What A Dive

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Yup - pretty much sums up the good and bad of Southern Thailand in one phrase. Southern Thailand below water level is an astonishing wonderland of coral, sea life and crystal clear waters, and then as soon as you put your head above water it's a Dismaland of over-pricing, inauthentic food, drunken teenagers and sex tourists. I'm being a little unfair, of course (in fact I'm being very unfair) - Thailand has some amazing places, and Southern Thailand has some genuine tropical paradises, if you can find them. But not being big beach bums, and not particularly enjoying crowds of other tourists, it was never going to be our favourite place on our travels...

Our time in Thailand started pretty well - we spent the first couple of days in Trang, a town near the Malaysian border famed for its food, influenced by traditional Thai flavours and by Malay Muslim as well as Chinese cuisine. The result is a very foodie town with huge night markets that you just want to eat everything from. We spent a happy couple of days snacking away on dim sum in the morning, uber-spicy salads at lunch and lots of deep fried goodness at night, then jumped on a boat to Koh Ngai. As Thailand goes, this is a pretty undiscovered tropical paradise - it's hardly something from The Beach, but it's a small island with just a few hotels on it and no drunken hordes. Our hotel had a little private beach with incredible snorkelling straight from it; 10 metres or so out of brightly coloured coral reef filled with multi-coloured fish (the highlight of which was an anemone full of clownfish wriggling about, poking their heads out and then wriggling back in - very cute, we kept going back to see them) followed by a big drop-off with loads of schools of fish and some bigger stuff like groupers lurking under outcrops. Pretty amazing to have so easily accessible, we spent a lovely couple of days snorkelling about and kayaking around the spectacular limestone karst scenery.

After Koh Ngai we went up to use our new found diving skills on Koh Lanta, which has some of the best diving sites in Thailand. This was where the good and bad sides of Southern Thailand really started to become clear - Koh Lanta itself was really not very nice at all. The beach was scruffy, the food was terrible and expensive, our bamboo bungalow was full of mouse shit every time we returned to it, and the bars were atmosphere-less copies of one another, blaring reggae and competing for the strongest buckets of booze. But - and it's a big but - the diving was amazing, and made up for all the negatives. We did two dives there, and after the poor visibility of our course in Langkawi, we were blown away - it felt like we could see for miles. The sea life was so rich and diverse, you just didn't know which way to look; schools of barracuda, big cuttlefish, lobster, giant moray eels, pufferfish, lionfish and so much more on all sides... Amazing stuff. Definitely confirmed our bug for diving - we'll be doing a lot more over the rest of the year!

After sampling the Andaman Sea diving, we headed across to do our Advanced Open Water Course in the Gulf of Thailand, via a quick stop off in Khao Sok, in an attempt to get at least a little off the beaten track. Khao Sok is a national park spread around a large lake, with stunning scenery - the same kind of limestone karst formations you see on the coast, but even more closely packed and dramatic from the lake. We jumped on one of the overnight visits to the park, and were pleasantly surprised when there were only two other people in our pick-up - maybe we'd actually managed to get off the beaten track! Then we arrived at the boathouse and discovered the big pick-up was already full, we were just the extra spillover... Never mind! We were crammed like sardines onto a boat and buzzed off across the lake. We were staying in a very atmospheric place overnight, a bunch of floating huts on the lake itself, and had fun that afternoon swimming around in the lake straight off our front porch. That night, and the morning afterwards, we were treated to a completely farcical couple of 'safaris'. They tell you that there are elephants, leopards, and even tigers in Khao Sok, but the longtail boats they crammed us into are incredibly loud (I mean temporary hearing loss if you're sat too near the engine kind of loud) - unsurprisingly, not the best vehicle to see shy, retiring creatures from! We saw a grand total of one owl on the night safari and two monkeys on the morning one - not the most exciting couple of hours we've ever had...

Next we were back to more diving, on the diving Mecca that is Koh Tao. Again, the island was pretty nasty - crowded, tacky, totally inauthentic - but it did at least have nice beaches, and yet more fantastic diving. Our Advanced Open Water course was five dives, and after a couple of more technical ones on navigation and buoyancy control (very useful but less interesting) the last three were all great fun. On the first evening we did a night dive; a little scary at first as you descend into the black armed with just a little hand torch, but we quickly got used to it and had a great dive - a lot of the big stuff that hides under rocks during the day comes out to hunt at night, so we saw loads of cool things, including giant grouper, a great big hermit crab and loads of blue-spotted stingrays gliding around the seabed. We also had a lot of fun playing with the phosphorescence in the water - turn the torch off and wave your hand around, to set the water ablaze with a green glow. Very cool! The final two dives were a deep dive, to qualify us to dive down to 30m, and a wreck dive, on a Second World War warship deliberately sunk as a dive site a few years ago. Both dives were a lot of fun, and we saw loads of schools of big fish, as well as a huge great barracuda swimming around by himself, very impressive.

Given we're travelling for a year and are on a budget, we probably should have stopped diving at this point, having finished the course. But we're not very sensible, so we forked out for another two dives the next day as well. Well worth the money though, we had another two fantastic dives. Star of the show on these dives were the titan trigger fish - beautiful and somehow prehistoric looking fish, but territorial and aggressive, they have quite a jaw on them ready to take a good chunk out of you if you don't get out of their yard pretty damn quickly. They flick up a trigger fin on their backs when about to attack, which is your signal to really get moving... We saw a load on the second dive, mainly at a safe enough distance to just admire them, although one flicked up his trigger and had a go at our dive guides fins... We got out of his yard pretty damn quickly.

After Koh Tao we started to make our way up towards Bangkok. Our next, brief, port of call was Hua Hin, a beach resort apparently very popular with older European tourists (and hence somewhat stomach churning, thanks to the insistence of elderly, fat, hairy European men to wear Speedos...) after which we moved on to Petchaburi. There's not a lot to see or do in Petchaburi, but something about it just works, and it was probably my favourite place we visited in Thailand. We stayed in a charming little guesthouse, run by a slightly crazy but very lovely old Thai lady who had loads of cats and loved 60s and 70s music (sitting in their atmospheric little bar overlooking the river, sipping a cold beer, listening to Pink Floyd, with kittens playing around your feet - what's not to love?). The town itself was that authentic Thai experience we'd been searching for at last, with bustling markets filled with fish, meat and vegetable stalls, and street food everywhere. We intended to stay two nights and ended up staying for four chilled out, snack-filled days. Perfect!

Final stop in Thailand (at least for now) was Bangkok, to soak up some Thai city life before meeting up with my parents, who were stopping off on their way to Burma. The main tourist sites were pretty much as expected - impressive, but expensive and incredibly crowded - but it would be hard to dislike Bangkok as a city; it's full-on, hectic and constantly interesting, not to mention full of wonderful food. We stayed the first couple of nights in our usual kind of cheap hotel, until my parents arrived and we moved across to the nice hotel they'd very generously put us up in while they were there. We felt somewhat like frauds walking in with our backpacks and sweaty clothes; a hotel with a big bed, no cockroaches to be seen - free soap and everything! Pretty nice to live in luxury for a couple of nights - thanks Mum and Dad! We had a lovely couple of days with them, eating plenty of good food, drinking the occasional beer and fighting our way through the throngs at a couple of tourist sites.

We're back into Thailand from the north later in our trip, but that was it for now; we were up at the crack of dawn the next day to catch a train - next stop Cambodia.

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