Becoming a diver

Me the new diver and Weitske my instructor, the freakily tanned and skinny one
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After a gorgous sleep on the night train I arrived in Surat Thani and was shuttled into buses to take all the westerners to the pier, where we were shuttled into boats.  I got the feeling that this is a well worn travel route!  The boat was full of 12 year olds going to the full moon party on the island next to Ko Tao.  Ok they may have been 18, almost.

I arrived in Ko Tao and booked into a dive course, disappointed to find out that I had arrived 1 hour too late to start that day.  So there was nothing to do but lie on a beach for the afternoon, and the next morning, how terrible!

Ko Samui (its much nicer when the tide is in, which only happened at night when I was there)
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Because of the party Ko Tao was very quite for the whole time I was there, and I had the dive instructor all to myself for personal tuition.  This was just as well, as in my first dive I think I breathed more water than air, and felt sick so had to abort it early.  You are also supposed to be able to control your height in the water by how inflated your lungs are - but I just didn't get it and kept popping up to the surface.  My instructor told me to re-read the section of the manual on bouyancy - I thought, bouyancy wasn't my problem, I need a section on not being bouyant!

The next dives went much better, and we went to some cool dive sites with lots of coral and fish and I was signed off as a diver with no worries.

As the beaches on Ko Tao weren't all that nice, I decided to go to Ko Samui next to see what it is like there.  It is a 2 hour boat ride from Ko Tao, and I arrived in time to find a bar to watch the All Blacks defeat France.

I was dropped off at the main beach on the island, a very beautiful sandy beach curving for miles with picturesque off shore islands.  The only problem was that most of the beach was taken up by flash resorts, which made me very envious of the people lounging around the pool or on deck chairs by the sea.  I decided that Ko Samui wasn't the place for me (not much fun with no one to rub sunscreen on your back for you) and left again after one night to head down south to Malaysia.