November 15-20: Ko Tao, Thailand (By Liz)

After an all-day bus ride from Chiang Mai to Bangkok, a night train from Bangkok to Chumpon (which arrived at 4am), a bus from Chumpon train station to the pier, and a nearly barf-inducing ferry (many other people were sick) from the pier out to the island, we were finally in Ko Tao, in the Gulf of Thailand. We had previously made a reservation with Ban’s Dive Resort, so we immediately set out for the hotel. Because we were going to do the open water scuba diving course with them, they gave us a free basic room. The one we got was pretty crummy and smelled like paint fumes, so they switched us to another, better room but asked us not to use the air conditioning…um, yeah right! So that was an awesome deal.

We started our scuba course that evening by meeting our instructors, watching an instructional video, and completing some reading and homework. We were in a class with four Canadians and two Irish girls. Everyone was super nice, which made the experience so much more fun. The next day we did a contained water dive (swimming pool) to get used to breathing and to practice various skills, like taking off your mask and removing the regulator from your mouth. The day after, the real fun began! We had two dives in the morning in the ocean, going down to 10 meters/34 feet! Apparently November is the worst (and the only bad) month to dive in Ko Tao, so the visibility was pretty bad, but the dive was still amazing! It’s such a cool feeling to be suspended in water, and to have fish swimming all around you rather than only below you. We had to do some more skills again, which sucked because the salt water burns your eyes and nose so much more than pool water, and makes your mouth feel awful for the whole rest of the dive. But it was a small price to pay to get used to the feeling of diving! The following day, we did two more dives, this time descending to 18 meters/60 feet.


On the dive boat!

Because we enjoyed it so much, Jeff and I decided to continue on and get our advanced open water certification, which means the diver can dive to 100 feet and can dive without a dive master. We got 5 more dives over two days. The first one we dove to 100 feet to check and see if either of us gets nitrogen narcosis at that depth. It is a condition where the diver acts very silly and feels like they are on drugs, so it is necessary to make sure the diver won’t do anything too stupid. Our instructor told us a story of a previous student who ended up chasing a fish with his extra air because he thought the fish couldn’t breathe. Luckily (or disappointingly? Haha) this didn’t happen to either Jeff or myself. The next dive we had to learn how to use a compass and a dive computer to navigate around the dive site. A bit less fun than the others, but it definitely built up our confidence. Our third dive was the night dive! We went out with flashlights and observed the different kinds of fish that come out at night. We saw lots of barracudas, who use the light from our flashlights to hunt. We also saw an enormous trigger fish sleeping on its side just like a human under some rocks. At one point, we all turned off our flashlights and moved our arms and legs around to irritate the plankton and make them glow. So freaking cool! The colors of the coral were even more vivid without the blue-hue that sunlight through water gives it.

The following day Jeff and I did the two dives all by ourselves! It gave us so much confidence in our skills and really brought the adventurous aspect. One dive was for fish identification, and it was amazing. Our instructor told us to choose one place that seemed to have a good amount of activity, and simply kneel on the ground for 5 minutes and watch what took place. We ended up choosing a great place, as it was a fish “car wash”: about 5 feeder/cleaner fish would clean all the crud off whatever one fish was in a particular spot. Once that fish was clean, it would swim away, and another fish would come in and take its place. We watched this happen with about 15 fish, and we even saw it happening in groups by species. One of the cleaner fish even swam over to Jeff and tried to figure out how to clean him! It was a super cool dive and we both loved it. The next dive was more practice with navigating a dive site, and although we didn’t know exactly where we were, we still remained within the site (our instructor said that many people end up waaayy outside the boundaries) and had a great time.


Back from an amazing dive :)

After finishing up all the paperwork for our certification, we hurriedly packed up our things to catch the early afternoon ferry over to Koh Phangan.



Beautiful sunset from our hotel's beach


A sweet kitty at the hotel waited for us every night at the top of our stairs and always wanted to hang out with us...we eventually gave in and let her cuddle on our bed!