Diving in Ko Tao

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April 6th 2010

Published: April 15th 2010

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juhos

arriving

Arriving at Ko tao

Everything that has a beginning has an end, and like our Grand Asian journey, this doesn't make an expection. Thailand is our last destination, the last country and the Swedish canary islands. After seeing some riots pro Thai ex-prime minister in Bangkok we changed our bus from Siem Reap to Ko Tao unbelivably fast despite all the streets of Bangkok were jammed. The night bus to Chumphon took almost the whole night and early in the morning we traveled by boat to Ko Tao - Island of turtles.

Without any longer hesitation we booked a open water diving course (that's the reason why we had come to Ko Tao anyway). The course by Sairee Cottage Diving was in English but we thought it'd be more useful to know the diving terms especially in English (it's available in Finnish here as well) if there will be new dives somewhere else in the World in the future. The beginning was hard because we hadn't studied anything in many months, but once we got the basic points about buoyancy, equipment, nitrogen levels, dangerous water animals and so on, it was very enjoyable to be under water and marvel the sea fauna which are

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particularly beautiful in Ko Tao. During our dives we spotted (at least) stingrays, morays, angel fish, trigger fish, barracudas, schools of other smaller fish and very colorful coral reefs. I think Jacques Cousteau really knew why he did all those documentaries about the under water space. If you haven't ever been diving, you should do it here, because of competition which lowers the prices significantly.

After becoming real divers in the depth of 18 meters and getting certificates we met a very nice bunch of Finnish fellows and we decided to celebrate the Thai New Year also known as Songkran with them. Good, memorable times! While writing this blog we're still here in Ka Tao and the tickets are already booked to Bangkok where we shall fly back to Finland on Saturday. So it's TJ 2 and we should still do the last day shopping in the City of Angels and try to avoid the riots of the infamous red-shirts.

All in all it's been a very fascinating trip in Asia - over 100 days, 6 countries (if added also a visa run to Burma and Chinese airports the number is 8), and it's almost impossible to put