Koh Tao

After a long and hectic journey to Koh Tao we finally arrived at the island and found ourselves a dive school to do our PADI open water course. The course consisted of a few classroom lessons a swimming pool dive and 4 sea dives. It has been one of the most amazing things we've done so far. The classroom lessons were watching some cheesy American videos and learing about the theory of diving followed by a test and then a swimming pool to learnt the basic skills required for diving. I was very very nervous in the swimming pool - it feels so strange breathing under water and having to make a conscience effort to breathe slowly and not freak out. AT thins point I really didnt think Id like it - Elliott, of course settled in straight away. The first 2 dives were the next day, and after a few minutes of calming down, equilising and breathing slowly I found that it was the most amazing thing we've done. On the first few dives the visabiltiy was brilliant, there were so many fish absolutely everywhere, parrot fish, massive bat fish, angel fish, rays, moray eels, and occasionally the slightly dangerous coral eating trigger fish. There were so many I could mention, some in massive schools swimming care free around you. When you swam at the bottom of outcrops of coral and looked up at the swarming fish you felt like you were on some sort of nature program - I can recommend it enough. The only annoying fish were the cleaner wrasse that peck at your scabs like how they clean the bigger fish, but you only felt tiny stings. The dives were'nt all just fun, we had to demonstrate several skills to pass the course, like taking off and replacing your mask and clearing it of water underwater, pretending you'd run out of air and using your buddys air, and the best one was ascending from a depth with on lungful of air. It was strange because as you ascend the air in you lungs expands so you can keep breathing for absolutley ages without running out of air. The course was run so well, becasue it was low season we had a master diver between the 3 of us, as well as an instructor, so we could master all the skills to perfection, one of the best was the 'James Bond' water entry, where you flip over backwards and land in the water tank first!

After our diving course it was New Year. We went to a busier beach further along to celebrate it, and found a brilliant spot in a bar on the beach sat at the shoreline. The whole night there were the locals doing fire poi and fire stick - I've never seen anything like it in my life, they were so skilled and fast. We sat there all night drinking a bucket (Im not sure my liver would ever take that again!), talking to other travellers and watching the fireworks - one of the best New Years for both of us... though the next day we were'nt feeling that bright!

As we enjoyed our open water course so much, we decided to do our advanced course. Not only are we now addicted to diving, we're hoping to do some in Australia, so it would help to have our skills down. This course consisted of 5 dives - a bouyancy dive (to help us to control how you hover off the bottom of the sea using your lung capacity alone to go up and down over the coral), a navigation dive, a deep dive (so that we could go to depths of 30m), a naturalist dive (so we could recognise different fish), and a night dive. At this point the visability was getting pretty bad, but considering it was just at the end of monsoon season it was expected really. This made the first 2 skill dives a little harder, but Elliott and I passed with flyng colours in our group. The naturalist dive was really cool, except at the end when we swam towards a massive colourful fish, and only realised when quite close that it was a trigger fish. As they eat coral they have a pretty nasty set of sharp teeth, and when they have they're trigger up it means theyre in aggressive mode - which it was, but we were fine! The deep dive was fun but very different, at those depths there were'nt any fish, and as you decended you felt like you were going forever and it gets darker as you go along. The night dive was something completely different altogether. Normally its amazing and you see some of the bigger fish like the barracuda and the rays, but the visability was so poor, you were basically following the persons fins in front of you with your torch. Occasionally, you'd nearly bump in to a wall of coral... oopes theres a spiky sea urchin/wall of coral. The coolest part of it was when you turned off your torch underwater so it was pitch dark, and wave your hands in front of your face, it looked like tiny fireworks as the bio-illuminescence lit up. We made it through fine, passed our course and surfaced under the stars.

During our advanced course we decided to go to the Full Moon festival on Koh Pha ngang. We had high expectations for it as it sounded like one of those must do things you had to do, but it was a bit of a let down. We took the night catamarn to the island, which took an hour, and then on to the beach. The beach had several massive bars pumping out he music - unfortuantely the speakers werent very well placed so all the music kind of blended in to one. It was definately for the tourists, everyone stumbling around drinking buckets - there was even a sleeping area for people who drunk a bit too much. It probably a nice beach to start with, but it was soon littered and disgusting. All the blokes were pissing in the sea, even though there was a sand bar trapping the water, and then some stupid drunk people decide its a good idea to swim in it! Gross!! As our night dive was the next night we didnt drink much, but as our ferry left at 7 the next morning we were pretty tired, and so found some chairs to sit on. Some cheeky bloke tried stealing our bags from under the stairs we were sat on!! We didnt have anything except water in it and i caught him, but unbelieveabe non the less. The night wasn't as good as we had hoped but we still had a good time - and were completely sober in preparation for the end of our advanced course.x