Scuba dooby doo

Andre, Courtney, and I successfully completed our PADI open-water dive certification yesterday, just in the nick of time since I have to hurry back to Ban Phe in order to go to Chonburi on Friday morning!!! I am so happy that we pulled through on the test and are finished, and I can’t wait til the next time I get to dive. We have talked about and priced out the live-aboard boats that you get from Phuket to go to the Similan Islands (which are supposed to be absolutely gorgeous).

I decided pretty recently that I wanted to do this. In the past I had always been pretty anxious about the idea of scuba diving and told myself that I could see just as much in snorkeling, but I have come to realize that though that is sometimes the case, there are often things that you have to go deeper to see. Besides that, I just decided it was something I wanted to learn. So I began to hatch a plan for our post-TEFL class days, which involved heading over to Ko Chang (2nd biggest island in Thailand, after Phuket, and close to the border with Cambodia). Courtney was game as well, and a lot of the other TEFL-ers also ended up heading to Ko Chang, though not to get certified with us (except for Andre).

When we first arrived on Ko Chang, we went around to several dive shops, trying to get the best deal. We ended up deciding to go with a company called Scuba Evolution and they turned out to be pretty good. There were some oopsies along the way, though, like when we were paying for the course at the dive shop and I managed to get locked inside the bathroom (not an auspicious beginning!). Also, our first day they came to pick us up an hour early, but then didn't have our PADI books ready for us for several hours. Everything therefore got pushed back because of the delay, and we ended up doing our pool dives in the waning light of day into nighttime, which was really a little disconcerting at first, but it turned out to be fine. Our instructor, Per, from Sweden, was very laid back, to say the least!

Though the visibility wasn’t the most spectacular (rains, etc.), the variety of coral was pretty neat and we got to see a lot of interesting life down there. [Side note: Courtney and I enjoy making fun of people who love to throw dive lingo around to show how savvy they are- "What’s the viz?" as in, in other activities, when people say, "What’s the vert?", "There was some sick pow pow but the bottom was mostly mashed potatoes," or "The waves were totally gnar gnar, bro."]

I love to look at brain coral, those weird giant burrowing clams, and also the Christmas Tree worms. They are little brightly colored organisms (electric blue, yellow, and orange, among others) that do really look like miniature Christmas trees standing on the coral, but if you wave your hand close to them, them retract into their holes (to the tune of "Under the Sea," at least inside my head), just as the huge clams snap shut. There are also tons of sea urchins on the ocean floor and among the coral. They are black with very long spines and that creepy "eye" in the center. You have to watch out when you get to the bottom, lest your puncture your belly or legs on their sharp spines. I've seen the pain it can cause because once my friend, Manual, in Cuba stepped directly on one as he struggled into shore in Havana. It was quite a lengthy and painful process to extract all those spines!
I saw morey eels for the first time (ugly!!) and we also saw a little sting ray hiding in a crevice (Courtney spelled 'ray' to me in sign language, but it took me a minute to register the letters, my sign alphabet is a little rustry from the Girls Scout years). We saw clownfish swimming amongst the sea anemones, but alas, they were not Nemo-colored.

I thought that scuba might be scary, but I really didn’t feel scared at all. I think it was good that I waited until now because if you are in any way freaked out by it, it could become too scary and/or dangerous to do. It was only a little bit hard to knock the instinct to hold my breath under water out of my head. And then it reminded me of meditation in a way because you are soooo conscious of your breath while you are swimming (in and out and for how long, etc.).

All the clichés that you hear about scuba diving were completely true for me- how the weightlessness when you bounce around the ocean floor can make you feel like you are on the moon’s surface, how time passes so quickly when you are down there, how peaceful it is (most of the time, except when you graze your leg across sharp coral). It was like swimming in a gigantic tank at the aquarium and at times, when away from the coral, just like a humongous fish bowl that you could spin around in. The gear is so bulky and cumbersome on board, but then you jump into the water and immediately the annoyance of it is wiped away. The second day I heard all those semi-eery underwater noises that they always pipe into aquariums. Strange and beautiful.

It is a really special experience and I’m glad that Andre and Courtney were up for it, too, so I could do it with other people. I hope we will get a chance to go again at some point in Thailand or maybe even Australia (because I think all of us are headed there after SE Asia).

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