10. Bans diving resort - 3 of 3. Advanced open water

When I had set off travelling it had been a goal of mine to learn to scuba dive, and I had finally achieved becoming a certified diver! I was celebrating this in "the fish bowl" along with the other few new graduates of bans diving resort. Alcohol flowed freely and at some stage I even drunkenly persuaded a girl to show me her apartment.

Our diving group celebrated our victory. I can be seen here miming the size of a fish I saw

After the visit I decided to make my way home, and staggered back to my apartment (still pretty drunk). When I got back I blearily discovered that I didn't have my key. The apartment was one large room containing 3 beds and accessed by a large french window, where I was stood, locked out. Inside I could see that the light was on, and Tony was sleeping, so I banged on the french windows, hoping to wake him.

"TONY!" I shouted.

Nothing.

I tried again, and again until about five minutes had passed with me hammering and shouting trying to rouse the slumbering lump. Eventually there was movement from an unexpected part of the apartment when the bathroom door swung open and out hopped Rob completely naked. He scurried over, clutching his tackle, unlocked the door, and scuttled back into the bathroom. I thought nothing about this, and passed out in my bed.

The next day I learned that Rob had in fact been with a lady in the bathroom, and had to stop half way through to come and let me in. Not only that but he told me the next day that they had moved things back into our room shortly after! I remembered none of this.

On my day off, very hungover, I met up with my dive buddy Jack. We jumped on his quad bike to go to a place that did mini golf. Or was it crazy golf? What is the difference? Anyway we nursed our heads and spent a few hours playing some size or sanity of golf. On the way back Jack thought it would be a laugh to see how fast the quad bike would go. The answer is very. Luckily quad bikes are quite loud, so most of my terrified screams were drowned out by the engine.

The following day heralded the start of the two day advanced diving course. I was happy to learn that the advanced course was more focused on the practical side of things and doing dives, so no more classroom boredom.

These dives were a blast. This was partly because we went to some interesting places, but also in no small part down to the fact that I was now a bit more competent underwater so felt less like I might drown at any moment. The course was highlighted by....

Wreck dive: This was a dive around a decommissioned battleship that had been scuppered near to Ko Tao fairly recently - solely for the benefit of visitors to dive around. It was fascinating to explore nonetheless.

Orientation dive: Up until this point we had always been accompanied Steve the dive master, however for this dive we were on our own. Each buddy pair made a map of the underwater terrain, then were free to randomly roam out across the reef at our leisure. Rob and I did fine, apart from when we thought we would try crossing from one reef to another, and ended up just swimming off into the open ocean where there we could see nothing but infinite blue ahead and featureless sand below. We started to get a little worried, realising that it seemed like we'd gone astray - so retraced our steps.

Night dive: This had to be my favourite of all the dives I did at Ko Tao. A group of about 4 set off at sunset with our normal gear and 2 torches. By the time we got to the dive site it was pitch black. Going down was creepy and amazing at the same time. When diving I find you  have a certain sense of weightlessness, and as it was night it was pitch black in all directions. As such it was easy for me to imagine that I was drifting in space, pulling myself along an invisible rope. After a minute or two torches started being switched on ahead, so was able to stick with the group, gradually descending until the reef eventually materialised ahead of us. It was interesting to observe the different marine life that emerged at night. It was also fun to occasionally look away from the reef and look into the complete blackness of the ocean, which gave me a very real feeling that I was floating in a void of nothingness. It only took a few second before I would feel a twinge of panic and quickly have to look back to the patches of light ahead, and realise that the world was still there.

So I would thoroughly recommend Ko Tao if you are thinking of travelling to Thailand, it might not feature as much diversity or marine life or coral as a few other places, but that is not to say that there isn't still plenty you can see. It is also relaxing to dive on an island where the diving is so common that the process has been refined to hassle free perfection. Alas my visit here came to an end, and I was to continue my island hopping trip to include Ko Samui.

9. Bans diving resort - 2 of 3

Our motorboat arrived at a giant wooden brick that was apparently the main diving vessel. We clambered aboard, and with a shiver it chugged in to life before heading out to deeper waters. In diving you always have to dive with a buddy, in case you panic or anything - they can give you a slap and tell you to pull yourself together.

That day I buddied up with an English guy called Jack, we checked our equipment over, had a final group talk and all too soon the boat arrived at the first dive site. I donned my fins and with a great deal of trepidation clumsily flapped over to the rear of the boat, and launched myself into the water.

