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Published: April 26th 2006
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The dinghy
waiting to pick up the last divers at sunset Arrived back from the liveaboard yesterday. I did 11 (well, ten and a half really) of a possible 14 dives in four days, which i was pretty happy with... if i had done the whole 14 i don't think i would have enjoyed them as much because i would have been absolutely buggered. and i developed a cold so i would have been in a great deal of pain for a couple of them too.
It was a really good trip though... the boat was quite nice - 30 metres with air-conditioned cabins and shared bathrooms, and heaps of staff... the paying customers did nothing but eat, sleep and dive... and even the diving was lazy - the "thai crew" put all the gear together, filled the tanks, helped you into your gear, into the water, out of the water, and if you surfaced more than about three metres from the ladder they either sent a dinghy or threw a rope and towed you in. and then there were two thai women whose every waking moment was spent cooking food in a stinking hot kitchen... every time we came up from diving there was a buffet style meal with a
One of the Bay's we moored at
The rocky boulders on the left were also underwater, making for some wicked canyon-like swim-throughs etc combination of thai and european food. it was madness.
And of course the dives themselves were, as promised, fantastic... the water was the most beautiful color when you looked at it from the surface, and once you were under it the visibility was incredible. and it was really warm and full of all sorts of sea-life - fish, coral's etc. Once again i felt like i was on the national geographic channel. Unfortunately i failed to find any underwater housing for my camera so there's no pictures, but i can tell you i saw so many wierd creatures - frogfish, seahorses, lionfish, scorpionfish, stonefish (if a rock looks a little too much like a rock, it's probably a fish), moray eels, seasnakes, leopard sharks, nemo's (as in "finding nemo", that appears to be they're official name now, "clown anemone fish", or whatever they were called, is so last century), harlequin shrimps, smasher shrimps (who apparently have the strongest punch in the underwater world - aquariums have to be made of 3 inch glass so they don't smash through it).
But the two things i was most stoked about were...
1) Turtles... for the first couple of dives,
various dive groups would come up and be like "did you see the turtle?!" to which i had to say no... which i was unimpressed about, but then and the very end of about the seventh dive, the dive master lead us to a gap in these boulders and i couldn't figure out what he was pointing to at first, but then i saw that it was a turtle munching on coral! it was so cute and all prehistoric looking. Then as we were eating lunch after the same dive, another turtle came swimming by the boat while we were moored in this picturesque bay. So people started throwing banana's to it and it stuck around long enough for those that wanted (me included) to jump in and swim with it!! I had bought a disposable underwater camera that could only go to 15 metres, so couldn't be used for actual diving, and i was wondering how i was going to use up the rest of the film when this turtle appeared. on development there appears to be something funny with the colours and a white spot in the corner of the pictures, but you get the idea.
2)
manta ray... these, along with whale sharks, were the drawcards of the similans, but being wild animals you're never garunteed to see them. but our last two dives of the trip were scheduled for a place called koh bon, which is renowned for manta rays... this was all very exciting until about 8 metres deep when my right ear wouldn't equalize (diving 101 - to compensate for the increased water pressure against the outside of your eardrums, you block your nose and blow, pushing more air behind the inside of your eardrums, thus "equalizing" the pressure, but when your sinuses are blocked because of a cold etc, it doesn't work)... so there i was, sitting 8 metres deep in the andaman sea, cursing my sinuses, the laws of physics, and life in general for not letting me see a manta, when right on cue, a HUGE one swam straight under me!!! It was joined by a white-tip reef shark which must have been maybe a metre, metre and a half long, but it was completely dwarfed by the manta. After that i was quite happy to sit on the boat and watch dvd's for the remained of the trip. Although
This time from the surface
note the color of the water, it's gorgeous everyone else saw plenty more - apparently there were about 6 of them at one stage - i'm just stoked i saw one at all.
In addition to the sea-life, the people on the boat were really cool too... all sorts of nationalities - a couple of british couples, a german woman, a french guy, a couple of french canadians, some japanese... and one hot swede. on the last evening he complained of being to cold in his cabin cos he was right next to the air conditioning duct. "i've got ways to keep you warm hot swede" i thought to myself, but settled for offering him the use of my sleeping bag, sans me in it.
And now i'm back in guady phuket. This afternoon, I met up with one of the english couples from the boat and we hired a tuktuk to take us to the gibbon rehabilitation centre where we saw some cute-as-a-button gibbons who are rescued from captivity and hopefully rehabilitated to behave liek gibbons again in order to be released back into the wild. But unfortunately some of them will never be released either because they've got diseases (like herpes and HIV... how
Gibbon
Poor wee gibbon who will never get released into the wild because he's been taught not to sing did they get those??) or because they're too domesticated and will never learn to behave like wild gibbons again, which is really sad.
but I'm not here for too much longer - tomorrow it's back to bangkok then to cambodia... where hopefully i'll gather more fun tales.
Until then...
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Ev
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Hey Stace! The diving looks absolutely amazing. So jealous! Keep up the great updates. Looking forward to seeing you in London town. :-)