Scuba Emma

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After another long and tiresome journey in the less than promising thai bus service. We arrived in Ko Tao tired and sleep deprived. We were happy to be there however and it was one of the prettiest places I have seen as we pulled up to the harbour. After a short ride on the back of a pick up truck we arrived at one of the holiday villages and checked into a resort on the beachfront. This place was well set up for tourists and a definate holiday destination. There were dive schools, guesthouses and restaurants littered everywhere. We rented a moped for the duration of our stay. We were told later that one person a month dies in a vehicle collsion on the island. I would well believe it by the state of the roads and the absolutely stupid way that some of the people drove. We had one incident where a young guy on a huge dirt bike was driving on the wrong side of the road going around a bend and came straight for us. Only for we were crawling along at about 10km an hour we would have been dead meat.

We came to Ko Tao to unwind, party and of course get our PADI License. We managed to get a good deal and decided to take our course with Seashell divers. They seemed really nice when we were talking with one of the main guys in the place, got a really good feeling from them and they seemed really professional. Later we would discover that first impressions mean nothing!

The night before we were to start the course we ended up going on an absolute bender and got to bed about an hour before we were supposed to get up. Managed to scrape ourselves out of bed on time only to be sat in front of what has to be one of the most BORING/ANNOYING videos I have ever seen in my life. Literally had to sit there with my fingers keeping my eyelids from shutting. Had to keep prodding my mate everytime her snoring got so loud I thought the instructer might hear her in the next room! There was this one guy in the video who kept making really stupid unfunny jokes...I reckon if I saw him in real life I would stand on his toe or worse! After a torturous couple of hours we were finally released to go home and catch up on some much needed zzzzs.

The first part of our training in shallow water went really well, thought that it would be easy enough when we went for the real thing. Unfortunately the weather decided to play havoc with us. When we got out to sea there were 1m swells and only 2m visibility, but even at that, what you could see was a grey murky version of what was actually there. Scary stuff. Needless to say we were all feeling a little queasy from the boat ride and the inevitable happened one of us panicked and didn't want to do the dive. I am sure this is a normal day to day occurance for dive instructors all over the world....but of course our dive instructor is ex-navy and decided to use a tough love approach which meant him shouting at us and saying that the person panicking was putting all our lives at risk...way to make a person feel comfortable! The whole situation spiralled out of control and ended up being a shouting match while swallowing salty water from the waves crashing over our heads and the rain pelting down. Eventually I think he saw sense and he brought us to shallow water to start the dive there and swim gradually deeper. We all managed to do our dive successfully and we got the added bonus of seeing a hawksbill turtle on our first proper dive. The rest of the course went well enough apart from another few incidents with our scary scuba instructor.

We got there in the end and were really proud of ourselves when we eventually got our PADI License. After the course was over there was little else of interest to do in Ko Tao so we made our over to Ko Pha Ngan, the infamous island of the FULL MOON PARTIES.....

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Photos

Dive School
Nice company but I don't think that my instructor was a people person :)

The Scuba Professionals
Don't we look hot hahaha!

The Island
View from the boat

Water
This is where we saw a turtle on one of our first dives!

Comments

[the soul cultivator]

Scuba boot camp....
Hey Emma....Didn't help tackling them swills with a serious hangover, feel sick thinking about it, well bloomin' done though, was with you all the way on this one. Much Love X