My first dive in the sea! We weren't going deep: only 9 meters, but it felt a lot to me as I caught sight of the the dim ocean floor looming way below. As your body gets under pressure you being to feel a 'sqeeze', where the little pockets of air inside you get pressurised - especially in your ears. You have to equalise this pressure, by blowing on your nose, swallowing or wiggling your jaw about. And so that is how I descended: inching down the buoy rope frantically swallowing, waggling my jaw about and blowing on my nose. I took so long that Steve the instructor, and all the dive master helpers swam over to check that I was ok. We eventually all made it to the bottom, and practiced all of the techniques we had learned in the pool. I didn't really get a chance to look about too much - focused as I was on not messing up.
Tony seemed to be coping fine, despite the fear he had told us about yesterday. However that evening he did confess he'd found it hard, and that he wasn't sure he could finish the course. I attempted to persuade him to stick with it to the end, being that it was only 3 days, and he had already done one of them.

The next day was rather boring and contained no dives. We were just sat in classroom, learning theory.

The day after that was the last of the course. We went on a few more dives, getting familiar with how the whole diving thing worked, and to demonstrate a couple of skills that weren't too simple. The first was that I had to take all off all of my equipment and put it on again. The second was a simulation of being out of air. Or to put it another way: drowning. To do this I had to take off my mask, and Steve the instructor turned off my air. Very suddenly I could not breathe at all. I frantically batted at him to let him know I was suffocating, and he let the air flow again. Thinking about it I'm not sure if that part was actually part of the course at all, and was in fact just Steve getting some twisted kick out of torturing us.


This was probably the hardest part of the course, and to make sure that Tony could do it Steve yet again deployed Daphne the pretty dive master to do the skill demonstration individually with him. He did so admirably, even somehow managing to puff out his chest a little at the same time.
At midday we were brought back to land. That was the end of the practical side of the course. In the afternoon we sat the exam. Although to say exam would be a bit of an exaggeration. There were questions to answer, sure, with multiple choice answers - except that Daphne the dive master was in the room with us, and as soon as we didn't know an answer we asked her and she just told us. Unsurprisingly everyone passed. Nobody was more happy about this than Tony.

Rob and I had already signed up to go on to complete the advanced course as well. Tony felt that this would be a little much so did not decide to join us on that venture. The only issue was that the advanced course was scheduled to start the day after the exam. There were a few people in the same boat (pardon the pun) and everybody agreed that it was a little "full on", to start the day after. With a little persuading we managed to get Steve the instructor to let us all have the day off. He agreed, and so that meant party times ahoy.

8. Bans diving resort - 1 of 3

So my mission to learn to become a diver has come to fruition - I had arrived at ko Tao.

We arrived as dawn was breaking, and despite it being so early that there was barely enough light in the sky to see by, me and my prospective diver companions (Rob and Tony) found several people there sleepily peddling the services of various dive schools as we disembarked. I smiled and nodded non-commitally as one rep waggled a leaflet under my nose.


Tony had heard about a place so we ignored all of them and instead stated to nobody in particular that we'd like a taxi. Dutifully a man materialised in possession of a four by four pickup. We hopped in the back and the driver pulled away.
The rep that had shown me the leaflet was having none of this. As soon as he saw that we were leaving he jumped onto his scooter fired up the engine and took chase. He clutched to the side as we trundled along, handing us leaflets into the back of the pickup - we learned that he represented a dive school called Bans diving resort. We were at first dismissive, but then started to get genuinely concerned that the guy was going to disappear under the wheels of the pickup unless we agreed to at least look at Bans. So we told him that we would take a look. With that he pulled forward to the driver window and shouted some instructions to him. The pickup slowed into a u-turn which almost send the Bans rep flying into a bush, and we sped off in the opposite direction.

Bans turned out be ideal as far as I was concerned. The  small complex sprawled away from a little beach where there was a cafe, bar, and a small staging area for Bans pupils could jump onto boats and head into open water. Further back were a couple of practice pools where you would normally find some newby divers (like I was about to become) bubbling away under the surface, and finally some apartments set against a picturesque forested backdrop. We haggled our way into a palatial little suite for the three of us, full diving course for a really good price.

