Koh Tao, Thailand - Diving!

We travelled south to the island of Koh Tao with Lomprayah, a travel company that operate a fleet of buses and ferries so that backpackers can easily travel around Thailand at a reasonable price. We took the overnight bus from Bangkok and arrived in Koh Tao at 8.45am. We came to this island for one reason, for Ashley to to do his diving accreditation. Koh Tao is second only to Cairns in Australia for the number of diving courses taken each year. It is famed as being pretty much the cheapest place in the world to learn to dive.

Ash set about wandering the island looking for the best dive centres (of which he spent about 5 hours doing so!!) and settled on Chic (as in sheek) Divers. He started the course that evening and 5 days later he had his Open Water and Advanced qualifications. He can now go anywhere in the world and pay to hire the equipment and boat space and go on fun dives with a guide.

The diving and snorkelling here is reasonable, but we have been totally spoilt by the experience of the Maldives. Nothing has even come close to the visibility and variety of marine life there. Ash has seen a turtle, multiple sting rays, eels and many many tropical fish. However we also intend to visit some better dive spots as we continue our travels around South East Asia.

There are several projects going on around the island to restore the reefs, including a turtle hatchery!

Koh Tao is such a relaxed island and we decided to stay a lot longer than originally planned to just have some time to rest in one place for a while. It gets tiring moving every couple of days!

We hired a scooter to get around and spent the days exploring the beaches, snorkelling and drinking cider. Just what we needed!

Ashley decided jumping off a really big rock into the sea was a good idea.

He jumped from two points on the rock, one at 6m and one at around 9m! He seemed to think it was fun, whilst I watched on from the beach in terror certain he was going to come back injured. He did cut his foot on some coral but that was pre jump so I'm not sure it counts... I chastised him anyway :)

We spent many nights just watching the sunset from the beach.

We are leaving tomorrow, Monday 10th October, to get a ferry to Surat Thani on the mainland and then a flight to Karibo and Boracay Island in the Philippines just in time for Ashley's birthday where he has even more cliff diving planned.... *gulp*

Next post should be a shorter wait... See you in the Philippines!