Kristine and the big blue - errr, I mean, big murky sea...

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The journey to Koh Tao was a bit of a nightmare. As it turns out I’ve “done” Thailand the wrong way round. When I was here last I went to the west coast, when the monsoon was only just finishing, which meant that the weather wasn’t always perfect… On Phi Phi it was, but everywhere else there was always days with rain in-between. Now that I’m back I’m on the east coast and now the monsoon is over here! We thought that we would get to Koh Tao around mid-morning when we left Bangkok the night before. As it turned out, we were driving down to quite a storm, which meant that the boat we were supposed to take wasn’t running - a fact we only found out when we got to Koh Pha Ngan via Koh Samui at 12.30 to find out that we had to pay extra to go on a different boat which would finally get us to Koh Tao at 4pm!
After having spent time in Cambodia where the buses actually both leave and arrive on time, I now remembered how frustrating it can be to travel in Thailand.

The waves were high and people all around me were being sick into bags - I thought it was a bit like being on a roller coaster. Nothing to do but sit back and enjoy the ride; oh, and remember to laugh when it really tickles your stomach!
Anyway, by the time we got to Koh Tao the sun was out and with the hope of a shower after our 22 hour journey I went in search of a dive school I’d had recommended by a friend. Easy Divers was a really cool place and the girl I met there actually turned out to be Danish. Her name was Signe and I got the option to join her course with two other students from Germany, which was great, all it meant was that I missed out on the first afternoon of video, but she said I could just read the first two chapters in the PADI instruction book. This sounded easy enough so I signed up for a four day Open Water Diving Course which included accommodation at their resort.

Becky, whom I’d met on the bus from Cambodia, had still not heard from her friend that she was hoping to meet up with in Koh Tao, so I invited her to share my room with me. She must have been really bored, though, because when we’d had our showers and settled in, I realised that the first two chapters of the PADI book actually meant reading pretty much half the book!!!! Which I did, but in exchange for some of my much-needed rest, as I had to be in class at 8.30 the next morning…

Here I met my two fellow students - a lovely couple from Germany who were travelling for a few months before they were both going to do internships in India. Koh Tao was their last stop before India, so we had a lot of stories to share about our trips around Thailand, Laos and Cambodia (they hadn’t gone to Vietnam). Our instructor, Signe, quickly got down to the business of impressing the importance of never holding your breath and always being in control under water upon us. She did this with a lot of humour and great examples, and the morning passed quickly while we learned about atmospheric pressure and how to set up your dive equipment. After a test and some quick lunch it was down to the boat, stomachs all aflutter…



At the dive centre we tried on our wetsuits and fins to make sure everything fitted before heading out to see. The waves were still really high, and it was ‘interesting’ trying to hear everything Signe was saying when she was going through the procedure of setting up your equipment on the boat as we were trying to keep our balance and our place in the circle we were forming around her. It’s a bit daunting knowing that in a minute you’ll be diving down under water in equipment you’ve assembled yourself for the very first time… However, nothing is left to chance when you dive. First you go through all the procedures yourself, muttering 'Bangkok Women Really Are Fellas' to yourself… This is a sentence derived from the abbreviation of BWRAF, which stands for BCD, Weight belt, Releases, Air, Final OK, which is the order in which you check the various components of your equipment. Then you put it all on, except fins and mask, and then you do a 'buddy check', which means you pair up with your dive buddy (you always dive in pairs like this) and go through each others equipment to double check everything. Then you go to the steps into the water, put on your fins and mask and put your regulator (which is the mouth-piece through which you breathe) in place, hold on to your weight belt with one hand, and mask and regulator with the other, look up, 1, 2, 3, and a big step into the water and you experience the weird and wonderful sensation of breathing cold, fresh air under water for the first time. Even if it is only for a few seconds before your BDC (which is the 'jacket' that inflates and also straps the air tank to your back and holds all the hoses and gauges in place) pulls you up to the surface, it’s a thrill and a little taste of what’s to come after you’ve given the ok sign to the boat and waited for your buddies to jump in too. Even floating at the surface with all the equipment on is quite a different experience. I’ve never had a wetsuit on before, and that’s a bit weird (especially when you first feel all the cold water running in filling up the spaces between your body and the suit), as is it wearing an inflatable jacket and an air tank strapped to your back. You feel a bit like a non-streamlined Michelin-man out of his element, much more at the mercy of the current than when you normally swim.