view from the beach at bans. Couple of dive boats off in the distance there

The next day heralded the beginning of the course. We had all signed up to both open water and advanced courses, which means we'll be qualified to dive to 18 and then 30 metres. During sign in we are instructed to meet at a block of onsite classrooms. So first thing the next morning we all headed to it. We meet our classmates, a group of around 8 people. We met our instructor - an awesome dutch guy in his fifties wearing a permanent grin and preceding most of his sentences with "alright guysh! ... "; and we also met a couple of the dive masters - who would be helping us out: Tom and Daphne.
We had a little overview and then watched an incredibly patronising video voiced by an American (Apparently it is frowned upon to remove all of you equipment for no reason whilst under water? Who knew). After that we were herded to one of the practice pools to learn how to don our various bits and bobs before all clumsily waddling out into the shallows.
We spent the next while learning the tricks of the diving trade, like how to not immediately drown and that kind of thing. Tony was having a little trouble with some of the methods we had to learn. He had told me yesterday that he had a slight fear of the water - and doing his open water diving course was a way to conquer this. So Steve (the instructor) had a solution for this, which was to pair him off with Daphne. Now Daphne was pretty, young, curvy and had a soft Italian accent. Tony: who seemed to have a soft spot for her amd didn't dare to be seen to lose face - so Steve the instructor's plan worked perfectly. Tony was up to speed in no time.

There was another day of "confined water" skills (in other words swimming around in circles in a pool), where everyone was itching to go out in the ocean; and before we knew it another beautiful day dawned in Thailand. we headed down to the jetty to board a massive motorboat. I was shitting my pants a little bit at this point, as I picked out the right size wetsuit and assorted equipment. I dumped it into a big bag and clambered onto the motor boat. Where is my tank of air? I suddenly thought in a panic.

"Alright guysh!" Announced Steve the instructor "We're going to head out to a few dives sitesh now, We are meeting up with a bigger boat we'll be diving from which has our air tanks and you'll do your buddy checksh there."*

"Whew" I think I said out loud.

With that the engines roared into life and we sped off towards our first ever ocean scuba dive!

*You may have read this in the voice of Sean Connery, and you would be right to because he didn't sound dissimilar

7. The Night Bucket

Why travel to Ko Tao, I hear you ask? Well it's a diving factory set up to transform soft foreigners like me into hardened underwater explorers with ruthless efficiency. That's what I'm after because I want to learn. It's also a picturesque bump in the gulf of Thailand so quite nice to look at above and below water.

Some things that happen when you are a massive cheapskate and spend hours shopping around to save about a fiver on an overnight ferry ticket:

 The trip is likely to be pretty uncomfortable, you probably wont sleep, It may take five times as long as it should... I forgot all of that as I painstakingly tried to hunt down the best possible deal on a ticket. Eventually I did, from a tourist office, which also inexplicably doubled as a tattoo parlour. In hindsight I probably should have taken that as a warning. I bought the ticket from a swarthy looking Thai man, who gave me a handful of scraps of paper in which, I was informed, I would find the tickets I needed. I then packed my things and was on my way.

I spent the day travelling first from Phi Phi to the mainland on one of two ferries fleeing an epic looking storm; and then Eastwards to Surat Thani where I would pick up a night ferry to Ko Tao. There were about 10 coaches* involved in getting me there. For some reason when we changed to the final coach me and a couple of other English guys were afforded the privilege of being seated in the VIP section - which was on the "ground floor" of the bus with padded leather seats and a private toilet. All of the luggage also appeared to be in there with us. So besides having to constantly readjust bags to avoid being buried, it was pleasant enough. I learned that the other guys: Rob and Tony were headed to the same island to do some diving as well. They too hadn't bothered to book anything other than the ferry trip yet.

As night fell we arrived at what looked like a dock in Surat Thani. The three of us were unduly hoofed out, apparently being the only people getting this ferry. Although where said ferry was did not seem clear - because as the bus drove off we could only see a few beaten up old cargo ships. I scrutinised the  crumpled scrap of paper with a number stamped on it that was apparently my ticket. It took a moment to realise that the number did correspond to one of the boats. Toward the end of the line of rickety old buckets in front of us there was one bizarre looking sort of cargo ship that looked as if someone found noahs ark, shrunk it down, painted it blue and then attacked it with a hammer for a few days.

We boarded via a rickety plank and made our way to the passenger area. The part we were to sleep in seemed as if it had been bolted on to the top of the boat as an afterthought. It was one large room, with a roof so low that we had to stoop down to get in. It was about 70 feet long, and about 13 wide with 35 tiny mattresses along each side, about an inch thick and made of some shiny plastic material. Essentially this area was ideal for a small Thai person who wasn't too bothered about getting any sleep. There were a few passengers already on a few of the mattresses. We took 3 spaces next to each other, and promised to avoid any accidental spooning.

