Holiday Travels Parts Two and Three: Koh Phangan and part one of Koh Tao

Chumpon was a very lovely place to start my holiday travels and I'm very thankful to Jess for hosting me and touring me around town.  I almost didn't want to leave, but I'd made plans to meet other friends on the island of Koh Phangan for the Full Moon Party and I was excited to see them.  Koh Phangan boasts the biggest Full Moon parties (along with half moon, new moon, no moon, waning gibbous moon...) in Thailand.  The beach is huge and the view of the moon is unforgettable.  I was lucky to be there for this particular full moon because it was the famed 'super moon'.  The moon was the largest it has been in 28 years, and that night, I'm tellin ya- it was very huge, and very bright!  The weather while I was on the island wasn't so great, but the sky did clear for the night of the full moon, so it made the whole night even more worth it.

I won't elaborate too much on the whole of the Full Moon party shenanigans.  To be honest, it wasn't an earth shattering experience,  but it was something I wanted to cross off my Thailand bucket list.  It's a huge party on the beach basically.  But I had a good time and kept my whits about me.  You'd probably find a better description of this event in any guidebook to Thailand.  I'm not a huge party type so I'm a bad person to describe this event.  I will say that after 4 days of rain and being around too many farangs, I was ready to get off the island and do something different.

So after 4 days of being surrounded by a lot of neon and plastic buckets, I took a ferry to Koh Tao- the northernmost island in the chain of islands on the western side of the Gulf of Thailand.  It takes about 2 1/2 hours by ferry to travel from Koh Phangan.  My plan was to do a four day open water scuba course, a little bouldering on some sweet granite boulders, and some kayaking around the island.  Part one of this 3 part plan was successful, but the latter two soon became unmanageable due to the severe rains and flood that ravaged the island for nearly 4 days straight.  I was lucky and happy to have cooperative weather for scuba, so I'll talk a little bit about that before delving into the great flood.

This was my second visit to Koh Tao.  The first time I went to the island was with Petey in the beginning of my travels in Thailand in late August.  Petey has his advanced open water scuba certification and was eager to do as much diving as he could.  Koh Tao is known as one of the best  places in Thailand to scuba dive and there must be nearly a hundred dive schools.   It is also one of the cheapest places in the world to get certified or just fun dive (the dives you go on if you are already certified are known as fun dives).  At that point I did not have any scuba experience so I tried a 'discover scuba' class where you get a little bit of instruction in a pool or shallow water first to learn about the gear and get comfortable, then in the afternoon you do a dive with your instructor.  I had a great with this trial of scuba and from experience I was excited for to come back another time when I had a little more money to take a full course to get certified.

The course consisted of watching some videos, a little bit of reading and homework, skills tests in shallow water, skills tests in deeper water, and 5 dives.  The skills include showing you can successfully inflate and deflate your bcd (bouyancy control device- the 'vest' that carries your tank), read your air gauge, take your mask off and put it back on under water, clear your mask of water, control your buoyancy, retrieve your regulator (where your air comes from) if it gets knocked out of your mouth, and resurface at a safe rate.  We also learned about what we would see under water and learned different hand signals for fish and hand signals to communicate with our buddy and instructor.  At the end of the course we were given our Scuba Schools International (SSI- the other internationally recognized scuba school aside from PADI) cards under water after we finished our last skill.  It was a fun little surprise.

Although the visibility wasn't so great at times because the weather was taking a turn for the worse, we still saw a lot of really beautiful creatures.  The underwater world is really incredible and it's pretty amazing that humans have invented a way to withstand the pressure of being submerged for so long- something that is not natural.  I saw batfish, bannerfish, angelfish, blue spotted sting rays, lots of corals and anemones, starfish, a huge and pregnant grouper, regular sized groupers, puffer fish, scorpion fish, trigger fish schools of small barracudas, and so much more.  Being underwater for such a long time (we were down for about 50 minutes on each dive) is unnerving at first, but then when you learn to control your breathing, buoyancy, and you learn about all of your equipment, the act of scuba diving is exciting, relaxing, eye opening and peaceful in a way.  Although you see lots of other divers, hear the bubbles from everyone's regulators and hear your own breathing at an amplified volume, diving to me still seemed very quiet.  It is rare to have complete and utter silence in our daily lives.  The silence of the underwater world is different from the kind of silence we might experience in a normal setting.  Being in a room without the noise from the tv, a cell phone ringing, noises from the street etc. is totally different from the type of quiet you experience underwater.  Underwater the silence is ever-present and you can feel it.  The silence added to the fact that your perspective changes completely makes for a remarkable experience.  When you're underwater, you don't only look around you and up, you have a view below you and all around you.  This feeling can also be a bit unnerving as well.  Once I got used to these feelings, I really liked it.  I was able to just float along, look at fish, reflect on all this, and continue on with observing the life of the reef.  Scuba diving is rad and I'm excited that I'm now certified and can dive anywhere else in the world within my limits, unless I want to go ahead and take an advanced open water course which would certify me to dive down to 30 meters. 

I had a great group of people in my class and we all got along really well so all in all, I really enjoyed my time diving and staying at Big Blue Diving.  I was happy to experience something different and be productive.  After my time on Koh Phangan I was eager to be a bit more active.  And now, I'm certified to dive down to 18 meters (about 60 feet).  Hooray!

The next post will be more exciting and with more photos for you to visualize the next four days of intense rain and flood.

Dive site numero uno- Twins- So named because there are two main towers underneath the water that we can swim around.  Behind this boat is a sandbar that beach goers can walk across that connects these two main islands.  There is another island behind the one on the right side.  This beach is called Ao Nang Yuang I'm pretty sure.  It's one of the only islands in the world of its kind- being connected with a sandbar like it is.  Visitors can hang out on the beach and hike around a bit- there are trails up into those sweet boulders.  On the other side of the sandbar is another dive site called Japanese Gardens.

The other side of Ao Nang Yuang- dive site- Japanese Gardens (I thought it looked like a big salad.  Huge, leafy coral everywhere you looked)

Should be the new cover photo for Lonely Planet Thailand.