Diving in Koh Tao

After a brief interlude in Bangkok - during which we scoured the city for a good tailor and ordered several custom-made suits – and a rather unpleasant overnight bus, a three hour wait and then a four-hour boat ride, we arrived on the island of Koh Tao to begin our scuba adventure. Koh Tao is located off the eastern shore of southern Thailand in the Gulf of Siam. It is a beautiful little island catering entirely to tourists and almost exclusively to scuba divers. Scuba shops are as ubiquitous as restaurants here and conversations are filled with stories of shark, turtle and barracuda sightings.

Our plan for Koh Tao was to brush up our scuba skills, get comfortable with our new equipment and relax. All accomplished.

The beaches are pure white and the water is clear turquoise. We settled into a comfortable bungalow on the beach and signed up for some classes with a very reputable dive shop. We’ve been diving here for 4 days. In that time, I’ve received my advanced diving certification (bringing my level up to Edan’s) and Edan has been certified with a deep-diving specialty (he’s now certified to go down 40m while I’m only certified as deep as 30m), and he took an underwater photography class using the special case that accompanies our camera. Some of his first good shots are posted here. No joke, he actually took that shark picture – we saw lots of sharks and they were quite friendly. I highly recommend that you download the photos to your own computer so that you can open them in a lager screen. They look much cooler that way.

The visibility has been fantastic so we’ve seen some incredible stuff down there, including the sharks, blue-spotted sting rays and moray eels! We even did a night dive (this was a required element of my course) and got to see all the nocturnal fish and feeding coral that you don’t see during the day. All in all, a magical experience.

Now we’re off to the western coast where we’ve arranged a live-aboard dive cruise beginning on Oct. 23 (ending the 29th). We’ll be sailing around the Similan Islands and enjoying some of the best diving in the world.

Hope everyone is doing well! Love from both of us.