Diving in Koh Tao

After our 5^th day there, Tomi and Brad and the kids had to catch their flight home, so Beth, Chad and I took a speed boat to Koh Pha Ngan (70 Baht) and a slow boat to Koh Tao (150 Baht), the northernmost, smallest, and least developed of the three islands.

There was no doubt Koh Tao was a dive center, as there were over 20 dive shops on the tiny island, and not much of anything else. Every guesthouse was connected to a dive shop, and visa versa. As soon as we got off the ferry we were attacked by what seemed like hundreds of touts and drivers. We barged right through and found a restaurant where we left the bags with Beth as per our “formula”. When we came back to the landing area, everyone ignored us as if we were natives – Chad and I had to celebrate with high 5s! We checked out a few dive shops (most of them “too cool” and unfriendly), and eventually chose Big Blue Divers, which turned out to be the first dive shop on the island. Collusion aside, all of the dive shops have agreed to charge the same prices for dives – 1400 for 2 dives, 3600 for 6 dives (2 days), and 1900 Baht for a 3 dive trip. Most outfits had 2 trips scheduled every day: 2 dives in the morning, and 2 in the afternoon, so you could pick and choose when and where you dove. We stayed at the bungalows attached to Big Blue Divers (150 Baht) which were great, but we could have paid 150 Baht virtually any place on the island, as the previous week’s bad weather had scared off a lot of people.

If you needed to buy anything on Koh Tao, you had to see Mr. J, as the signs all said. Mr. J was a Chinese Thai who owned a shop just south of the jetty, and had about a dozen signs tacked to virtually every tree – this guy was hilarious – he wanted our business. He did laundry, had a (crap) restaurant, sold everything (books, clothes, film etc), rented kayaks and snorkeling equipment, and even did Vietnamese visas (although that seemed a little shady on such a small island!) I asked Mr. J if he bought used books from people and he replied “I buy…” - he proceeded to squeeze a plastic frog that made a high pitched squeaking sound – “anything”.

Our first day of dives was all right – the first dive was crap, the current was way too strong, but the second dive was good. The next day, Beth decided to relax and Chad and I did an all day, 3-dive trip. The first dive was an absolute nightmare that could have ended in disaster. It was just the two of us with a young Canadian divemaster named Belinda. She seemed pretty cocky, even inviting us to try a “forward flip entry” – we weren’t interested. The current was strong, like the day before. We were diving Chumphon Pinnacle, reportedly one of the best sites in Southeast Asia and a place of many whale shark sightings. We met at the anchor line on the surface, but she decided not to use the line to go down, and instead descend freely– that was the last thing we saw for 30 frightening minutes. We descended in about 2-meter visibility water to 24 meters. When we didn’t see bottom, Chad and I looked at each other and simultaneously rolled our eyes. For the next 15 minutes we used up air at a furious rate while following our “guide” who was frantically gesturing that she was lost – no kidding. At 24 meters below the surface, you didn’t want to start losing faith in your guide, but we could both tell she was panicking. Finally, I grabbed her by the fin and motioned for someone to go to the surface, check our bearing to the mooring line, and come down again. She went up and came back down several minutes later. We began following her again, but it was painfully obvious she didn’t know how to navigate with a compass. Five minutes later, still floundering in space, Chad looked at me questioning “up?” and I nodded. He grabbed Belinda and motioned “up” but she grabbed his BCD and gestured to him not to panic. I got her attention and motioned that Chad was OK, but that it was time to go up (who was the divemaster here anyway!). We proceeded up, and after a 5-minute safety stop, we reached the surface. When we hit air, not only were we pointed away from the boat, we were what seemed like miles away from the boat. Belinda kept apologizing, saying it was the first time it had happened – it was then that I realized that had Beth, an inexperienced and not so confident diver, come with us, there could have been a serious accident. We started swimming back to the boat, with “divemaster” Belinda quickly fading behind us. When we got to within earshot of the boat, 30 minutes later, a guy on the boat asked who was behind us and we replied “that’s our divemaster”. She got to the boat 30 minutes later – almost an hour and a half after starting our dive. As I think back on that day, I realize that we were lucky – lucky that we were experienced and didn’t panic, and lucky that we did not put our trust completely in Belinda - an obviously under-qualified divemaster. Thoughts of the movie Open Water also cross my mind…

They have the movie thing going in Koh Tao, much like Gili Trawangan in Lombok, and they usually had a party somewhere on the island, rotating between restaurants. Sai Ree beach had lots of good restaurants that always had catch of the day specials – you could have barbecued swordfish for next to nothing. Most of the diving staff went to the Safety Stop as they had a happy hour from 6 to 8 with 30 Baht beers.

Chad had to go back to Koh Samui to catch his flight to Bangkok, so we said our good-byes, then boarded the 300 Baht, 2-hour speedboat to Chumphon, on the mainland.

Chumphon is a city built around an old fishing village. It had been devastated by the recent flooding, and most of the stores were just beginning to reopen, with very little on the shelves. After getting our train ticket, the overnight 2^nd class sleeper for 390 Baht, we started killing time. We had 9 hours until the 9:21PM train departed.

We could have taken a minibus and arrived late the same night in Bangkok, but we had this preconceived fear (based largely on our previous semi-nightmare one-day stop in Bangkok two years prior on our way back from Phuket) of the city. So we waited. And waited. And waited. The train finally left at midnight, but it was amazingly comfortable. The lower berths (which we got) were a little more expensive, but had windows and about twice the room of the upper berths. Beth and I slept soundly with our bags at our feet, and awoke at 7:00am, as out train lumbered through the outskirts of Bangkok.