Ko Tao

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After a full day travelling south, first on a 6:30am bus from Kanchanaburi to Ratchaburi and the 7 hours on the slowest train in the world, we reached Chumphon at around 6pm and had the choice of catching the 11pm night boat to Koa Tao or waiting until morning and catching the ferry. We choose the easier option of staying and getting some sleep. Chumphon is a small place with a bustling night market selling cheap Pad Thai as well as the local seafood speciality of a fried mussel omelette. We stocked up on supplies and managed to find one of the few banks in Thailand that don't charge 150baht to use foreign cards in their ATMs (apparently only Aeon and HSBC don't try and rip off foreigners in this way but their ATMs are few and far between).

The short ferry ride was expensive but pleasant and definitely preferable to the night boat which would have got us in at 5am into Koa Tao. Since Koa Tao is one of the most popular places in Asia to learn to scuba dive, the boat had half a dozen guys trying to persuade people to go to their dive schools. We heard a few of them out and decided to go with Big Blue as I'd heard of it before and they were offering free accommodation with their open water courses. The place was right on the beach and all the dive instructors we met were English so there'd be no communications problems while learning. The only snag was that the accommodation was full and we'd have to spend the first night somewhere else which really annoyed us. Thankfully we got a room there the following day, free for four nights and bribed us with free T-shirts to sooth our frustration with them.

We started that evening, learning the theory behind it all and all the nasties to avoid, from nitrogen narcosis to decompression sickness. Thankfully the teaching was very good- a lot better than their organisation of accommodation. We opted to do an SSI course instead of the more traditional PADI course on the basis that they are essentially identical with the exception that PADI make you buy a diving manual at £16 each which we'd then have to carry around for the next six months.

Up bright and early the following morning, we covered more theory before grabbing some gear and heading out to the beach to practice some shallow water dives. This included practising various skills like swapping regulators underwater and taking your mask off under water and putting it on again & clearing it. Stacey was unfortunate enough to have a faulty BCD that kept self inflating, making it impossible for her to stay underwater which didn't help much when she was already so nervous about taking her mask off (not that I blame her, its pretty unpleasant!). Swimming further out from the shore, we submerged to 2 metres for our first proper look at the coral and fish, while doing a few more (tedious) skills like getting your weight belt off and on, as well as the scuba unit.

After the last of the theory the following morning, we boarded the dive boat in the afternoon for out first open water dive to 12 metres at a site called White Rock, a few km from shore. Suiting up and assembling our gear, we jumped in and swam to the front of the boat to follow the buoy line down to the reef. It was weird putting your face in the water, looking down and seeing all the fish but not being able to see the bottom. This was probably the last straw for Stacey who was already really tense so she decided that her place was swimming on the surface of the water where she could put her head up, rather than under it. We both did the theory work and the shallow water dives fine but the prospect of losing her mask in deep water was too much so from that point I was to continue my diving career on my own.

Submerging for the first time fas weird but fun, holding he buoy line until we reached 12m and then swam over the reef looking at all the strange life that exists beneath the sea- it really was like being on another planet and being able to move freely in three dimensions was great. Some of the wildlife included grouper, trigger fish, baracuda, long fin banner fish, angel fish and lots more that I couldn't identify plus countless varieties of colourful coral. It was amazing how teaming with life the reef was. The second dive of the day was similar, with the added bonus of seeing two clown fish that had mated and were guarding the eggs in a huge anemone.

The dives the next day were also great fun, the first being at Chumphon pinnacle which was a 45 minute trip away, pretty far out to sea. There we dived to 18m around this massive pinnacle of coral but still couldn't see the sea bed as the water was so deep. The fish down there were noticeably bigger as we were further out to sea. The tragedy was that the even bigger fish were lower down - we could see the other divers below but weren't qualified to dive and deeper.

The last dive of the day was fun but included more skills to complete, like the dreaded removing of the mask in deep water and clearing it. I find it pretty difficult to breath with the mask off as I just end up inhaling water through my nose but of course trying to cough it up again doesn't work under water, so just carried out the task quickly. The rest of the group found it similar so I guess its something that comes with practice.

They showed a video of the open water groups that evening in the bar with lots of underwater footage of us doing our thing. It was really good and of course it was for sale, but at £50 a pop, was a bit out of our budget. That night we celebrated pasing the course with the group and our instructor Jodie at a local restaurant. She had to go and do a visa run to Burma (something we'd be experiencing pretty soon) so she headed off to catch the night boat and we headed off to one of the beach bars. Its a nice atmosphere on Koh Tao in the evening, lively with entertainers juggling fire, jumping burning swinging ropes and even skipping using burning ropes but still very chilled out.