To save our air, we snorkelled into shallow waters where we then emptied the air out of our BCD’s so we could sit on our knees under water in a circle. This sounds easier than it is. If we were victims of the current at the surface, this was even more the case by the beach where there was both the current to counteract as well as the surf. The visibility was very low with all the movement of the water and our knees were being cut up by the sand on the bottom which I suspect was made more of broken seashells than actual sand. In these conditions we were trying to sit still and have our first underwater lesson, which consisted as much of getting used to breathing normally as it did of learning how to take out our regulators, putting them back in, filling our masks with water and clearing it out again. When it became time to try to take off our masks entirely I was picked first to try this exercise. I didn’t really think about it, as I knew I had air coming from my regulator, so I was quite surprised when a bunch of water came up through my nose as I breathed in - boy, was I glad we were in shallow water so I could indulge myself in a little gut reaction which was to stand up and cough it all out! Of course, this is the entirely wrong thing to do as a diver, where everything that might go wrong you have to learn to deal with underwater, as you cannot suddenly shoot to the surface when you’re 30 meters down… Luckily for me though, I got some time to prepare myself for the next attempt at this particular exercise, as Team Germany were both really cold at this point so we dove back to the boat. It was nice to have a little time-out from the technical side of things and be able to just swim underneath the surface looking at the corals and fish and getting used to being under the water with all this equipment - breathing! And after a surface interval with hot tea and fresh fruit, I managed to do it on the next dive. I kept my eyes closed so not to lose my contact lenses, and concentrated very hard on breathing in through my mouth and not my nose - it sounds easy, but you actually have to suck the air out of the regulator, and if there’s less resistance through your nose… Luckily the chances of you losing your mask while diving are pretty low, unless you dive in wild waters, which I have no intentions of :-)

The next couple of days passed in a blur of studying till late at night and diving in the day. It took a few dives before I felt comfortable under the water, but as we went through the routines and the different skills again and again my confidence grew and with that my enjoyment of it.
On the one hand it was a good thing the weather was so crap and there was no visibility because it allowed us to focus on the task at hand during the teaching dives - on the other hand it was a bit disappointing when we had our fun dives not to be able to see very much. I saw a few fish, but not the blue ringed angelfish Signe pointed out to us, just some of the same ones you can see when snorkelling. And then of course my grazed knees will be a reminder of diving on Koh Tao for some time to come.

When we passed our exams and Signe was happy that we knew all the practical skills we need for an open water dive certificate, we were so knackered that we just went for a quiet beer and a meal to celebrate. We were all really proud, but needed a break from diving (at least for a couple of days) and some sleep! Becky and I stayed on Koh Tao for a few days extra to just relax and see a bit more of the island. We rented a motorbike and went exploring. This brought us to a public pool at the southern end of the island where you could hang out and swim, with a beautiful view over the bay, as long as you bought your drinks and food from the bar. In fact, it was so good we came back for a repeat session the next day :-)
Some of the divers from Easy Divers happened to be there one of the days as well. The trainee divemasters were all passing their exams too and I think they had celebrations for several days in a row. We all went out one night, and it was easy to see who was celebrating something, because all the new divemasters were covered in talcum. One of the initiation rites includes all of them wearing snorkels attached to a board and having alcohol poured into the mouth-piece and various things sprayed and sprinkled over them all the while - such as talcum. So they were a merry and messy bunch when they turned up at the bar.

It was interesting to see how the divers on Koh Tao have created their own little society within the society on the island, with their own traditions, rites and pecking orders depending on how long they’ve been suffering from their ‘Peter Pan Complexes’ :-) Some of them are more than ready to admit to never wanting to grow up and having chosen a line of work where they can ‘play’ in the sea all day every day. Others take some offence to this and deny any grain of truth in my proposition that there might be a degree of running away involved in choosing to live on a remote island on the other side of the world… Not that I’m judging, I’m far from home too avoiding any responsibility at the moment - but at least I know it :-) And of course I understand the allure of living in a warm climate with beautiful beaches and palm trees - it’s not just that - it’s the mentality of the people on Koh Tao who have chosen this life: they are all ’24-hour-party-people’. Which of course makes this a really fun place to visit - I’m just glad I don’t have to live there ;-)

So after a few days of partying and sunbathing, Becky and I took the ferry to Koh Phangan, which has even more of a reputation for being a party island, but it’s much bigger than Koh Tao, and we had been advised that the north-west part of the island was very quiet and chilled. It seemed like the perfect antidote to Koh Tao.

More of that later…

Lots of love,
Kristine

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