Similan Islands

We left Koh Tao on what should have been a short trip to the Andaman coast island of Phuket. Instead it took 20 hours. We bought a “joint ticket” from a travel agency and got on an overnight boat that took us from the island of Koh Tao to the mainland town of Suratthani, where, in theory, the other part of our ticket should have kicked in and we should have been taken by minivan across peninsular Thailand to the bridge-connected island of Phuket.
But since we seemed to be the only travellers headed to Phuket, the minivan driver decided to save himself the trouble of taking us where we were going and just drive us to a different city (Krabi) with everyone else from the boat. It took another 8 hours to correct his “oversight”, but eventually we arrived in Phuket.

We found the diveshop we had contacted earlier – Calypso Divers – without any trouble. The next day we went out on their boat to the islands of Ratya Noi and Ratya Yai for a total of four dives. The diving was terrific – mild currents, good visibility, and we took some pretty good pictures.

While the diving is great, Phuket itself leaves much to be desired. The pizza is the best in Thailand, but that's pretty much the only thing it has going for it. It has Southern Thailand island pricing (take the Bangkok price and double it, at least) without island charm. It's loud, garish, and touristy. It's too pricey and commercial for backpackers, and too plebeian for the jet-set. It's the geographic equivalent of a fat, middle aged drunken white guy in a hawaiian shirt with his belly button showing.

Still, the diving makes up for it. We just spent 6 days on board a liveaboard dive boat – the Jonathan Cruiser. Owned by a Swede named Tomas and run by a Swedish instructor named Mattias and a Thai dive-master named Yay, the boat was a terrific time. We met four lovely English kids, a terrific Frenchman who is a phenomenally experienced diver and an old Bali hand (gave us two pages of tips and maps), and a very nice Finnish woman.

Dive boats are simple: sleep, eat, dive. When you're diving you burn a lot of energy keeping warm. Water is a very efficient conductor of heat when compared to air, so keeping your body at 37 degrees even when the water around you is a balmy 30 degrees still takes quite a great deal of energy. The consequence is that you can eat big meals often, pretty much after each dive. We had pounds of eggs, bacon, and toast for breakfast, buckets of thai food and western dishes for lunch and dinner, and even a snack in between.

For the divers out there, this is what diving is meant to be. Great vis, great currents, phenomenal macro life, and even a few pelagics. It's one of those situations where you don't know where to look, you keep spinning in ecstatic circles, taking it all in at the same time. The best stuff is all between 10 and 30 metres, so no technical diving skills are needed to access the best sites. The deepest we hit was 32.5 metres, and that was just to check out a shark. We did four dives at Richelieu Rock (use google earth), and I think it's the best site I've ever dived. Despite seeing no whale sharks, no rays, and only one leopard shark (and it was resting at bottom) the diving was still phenomenal. On our only wreck dive of the trip I spent a good 15 minutes bonding with an octopus at 20 metres. I looked at him, he looked at me, and there we were. For quite a while. We also managed to arrive in the middle of cuttlefish mating season, we've seen a few of them and Jenna took a great video of what appears to be a male humping a female while two more females hover and watch. And we've been told that there is only better to come – Bali, Flores, Komodo, and Rinca are apparently good enough to make you cry.

For those of you who don't dive, I can't even begin to describe how great it is. The pictures won't do it justice, it's one of those things you just have to do to understand. As noted above, we did take some half decent pictures. Unfortunately, posting them is proving difficult. We'll try to post a few more small ones, but the big stuff will probably have to wait until we get home and have oodles of time. We'll try to post a few small pictures now, and perhaps get the cuttlefish video onto Youtube. I'll update again with links as soon as this is all done.