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Published: March 14th 2007
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Welcome sandcastles on the beach. If the beach in Koh Pha-Ngan is dominated by the nightly consumption of buckets of Samsung, Coke and Redbull, the beach on Koh Tao is dominated by the nightly construction of sandcastles as restaurants prepare for their beachfront diners. The castles both mark out territory and house candle lighting. Each night the tide sweep away the castles and each evening the builders dig and sculpt the castles once more.
Later in the night the fire-jugglers and the buckets come out, but Koh Tao really doesn’t have the party momentum of Koh Pha-Ngan. And good job too. I had a fairly beach fronted bungalow and was trying to switch my body clock away from the no-holds-barred party routine of Koh Pha-Ngan and towards daytime activity mode.
My chosen daytime activity: diving. I hadn’t done any diving on the trip so far and Koh Tao had been recommended to me. My dive resort: Big Blue Diving. Their salesman had done a good job on the express ferry from Koh Pha-Ngan and I didn't have the energy or inclination to do any more shopping around.
Indeed I would readily recommend Big Blue Diving to
Candle lit castles on the beach
... the restaurant beach mats and cushions of Big Blue Divers students or “fun” divers visiting Koh Tao. (For the uninitiated any guest diver not engaged on a course is a “fun” diver.) My dive master Joost had everything you would want in an instructor: authoritative, attentive and engaging. The fairly beach fronted bungalow was fine. The Big Blue restaurant was excellent, with a particular mention for the delicious oversized bar-b-que beef kebab with baked potatoe.
I didn't have an underwater camera, so I'm afraid you will have to look up what the following fish look like. An ever-present fish was the fantastically named, territorial and ill tempered, Titan Trigger Fish - just plug it into Google Image Search. I didn't spot him, but apparently one was chasing after my fins on my first dive at Sail Rock. Another regular was Barracuda, there always seemed to be a big one lurking around. Honourable mentions should also go to the Blue Ringed Angel Fish and most of the cast of
Finding Nemo.
My favourite dive by a distance was my first
night dive, my first ever night dive. A night dive is usually a component of PADI Advanced Diver course. For reasons I can’t recall, I didn’t do a night
Big Blue Divers Beef Kebab
... yummy! Sorry pooch, this one's just too tasty to share dive as part of my otherwise highly enjoyable PADI Advanced dive course with Coral Divers at Sodwana Bay, South Africa. Aside from a couple of daytime “fun” dives at Aliwal Shoal off Durban, South Africa, the only diving I have done since was my PADI Rescue Diver course with Deep Blue Divers at Dahab, Egypt - and I didn't do one there either.
I had always meant to do a night dive. Across several continents I had listened to various divers exhorting: the otherness of night diving; how relaxing it was; watching stars from underwater; luminous plankton; and so on and so forth.
Getting a full day three-dive trip to Sail Rock, South West Pinnacle and Shark Island under my belt as a refresher course, I signed up for the night dive on the following evening. Piling onto the back of a pick-up truck, I was as excited as I had been on the way to my sky dive in Mexico. The pick-up truck transferred us to the main port where the Deep Blue dive boat awaited us.
As we headed out to White Rock, Joost instructed us on the basics of night diving. Point one (diving
More fire juggling
... together with the eponymous Red Bull T-Shirt torch): turn it on, lock it on, strap it to your wrist and don’t turn it off until you are back on the boat. Point two (communication): do
not shine the torch in the eyes of your dive master - you will annoy him and ruin his night vision - move your torch beam across his torch beam until you have his attention. As we approached the dive site we donned wet suits, weight-belts and BCD-Scuba units and checked the torches. At the dive site we completed buddy checks, donned fins and masks, and we completed giant stride water entries. The torches were then distributed, switched-on, locked-on, and strapped-on.
Surface checks complete we then released any air in the BCD and descended into the deep - and the dark. Immediately I felt like an astronaught distancing myself from the mothership. Weightlessness is not an unusal sense when diving, but darkness wrapped around. Fish or coral are illuminated only selectively. Different underwater activity predominate at night. Lobsters and hermit crabs come out to play. Shrimps can be seen, pairs tiny red eyes clustered under rock shelves. Fish try to sleep - eyes open - hanging around coral gardens. Barracuda remain
predatory, especially for Rabbit Fish which can get caught in the headlights! Feather stars are cousins of sea urchins and have feather like limbs they extend at night, but curl up under torch illumination. Is plankton luminous? We selected a nice sandy spot to sit on the bottom (at about 18m), shielded the torches against our chests and waved our hands in front our eyes. Sure enough luminous specks revealed themselves in the agitated water. A kind of self defence mechanism?
All in all it had been really good fun: new, different and with that sort of otherness. All the things I had been promised or had hoped for and more. All barring underwater stargazing that is - perhaps another time.
Aside from diving I also did some kayaking and some snorkelling. I did the kayaking independently, hiring a kayak on the beach and picked my own way across to and around the neighbouring Koh Nang Yuan. I did the snorkelling on a day trip tour of the island, a chance to meet some non-divers and see some of the "shallower stuff". The "shallower stuff" included seven reef sharks in Shark Bay! We also enjoyed better visibilty and
more light than any of the dive sites and saw many of the same reef fish. The snorkelling trip also dropped onto Koh Nang Yuan.
Koh Nang Yuan is billed on 3paradiseislands.com as "a place where we can lie back and take the world in at our own pace". It would be if it wasn't half a mile of Koh Tao. Snorkelling trips and dive trips land or circle daily. Kayakers brave the busy shipping lanes to visit daily. And the express ferry docks each day. It is however unusual, and very attractive, in being comprised of three granite boulder islands joined by a Y shape of beaches creating three sandy bays. Attractive though it might be, crowded it certainly felt above and below water. And you are stung by an admission charge.
Aside from the activities, Koh Tao has a very nice beach for relaxing or beach games - frisbee or cricket. Long, shallow and protected, Sai Ree Beach boasts the typical powdery white sand and nice in shore corals. The beach has bars, but it also has isolated sections and shady sections. There are no banana boats, no para-ascenders and no jet skis, though it is
surely only a matter of time. Koh Tao only has one beach, though, so if it becomes spoilt or over-developed that really will be it.
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Laurie/Mum
non-member comment
Real Sandcastles
There must be worst jobs than being a 'professional sandcastle builder'__can't be bad and you're never out of work if the tide keeps on coming in. Thought I'd better 'add a comment' to keep up my record!