Diving paradise of Similian Islands

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As we both learned how to dive in South East Asia and knew about its wonders, we already had planned to go for few days diving in the region. We first wanted to go to Malaysia as there is a very nice train ride from Singapore and the islands are exceptional. Unfortunately winter is not the diving season for the east coast (the best to go for diving), so we decided to go to the west and finally chose Similan islands in Thailand.

We found a cheap plane ticket to Phuket with Tiger Airways, grrr... Phuket is ‘The’ beach destination in Thailand, that's why you can find cheap plane tickets, but that also means that you're not alone on an undiscovered tropical beach... However we managed to escape from the resort tourists by staying in the town and booking a 4 days leave aboard diving trip. This means spending 4 days and 3 nights on a boat and spending the day diving and getting tan on the roof of the boat...

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So we spent our first day in Phuket town searching for a place to arrange our diving trip with all same same but different… After having found a place which felt good for us we then took a bike to visit one of nearby beaches to chill out and enjoy some sunshine (can you imagine the second time in 8 weeks?).

Phuket was badly beaten by the tsunami, however you can hardly see it on the beach front as everything has been rebuild quickly and tourism took back its place. The same cannot be said for underwater world, luckily it is already recovering and mainly the soft coral was hit.

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The next day we were being picked up by the minivan to take us to the pier (1,5hrs drive away) after having cruised the whole of pucket we came back again to Pucket city to then drive to the pier. This was something which slightly pissed us off as we spend 1 hour in the minivan to see that we passed our hotel by 500 meter again they could have saved us 1 hour of sleep there instead of picking us up at 6AM! After a very bumby speed boat ride we arrived just in time for our first dive of the day. The next few days we would spend on a beautiful boat with a great thai crew diving 4 times a day in search of the manta ray. After 4 days of beautiful diving I (Hugo) have to conclude I will never see a manta ray (thanks Iris) as we were not lucky. Although the Similans were great and treated us on the last dive with a 2m leopard shark we didn’t see any Manta ray. For the rest the liveaboard was really great and we were lucky with the choice made, good boat, nice food, good people (staff and guests) and beautiful diving.