area what it was and we found it. The fish is aptly named, its literally a bright box with blue spots. Amazing. You also see thousands of other fish, some look like zebras others pure black. There are some big ugly guys down there too. The ugliest is the one eye moray eel. Its body is gross and looks like dead wrinkled skin and the eyes don't look real. They are small plastic beads that don't move. The things are creepy as hell.

But the diving there was amazing overall. Visibility ranged from 10-20m so we could typically see about 50 or so feet underwater. Probably more on the deeper dives, I could see the boat from the bottom. The water temp out here? A cool 30 degrees celcius...thats 86F, the water is extremely comfortable to be in and once you get done diving you head back to a gorgeous beach for a gorgeous sunset.

A group of local Thai guys play beach soccer at sunset everyday and I joined in on that 3 of the nights I was there. The others were spent relaxing and celebrating the completion of our course at a happy hour. Cheers to redbull and vodka. Redbull I think originated in Thailand so the stuff out here is the real deal, a little stronger than the stuff you get in the states and it comes in small glass bottles that look like they'd be better suited to distributing medicene than something to drink.

I'm back in Bangkok now after a 2 hour boat ride through 5-8 foot swells, half the boat got sick which might for a pleasant smell, and an 8 hour bus ride and I head off to Cambodia in the morning.