Advertisement
Published: April 27th 2011
Edit Blog Post
The past three weeks have flown by far too quickly! We have had an awesome "holiday" in the middle of our trip, we've seen so much, relaxed so much, and loved every minute of it!
At first however we weren't sure if we would make it to the southern islands, they were struck by severe floods and the government was advising against all non essential travel to the area, at one point we were thinking we would have to fly elsewhere. But after long debates and worries over the weather it eventually cleared up had we great fun in the sun in the accompanied by friends and family!
After arriving from Vietnam, we met Ben in Bangkok and decided to go to Ko Chang, a small island 6hours from Bangkok near the border with Cambodia. At this point the weather and transport in the south was still horrendous, no buses were even running. It was almost a blessing in disguise for us as we loved Ko Chang and managed to find a really nice bungalow that was situated just metres from a beautiful quiet beach, which made our few days on the island lovely and relaxing! We spent our days
chilling in the warm waters and marveling at the crabs whilst admiring the amazing back drop of jungle clad mountains that surrounded us. After discovering that transport to the south had restarted, we were able to then continue with our original plan and meet Matt and Dejan in Bangkok (yes, more visitors :D), and proceeded to the island of Ko Tao to complete our padi scuba diving course.
The 5 of us managed to get the most amazing scuba diving package....Ko Tao is known for churning out it's "factory divers", with many of the schools taking on huge groups of people through their padi courses. Ours however was not one of these. 'New way diving' was not only one of the cheapest companies we found, but it also offered us a real personal experience during our course. It was only the 5 of us in our group and when out diving on the boat, there was only us and one other couple, we pretty much had the boat to ourselves! Furthermore, they pride themselves on being the first company to get to the dive sites, so although this meant early 6am starts for us, it was well worth it
as we were the only people in sight...... We had the fish all to ourselves! Further still, we were also given 2 extra fun dives free of charge which were a brilliant way to end the few days and gave us the chance to dive at new locations. Our diving instructor was also brilliant, and he even gave us a free Ko Tao diving book each (which he had written and published) detailing all the different fish species and sites (we got these for getting 100% in our theory exam.......kerching!)
The diving was incredible, straight away we were hooked! Parrotfish, triggerfish, moray eels, blue spotted stingrays, angelfish, batfish, beaked coral fish, butterfly fish and giant barracuda were just some of the many species we encountered. It's such an amazing feeling to be swimming through shoals of fish as they dart past and around you. We also had a up close encounter with a trigger fish (an aggressive species that bites) that swam up right through us, really awesome, and we saw the biggest Barracuda. It must have been at least metre and a half!
Overall it was an amazing experience, you can't really beat diving in the mornings and
chilling on the beach in the afternoons, and this was made even better by being able to do it with friends....unbelievable..... We were definitely living the dream!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.073s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 9; qc: 23; dbt: 0.0498s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb