Under the sea

I always find myself writing these blogs when we’re leaving or getting to places. I guess that’s really the only time where there’s enough time to write. So appropriately, we are now leaving Koh Tao. Turned out, this place that was really a last minute decision where we would learn to scuba dive, became the place where we’ve stayed the longest so far on our trip. Five days, six nights, and nine dives later, we are now officially advanced scuba divers! Advanced meaning we can dive up to 30 metres anywhere in the world.

Although I know you’re all dying to hear about all the different types of sea life we saw, I won’t get into that so much. But it does make you think that people like us are doing all this travelling so they can see more of the world on land, when underwater, we barely know anything about it. It’s just amazing how much there is under there, and how little we know of it. The dives that did stand out were the night dive, where for a few minutes, we turned off our flashlights and swam in the dark. And with every stroke, we were able to see the phosphorescence glowing like fireflies in the water.  Our deep water dive where we dove to 30 metres was also memorable in that it was the worst condition for diving. After barely surviving the boat ride to the dive site, we descended into thrashing waves, then got tossed and turned around under water like a washing machine, and was spat back out with near collision of the ladder at the back of the boat inches from crushing our skulls. And our final dive, where we were sent into the abyss and needed to take all that we have learned and put it to use without the guiding flippers of our instructor. We came out alive, and came away with some pictures we took underwater, which hopefully at least a few turned out well.

Now we are on our long journey to Chiang Mai. It’s a three part process that will take about 2 days. We’re on the boat now to bring us to the mainland, where we will board an overnight bus to Bangkok. We’ll stay in Bangkok for the day, and then at night, we’ll take the sleeper train to Chiang Mai. So we are kissing the beaches goodbye, and hello hills and temples. It’ll be a nice change. But we always seem to want what we don’t have.