Most travelers that I've talked to have been able to tell me about certain places that stole their heart, and that they ended up staying at much longer than they have meant to. Although I haven't stayed put for an extremely long amount of time, I have to say that Koh Tao is that kind of a place for me.
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| The dive boat |
I originally planned to stay a couple nights, maybe 3 or 4, and then likely head on to Thailand's Andaman coast. Instead, I stayed for 9 days!
When I got off the ferry at Koh Tao, I found myself walking beside another girl around my age who looked to be traveling alone, and who also looked like she was looking for a place to stay. We sort of looked over at each other, asked where the other was going, realized we were both traveling alone, and soon enough had decided to find a hostel together. Travelers are a friendly bunch, lemme tell you! Elise was from the Netherlands and doing a trip around the same length as me, and we ended up staying at the same hostel for the entire time we were on Koh Tao with both of us overstaying our original plans.
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| On the boat for a night dive |
As you probably knew from the title of this post, I ended up doing my PADI open water scuba diving license while on Koh Tao. The PADI open water is a very well known and well-regarded program for certifying divers, and will allow me to dive up to 18m underwater. I absolutely loved it!! I ended up doing the course with Niklas, a german friend I had met at Koh Phangan and who wanted to do scuba as well. After I finished I decided to continue on and do my advanced scuba as well, allowing me to dive to 30m, including deep dives, wrecks, night diving, etc. The thing that really made me decide to do my advanced is that with the regular open water, I would be certified to dive approximately 15% of the world's dive sites, but with the advanced that number would expand to approximately 90%, mostly because of the depth increase. I also learned a ton in the advanced course. The modules I chose were Peak Performance Buoyancy (where we went to "buoyancy world" to swim through hoops and various obstancles to really perfect the art of perfect neutral buoyancy underwater -a task that needs constant adjustment as your air is used up), Underwater navigator, Deep Diving, Wreck diving, and Night diving. The reefs were amazing, we saw so many fish and corals, and by the end I felt really comfortable and confident with all of my gear. My favourite was the night diving module. It was so dark except for our flashlights, and the reef was different somehow. Fish which hid in the day were now out and about, and it was just a rush to be on the ocean floor when it is so dark. At one point we turned off our flashlights, and stirred up these little organisms in the water which create bioluminescence. It was pretty incredible. Now I just want to adjust my trip to fit more dives in no matter what country I'm in! (Or maybe I should just change my career path from nurse to dive medic... :-P).
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| A typical evening on Koh Tao |
As for the rest of my time on Koh Tao, my days slid languously from one to the next. I fell in with a really good group of people, including Elise, and Niklas (who later moved to our hostel as well) as well as a couple more from our hostel who were there to dive as well. For most of the time I spent at Koh Tao, my days developed a nice little routine -waking up around 8 after a excellent night's sleep (our hostel had air-conditioning, plus diving is surprisingly tiring), heading out for breakfast with friends, separating to spend the day on the water, getting in multiple dives, finishing with a drink or a beer with our instructor, his friends, or friends from the hostel, or friends they had met. At night, we would usually find one of the many restaurants along the beach with large patio's stretching on to the beach. Some of these restaurants were really gorgeous, with little lights hanging in the trees and cool patios where people sit on cushions and props, instead of at a table. We would take our time with dinner, check our email on someone's ipad, lay around and play cards, or go further down the beach to watch the fire dancers. Not much drinking though -it doesn't mesh well with dives the next day. It was the most relaxing, nice time, and we were blesed with good weather. I was so sad to leave, but I can't afford to dive every day for the rest of my life, and there is a lot more of SE Asia I need to explore. Oh well. On to the next one!
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