Koh Tao: Well deserved island time

A warning to begin my long delayed new blog, addressed at those with a short attention span, either natural or self induced.... this entry is void of any pictures.  Let me explain  The day after arriving to the island of Koh Tao in the Gulf of Thailand, a beautiful sunny day, we had decided to rent motorbikes and snorkels and go exploring some different bays around the small island.  The first bay that we came to was a nice arched inlet with beautiful palms along the length of the shore all the way down to the clear water shimmering in the bright sun.  I pulled out my camera to start snapping some pictures and to my dismay my camera wasn't working for me.  All I got was vertical lines on my screen and nothing resembling the scenery.  After looking into it, the lines result from either "impact or water damage" both of which the camera has seen it's fair share of over the past months.  And thus, I was doomed to spend an absolutely wonderful two weeks on Koh Tao without getting to exercise my shutter addiction at all.   But after the little camera withdrawl passed, I enjoyed just being there, not trying to capture every sunset or beautiful landscape.  Just enjoying the moment instead of trying to photograph the moment.  That being said, I bought myself a new camera as soon as I passed through Bangkok again, after Koh Tao...

But now I'm already getting ahead of myself and I haven't even really started yet.  I arrived on Koh Tao around May 10th, having left Laos and re-entered Thailand.  I ended up taking a 13hr train ride from a city near the border (Uban) to Bangkok in a 3rd class car with a kiwi chick and a Finnish dude, packed tight, surrounded by Thai familys.  Good fun.  I managed to get away with only spending one night in Bangkok, just enough time to pass through, mail some stuff home, and buy a ticket out.  Bangkok is alright, but after being in laid-back Laos for a month I wasn't really in the mindstate for the chaos of a multi-million person city...  I took an overnight bus south, and then a  big ferry boat to Koh Tao.  Koh Tao is the smallest of the 3 main islands that are off the thai coast in the Gulf of Thailand, the other two being Koh Pangang, and Koh Samui.  I chose Koh Tao because I had heard that it was the least developed of the three islands, meaning fewer tourists and fewer big resorts, and also because it had the best options for scuba diving.  It certainly is a lovely place, but 'The Beach' it was not...  There were still pleanty of tourists, of both the cool and the obnoxious variety, and also a handfull of proper backpackers too.  It was by far the most expensive place that I'd been to on my trip so far, not that it'd be expensive by home standards but it was a hell of a lot pricier that many of the beautiful, budget friendly places I've found along the way.  But I'm not gonna complain about it, I knew it'd be as such before going, and it's the price you pay to have a little bit of paradise and get to dive in some of the most dramatic waters in the world.

In the two weeks that I spent on the island I took two scuba diving courses.  The first was my basic PADI Open Water certification, which was a 3 1/2 day course, learning the basic skills, both in classroom setting and in water.  It was actually pretty damn funny having a textbook and homework in the middle of my trip, and it took a little motivation to actually sit down and get the rusty braincells firing again... but it all started working eventually.  After that first course I was certified to a depth of 18 meters, but there's a hell of a lot of really cool stuff in the waters off of Koh Tao that hangs out a bit deeper than 18meters (namely Black Tip Reef Sharks) and I wanted to go deeper.  So after a couple free 'fun dives' that I got with my course, I decided to go ahead and do my Advanced Open Water, which is another 2 day course with 5 more dives involved, to a max depth of 30 meters.   The company that I was diving with was a nice smaller one (there are over 20 companies of the 8km island, big business!) and my instructor was a cool Dutch guy.  The advanced course involves your choice of 5 different dives, of which I did: Deep Dives (30m), multilevel dive, underwater navigation, a night dive, and a DPV( I'll explain in a minute).  They were all really great, with lots of beautifully colored fish and coral all around, though no sharks :-(   but my favorites were the night dive and the DPV.  A Diver Propulsion Device (DPV) is basically an underwater scooter (think Bond cruicing underwater in old school scuba gear).  It normally cost an extra US$ 25 to get to play on the DPV's but my instructor had just bought 3 new ones that he hadn't used yet and we got to 'test' them...  I told you he was a good guy.  Being pulled along by the quiet handheld little motors, it was like a stoney cruise through schools of fish, large and small, and at the same time you can do barrel-roll type manuvers and all with barely moving a muscle.  Pretty sweet!  The night dive was great too.  Just three of us, jump into the water just as the sun was setting in a nice pink climax, and turn on our flashlights and swim around at 14m in the pitch black with only a narrow spot light to look around.  We also turned the lights off at the bottom and enjoyed looking up at the moon and stars back up through that 14m of water.  The other cool thing with the light off was the bio-luminicent plancten, which emits little florscent green flashed when you agitate it by pushing the water around.  An all around surreal experience to say the least...

Once I finished my advanced course I could have easily been convinced to just go right in for my Dive Master and stay put for awhile, but realistically I didn't have the money for it, and plus I'm still very excited about the trip I have layed out in my mind in front of me.  So I spent a few more days lounging away the hours on Koh Tao and then decided to hit the road.  On first arriving in Koh Tao I had met up with a couple Irish girls I'd me in Laos and through them I'd made a nice group of friends that I was having a lot of fun with for the first few day that I was on the island.  But by the time I was done with my courses, the girls had left the island.  The kids that I had made the best friends with were still on the island but they were working towards the Dive Master, and occupied a lot of the time with that.  So if I wasn't going to be doing my Dive Master I knew it was just best for me to hit the road again and find my way toward something new...

And so I headed out of Koh Tao, blew through Bangkok in one night, and found my way to a different Thai isle, Koh Chang, on the east coast of Thailand, very near the Cambodian border.  It is actually in Koh Chang where I now sit, having spent another rough day, hammock swinging with a book in my lap, body surfing, and drinking a ungodly number of fruit shakes.  It's a great place, as long as you don't get nailed on the dome by falling coconuts (bigger killer than the ocean...)  but that's all another story for the next time.

Hope everybody is happy and healthy!

Evan