After a short while the place had filled up completely. Despite the mattresses being tiny it didn't stop a whole family happily cramming themselves onto one. I still hadn't seen a single member of crew - but assume they existed because eventually the old bucket chugged into life and we were away. We passed the time playing cards and drinking a couple of Changs we has managed to pick up from a 7/11 before boarding. Everyone eventually dozed off so I went to explore a little. At the rear of the boat some stairs lead down to a single covered low deck at the back of the boat. There was a toilet backing onto the ships galley (a couple of tin pots and a tiny gas stove). I could see through to the cargo section and get my first glimpse of the crew, a shadowy figure who gave me a conspiratorial nod before withdrawing out of sight. I sat on the edge of the boat to finish my beer - watching the dark waters slide by, before heading up to fail to sleep for 8 hours.

* Well it was only a couple, but felt like more somehow

6. Ko Phi Phi

Rabies, Liver poisoning and sunburn are possibly some of the ailments I got on Ko Phi Phi.

Being still a bit monsoon-y there were some evil heavy black clouds that chased the ferry over to the island. The island quickly grew from a blip on the horizon to a beautiful looming paradise. We arrived, and hurriedly scampered off the boat to take shelter before the rain hit. To my delight I discovered a guy holding a sign with the name of the accommodation I had pre-booked on it - The tropical garden bungalows. They had put on a taxi! However a thing I immediately discovered about Ko Phi Phi is that there isn't really any motorised transport. As such my taxi was in fact a wheelbarrow.


My backpack was unceremoniously dumped into the taxibarrow - and we walked to the "tropical garden bungalows". It lived up to its name, bustling as it was with vegetation and animal life. The animal life consisted of either cats, or cages containing assorted hooting and sqwaking birds of prey. Once I got to my bungalow found that there was one such cage a few feet from my door with a rather animated hawk screeching and flapping away incessantly in it. This made me a little concerned about getting any sleep.

I headed out to explore the little town of the island. It was thronged with holiday makers. A typical tourist seemed to be about 25, European, and too drunk to walk. That night I got to know a few such people and went round some of the multitude of shops, tattoo places, restaurants and bars that the town boasts. I also discovered a talent for "beer pong" I didn't realise I possessed.

winning at beer pong

The night concluded, I had become suitably inebriated and so stumbled my way back to the hut. I bid goodnight to the my pet hawk (still making a racket),and discovered a little cat on my front door step. How cute! I thought as it hissed and spat at me. I leaned down to tickle its belly, and it rewarded me with a massive scratch on my hand.

wanted: this cat

The next day I was horrified by my wound. Was that just a grumpy cat... or did it have a more sinister ailment? Could it have even been [dun dun DUUN] rabies? Well I was hungover and paranoid, so decided it was definitely rabies. With that I headed straight to a doctor to get a booster shot. I found one, and he proceeded to stick me with more needles than an acupuncturist - just to be sure I was ok.

With my wallet considerably lighter, and my arm considerably sorer, I decided to go and shop around for some new digs that were a bit cheaper and preferably did not feature birds of prey with verbal diarrhea. I managed to quickly find some nearby, and moved in.
I had a few party loving neighbors. On one side were some heavily accented Essex girls called Chelsea and Chantelle. They appeared to be indefinitely stationed on Phi Phi working in one of the bars. On the other side were Lee and Lisa - a couple of holidaying work-mates from London.

That evening me and the Londoners visited a number of bars and beachfront places. The first was one called the "reggae reggae bar". As soon as we got to there my friends lined up 10 buckets of booze, intent on drinking Phi Phi out of alcohol. The bar boasted daily Muai Thai boxing matches. I hadn't seen one before, so was keen to see what it was like. I think that it was the second time that one of the boxers did a double backward somersault after being punched that I got an inkling the matches might have been a tiny bit jazzed up with some amusing pantomime.
I yet again drifted quickly into drunkenness and the rest of the night is a fractured blur of getting bitten by mosquitos; watching fire juggling and failing to dance.

The following day in order to nurse my hangover I decided to take in some of the scenery of the beautiful Ko Phi Phi. The morning was a boat tour on which I nursed my head and struggled to keep my breakfast down. It had a few stops, on one I watched some fat monkeys on a beach getting fed pineapple by tourists. Another stop was at Phi Phi Lai - the little island where they filmed "the beach". I didn't spot Leo.
In the afternoon I decided to head to a view point up one of the hills, which proved to be a foolhardy mistake given my hangover. I very nearly died from a mixture of hyperventilation and dehydration climbing up (what felt like) the hundred billion stairs to the top. The view was spectacular though, and I could fully see the island's figure of 8 shape, with the little central town flanked by two forested hills.

 

Even though Phi Phi as big as a volkwagon and stuffed with visitors there is a lot of fun to be had on the beautiful island and it was too soon before I had to go. Despite being sad about leaving I was also excited, because I was off to join the diving factory on Ko Tao!