After a hectic day and a half of travel, going from minibus > Plane > Taxi > Overnight Train > Bus > Boat....we got to the island of Koh Tao in the gulf of Thailand. This was a very small island that was only about 21 kilometers around. The island is known for its diving, and that is the reason that we came down. We found a nice dive shop that offered us 4 free nights accomodation if we signed up for their Advanced open water course. We took them up on the offer, and signed up for the 5 dive course to get our advanced diver certificate, since we had just gotten our basic certificate in Vietnam. Our hotel was on a beautiful beach, even if the room was roasting hot with no A/c. It had to be close to 98 degrees during the day. Our first two dives were the navigation and buoyancy dives, which are the more technical dives of the advanced course. They were easy enough, and we saw some great fish and corals. The water clarity was much, much clearer than in Vietnam. The next two dives were our deep dive which we went to 30 meters, and our fish identification dive. The deep dive turned out to be a bust, because our instructor got lost and we went off course and didn´t get to the coral that was supposed to have a bunch of sharks and fish. He was very upset, and ended up feeling so bad that they let us have two more dives the next day, so we could do another deep dive and actually see something. That night we went on our night dive. This is a completely different experience than a day dive, and was by far one of the best of the 7 dives we did. The colors on the coral at night are much more livid than in the day, and all the corals come out. Some of the people on our dive had a barracuda hunting over their shoulder, using their flashlight to hunt by. The barracuda snatched a fish from right under their light as they shined it on a fish. The next day we went back to do another deep dive, and it turned out that this was our favorite dive by far. There were big bull sharks that would swim withing 5-10 ft. of us, and were very curious. We also saw huge schools of barracuda, and some giant grouper that were about 5 ft. and around 300lbs.
After the dives we spent the next two days just laying around the beach, and getting a tan(massive burn)! The last night we went out to the bars, and ended up meeting up with a big group of people from the dive shop who were celebrating one of the instructors birthdays. After the bar they told us to follow them to a suprise for the birthday boy. They had reserved some room at the Thai lady boy Cabaret! Although skeptical at first, this ended up being absolutely hillarious. Some of them were pretty convincing....some were not! We had a group of about 25, and at the end they pulled up some of the guys, luckily not me, and made them dress up and dance with the lady boys to YMCA! It was a great time!
Anyway, that was the last stop in South East Asia, and next we headed back to Bangkok, via Boat, Train, Bus. We had one day in Bangkok, and we went back to the weekend market, and went to a Muay Thai fight the last night.
That puts an end to Asia, and the next morning we headed to the airport for our Bangkok > Hong Kong > NYC flights.
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