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Category — Scuba diving

Koh Tao, Thailand

by Gregory Brine

Boats at sunset silhouetteI’ll start this blog by expressing my love for Koh Tao. It’s such a beautiful, amazing and fun place that we originally planned to stay for 5 or 6 days to get our PADI certificates, but in the end, left after 12 days, completely abandoning Malaysia (so we can come back and do it another day), and going on to the Advanced diver course.

Part of our love for it was that the island wasn’t overly busy. Apparently this was due to the 2004 Tsunami, the recent problem on Koh Samui over Christmas and the full moon party taking place on neighbouring Koh Phangan. The atmosphere on the island was great, I think partly as you can’t drink and dive (no pun intended), which meant that a lot of nights out are sober affairs (and you get to see more of the day too!)

The water is so niceWe arrived in Chumphon - the mainland station - at 4am on the overnight train from Bangkok, where we met Mike who runs a fantastic dive school on the island, for the Seashell resort. Getting to the island takes around 3 hours, with the a 15minute transfer on 2 of the most packed buses I’ve ever been on! We were actually surprised that they didn’t put anybody on the roof. It was quite an intimate experience with a couple of Swedish girls.

But when you first see the island, it just make your jaw drop. It really is a tropical paradise! I’ve never been to an island so beautiful and lush! Pulling into the harbour, you pass over coral and crystal clear water, surrounding by jungle and resorts crafted into the forest and hills.

Seashell divers crewOur resort was on the beach, with our accomodation being a bungalow set back about 300 yards from Sairee beach. As part of our PADI package, we also got a discount on our room for each night of the course, plus a discount on any fun dives. The restaurant - run by Michelle, Mike’s girfriend - has a fantastic view West for the evening sunsets, as well as serving delicious food.

Then there’s the tropics… The air was around 36 to 38 degrees C, and the water 28 to 29 degrees C! It felt so good jumping into the water, walking out for 200 metres (the water is that shallow), and then swimming amonst the coral - whilst dodging the Thai long tails, which are possibly the most dangerous boats ever built!

A great part of doing our PADI course on Koh Tao is that all the confined water training is actually done in one session in the sea - not 3 sessions in a swimming pool. On the downside, the water had a lot of Plankton in it making the visibility only upto 15m and not the usual 20 to 30m the island is known for. But, on the plus side - and this is a very, very big plus - we surfaced on our 3rd open water dive to be greeted by 3 to 4 Minke Whales! They were enormous, and dwarfed our boat (which was about 10m long in itself). Sadly, I’ve got no photos of it, but it’s something I’ll remember forever, and we were the envy of a lot of the professional Scuba divers as they’ve never seen one in their whole dive career!

Upside down fish?And, being completely hooked on Scuba Diving at this point, we booked straight back in to do a few fun dives and to get our Advanced Open water certifcation. For this part of the course, we were joined by Raynard from Norway, and we all did the following dives:

  • Buoyancy skills - working on Neutral buoyancy and inverted floating (that was good fun, and gave a new twist to diving so as to speak. Also useful for photos)
  • Underwater navigation - using a compass, measuring distances and natural navigation
  • Night Dive - Now this is good! It’s like another world down there, and we got to see some blue spotted Sting Rays gliding along the bottom
  • 30m deep dive - checks if you’re susceptible to Nitrogen Narcosis (or being Narced as it’s known) Paul, our instructor told us some great stories about this. But we were all ok - although Dan needs to work on his long addition!
  • Multi-level dives - a way of calculating dives to maximise your dive time, and minimise Nitrogen absorption
  • Underwater photography - this was quite tough, but I did manage to get a few good shots in

Basically, we’re now hooked on diving and our instructor, Paul was such and enthusiastic, solid teacher - even going diving with a painful ear infection because he didn’t want to leave us halfway through our course - that we felt really helped to make even mopre enjoyable, and us better divers. But the whole staff of Seashell Divers were great, and really looked after us whenever we went out for lessons or fun dives.

Seashell divers and Sairee beachOn the rest of the island, we went snorkelling in Shark Bay - guess why they call it that - where we saw black tipped reef sharks (sorry, gave it away)! An awesome site! Oh, and there were some other fish and coral down there, but seeing sharks really pipped it for me! Although Dan claims to have been attacked by a foot long fish whilst swimming - we all think one the them fell for Dan’s number 2 haircut, and thought he looked like an easy meal. If only I’d had a camera!

Nightlife was great too - partying till the sun came up - and the people we met were all great, even running into Brendon and Kieran from Laos.

It really is a fantastic place to chill out in it’s own right. But for us the diving was the best part of the experience! I can’t recommend Koh Tao enough, and it was the highlight of Thailand for me!

Links

PADI
Seashell resort

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March 14, 2006   No Comments