After the Christmas drinks, followed by a day of hangover fun on boxing day, we had the following day to get acquainted with scuba diving! We met our group of Linda, Ally, Sweaty (Kris) and Ted, and our well sound instructor called Guy, had a rather tedious afternoon of watching very cheesy diving videos, a bit of dive theory, and getting to know what we would be expecting. This was followed by a could of drinks with our team, then a fairly early night considering we had to be back up at 8 for more video watching and our exam!
We sat through the cheesy videos again, did some last minute revision, and sat the exam. Roz did a sterling job with 88% but i was teachers pet with 100%!! Get in! After this we got to go diving for the first time! Even if it was in a swimming pool... We practiced assembling equipment, breathing underwater, mask clearing, and regulator removal and finding. It is amazing how hungry this can make you, so we heading down the road to a Korean barbecue, which basically consists of all you can eat meat and noodles, and a mini barbie on the table in front of you and you just keep on cooking as much as you want! It was genius!! So with a belly full of meat we rolled down the hill and had another early night, as next day we had to be up a 7am!!
Day 3 of scuba training was into the sea! So after a quick briefing we got on the boat and headed for our first dive site, called twin peaks. We were heading down to 12m today and going through more practicing of skills underwater including buoyancy control, mask clearing, fin pivots and equalizing the pressure in our ears. After that we went for a quick swim around the coral, saw loads of fish and even a moray eel! Another dive in the afternoon was much the same, but more swimming and fish spotting! Same same again in the evening with food and sleep!!
The final day of diving was just a half day, with 2 more dives but this time down to 18m... it's weird but it feels a lot deeper than that when you look up and see people way up over head swimming above you! We had a camera man with us today so he would film us playing around underwater, practicing our final manouvers and swimming with fish! We saw blue spotted stingray, boxfish, barracuda and loads of others! That night we watched our video and was going to buy one but for 50 quid we could afford, we decided to buy one between the group and copy it!! So that was it, we are now qualified divers!!
The next day was new years, so we had a well deserved lie in, met up with Clare and Ed who we met in Chiang Mae, and headed over to Koh pha ngan for the full moon party!! The island was absolutely heaving with partiers, but after fighting our way through the crowds we bought the obligatory glow paint and started adorning our faces! You can see the photos we took on flickr (link from this page top left) and you'll see how messy we got! After earning a couple of beers painting randoms, we headed to the beach for the carnage, and managed to avoid the special buckets (laced with magic mushrooms!!) and danced like loons until the countdown began! Fireworks were explodign everywhere and it really was a sight to behold! We carried on partying for a couple more hours then somehow managed to find a quiet spot for a quick nap, before the ferry took us back to Koh Tao. And rest...! After a shower of course!
After new years, more beaching, and we have now decided to not bother with the rest of the Thai islands, cus Koh Tao was so amazing and have opted to head back north and spent our next month through Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam!! And so right now we are waiting for our night boat back to the mainland and into another adventure!!
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