"Off Shoe" in Koa Tao

Living the island dream on 21 square kilometres. Paradise has been found. Well, maybe I found it, if only it wasn't so hot. We have been residing on a tiny island in the Gulf of Thailand for the last five days. With not much to do on the island besides drink, dive and sweat, I have only been enjoying one of those activities.

The first day we arrived via ferry we enjoyed the beach and a nice lunch. Got to know our dive shop and moved hostels. Our first one had only fans. When you are sitting, not moving, under fans, and still sweating... Talk about anticipating an uncomfortable sleep. We found another clean place just down the road with air conditioning.

The diving on the island has been enjoyable, but doesn't in my mind, live up to the hype that is, "you must dive in Koa Tao!!" and justify 70 dive shops on this minuscule speck of dirt. The first two days of diving were fun because we decided to get our advanced scuba diver certification. This meant that we had homework, textbook reading and questions to answer in the evening. Our five dive tests were very different, but all fun! The first day started with navigation, where we had to make our way around the topography using fin strokes, counting seconds, and using a compass. There wasn't too much to see because we were concentrating on the tasks. The second dive was "peak performance buoyancy" where we got to play in an underwater playground complete with a concrete octopus to swim around, metal hoops to clear and concrete tunnels to pass through. I felt I was in a (very slow moving) circus act. The last dive of the day was in the evening and was my first night dive!! I was anticipating magnificence because of all the hype about how the animals are different at night. In terms of that, we saw some barracuda hunting, but that was about it. What was super fun was watching the light change. When we got in the water the sun was setting and the water was pink, when we decended, there was still a lovely pink tinge to the water. And slowly the water became darker as the sun completed setting. It was fun to use the dive torch and see the coral as different colours (without the sunlight being filtered by the water) but it was disconcerting to imagine what monsters lurked in the depths beyond the couple of feet my flashlight beam could reach. Spoiler: we didn't run into any. The next day was our final two dive tests where we did a deep dive to 30 metres, and I ran out of air quickly. The bottom was fun, as it was covered with anemone and anemone fish. The last dive was a computer assisted multilevel dive, which really just meant that we gradually made our way up to the surface, sticking to certain depths each time. Another day we did two "fun" dives and one WAS super fun. It was out to a U.S. owned WW2 gunner ship. It had been purposefully sunk, but it was really neat to explore as it still had a bunch of it's guns, and many fish had taken up residence on the deck, including a very funny faced sweet lips in the wheelhouse, who made a very silly face, and puffed up his gills when I pointed at him. The visibility was good, and it was sobering to imagine the ghosts of the men who once worked on the boat running round amongst the fish. On that dive my air ran low enough to that I got to used a drop tank during the safety stop. That was an adventure because it was attached to the boat above, which was going uuup and dooown in the waves, and therefore so was the tank, and therefore, so was I. LOL. The other dive we did was to the same location as we did the night dive and it was interesting to see how the underwater looked differently in the day. Some of the more interesting things that I spotted on all of the dives included the barracuda, a few blue-spotted-ribbon-tailed rays, a gorgeous orange and white nudibranch, pretty coral, lots of colourful coral fish. The most adrenaline pumping part of the last dive was Krys being chased by a triggerfish who deemed she was in his territory, it gave a good chase, while nipping at her fins until happy we moved far enough away. Always one for adventure, she feels more justified in her dislike of fish now. Sorry there aren't any underwater pictures to share, right now. They are on the GoPro and I don't have a mini SD card reader.

The other thing that we did on the island was some very very hot walks. Very very very hot. One walk took us to Two View. A nice spot, second highest on the island, with a beauty of a boulder to walk out on, and another pretty spot looking out over both sides of the island. Did I mention it was very hot? The other walk was down at the bottom of the island, and after the taxi took us to the wrong spot, despite being shown on two different maps (there's only 21 km total and only so many things to see, you would think they would know them) and we walked back, found the same taxi and then got taken to the correct spot. It was worth it. John Swaun Rock. A peninsula, once you get to the top, is bordered by two beautiful bays on either side. Lovely and worth the very hot, did I say very hot? hike! It was a great island, and a lifestyle (of no shoes) that I could get used to!

Oh! I almost forgot. What would this blog be without some cat pictures! This one was my favourite friend. The mentally and physically disabled dive store cat named tinker bell!