We had a much needed lay in the next morning and some time to ourselves relaxing on the beach. We met up with a few of the people from our course in the evening (some looking pretty worse for ware) and discussed which of us would be doing the advanced course when Jodie returned the following day. I was in two minds whether to do it as it was an extra 7800 Baht and we'd already spent a small fortune, but the lure was being able to dive to 30m and potentially see sharks. It was a tough call but in the end it had to be done. I would give me freedom to dive deeper at all the diversities we go to on our travels and would cost substantially less that doing it back home. On top of that, Big Blue offered me a 10% discount and 2 more free nights of accommodation so it was a done deal.

The course included 5 dives, one of which was a night dive and the rest were to do with buoyancy control, navigation, dive computer usage, photography and species identification. On top of this we would dive to 30m and perform a narcosis test as the nitrogen breathed at depth has the effect of diminishing your cognitive abilities and making you feel a bit tipsy. The first two dives included a lot of skill work but still with some remaining time to take a swim around the reef. The real treat came that evening when we did the night dive. Equipped with torches, we descended down the buoy line in the pitch black. We'd had to learn a new set of hand signals to be able to communicate while holding the torch. It was amazing, with lots of sea creatures that don't come out during the day. There were rays gliding along the sand with their blue spots glowing under the torch light, silver silhouettes of great barracuda out hunting, giant hermit crabs and entirely different coral that come to life at night. It was definitely a high light of the course.

The biggest thrill came early the next morning with the deep dive to 30m. After a quick narcosis test involving the instructor holding up some fingers and us responding by holding up the number needed to make 10. A few people had slower reactions but I wasn't too bad, and put this down to spending eight years at university with lots of subsequent experience of the narcotic effect of beer :-) Swimming around in the deep, we saw what we'd all been looking for - the murky silhouette of sharks swimming around. As we moved closer, we ended up near a group of about five of them swimming in and out of the mist. They were clearly bull sharks which can be aggressive towards humans in certain parts of the world, but they have never bothered divers at Koh Tao. Still, compared to them we were small, cumbersome and slow in the water so it wouldn't have been hard for them to take a nibble at us if they wanted. Unfortunately deeper dives are all too brief and this one was a mere 30 minutes which of course few by. We surfaced with much less air that we should have (10 bar instead of the safe 50 bar) but our instructor knew what she was doing and it was worth spending every extra second possible down there watching the sharks swim around. Our final dive, Jodie decided to let us go down on our own as she was having problems with her ears so she drew us a map of the dive site, gave us some compasses and off we went. Very strange being down their without a dive master and it would be pretty easy to get lost down there but fortunately there were no problems.

Successfully passing the course and getting a new certification card, we celebrated with a few beers. The two others diving with me were hooked and signed up to doing a nitrox course with the hope of being able to stay down longer. I was of course extremely jealous but having neither the spare £140 or the spare time (our visas expired the next day), was forced to give diving a break for a few days. These guys were so hooked that they went into the shop and bought top of the range dive computers (even better than most of the instructors there) costing in excess of £700 each - a big expenditure given that they'd only done 9 dives and were soon returning to cold countries where they wouldn't be diving, but I guess that's a big difference between backpackers and people simply on holiday in that they didn't have the restrictions of daily budgets.

We checked out of Big Blue the next day, who are really incompetent at managing their own accommodation as they had no idea how long we'd stayed or what we owed them so we ended off just picking the best price that one of the five different staff member had told us and set off on our way. We'd booked a visa run trip, that included a ferry to the main land, minibus pick up and shuttle to the other side of the county (the Andaman coast) where we'd get stamped out of Thailand and get on a boat to Burma. We stayed there for an hour and had something to eat in a big posh hotel called 'The Andaman Club', sitting on its own private island, before returning to Thailand and receiving a fresh stamp in our passports valid for another 15 days.

I haven't said much about Ko Tao, because in truth, we didn't get a chance to explore further than Sairee beach as I spent so much time diving (its a tough life). It short, its a tropical paradise with white sandy beach and hilly interior. Its pretty small at only a few km across in either direction and can be a little claustrophobic at times, but was a pleasant place to spend the week. The resorts and bars spill out onto the beaches giving some fantastic sunsets but everything is more expensive here on the main land, even the stuff in 7/11. Although the main reason people come here is to dive, its a beautiful place regardless and was well worth the extortionate boat fare.

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