Songkran!

So, as promised, April has been quite wild so far! We had the celebration of Thailand's New Year, also called Songkran. It's a water-based festival where throwing fresh water on people symbolizes a new beginning and washing away sins and fresh starts. What it really becomes is a free for all water battle where everyone shoots water guns and throws buckets of water at unsuspecting passerbys. There are no rules... doesn't matter if you've got luggage, if you're riding a scooter, if you're dry...

Hopefully this video will explain a little bit:

 

Here's the link if the video doesnt work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6u6nYgc1Lmc

We started drinking and celebrating around noon and the party lasted all day. One bar had a water slide hooked up that led from the bar into the ocean, which was pretty awesome although slightly dangerous with a bunch of drunk people. There were massive pool parties, lots of water guns and lots and lots of beer! No one was dry all day, if you weren't wet on land, you were in the ocean. It was such a fun day and I really enjoyed this New Years celebration. I think I like it better than American New Years celebrations! Maybe I'll try to get this one going next December 31st.... hahaha. 

In other April news, a few days before Songkran, I saw my first Koh Tao whaleshark!!!! I was fun diving with a friend from Australia who's been working in Phi Phi for the last few months. Dylan came out for a few days on his way back home and I took him fun diving... he must have had good luck because on his first dive on Koh Tao, he spotted a 4m whaleshark cruising by! I almost missed it, but luckily I turned around at the right minute! Hopefully this is the start of the season for them, so I might be seeing them more often! Fingers crossed! 

That's all for now! 

Love and fishes! 

Yikes, one blog post a month? I'm not doing so hot with the updates, am I? In my defense, there hasn't been a ton of new things going on... I'm still a dive instructor, I still live in Ko Tao, I still live in the same shabby guesthouse, but its all good! It's a fun place to hang out, that's for sure!

Lots of fun people keep turning up to visit, so that's fun! When I was living in Cairns, I met a lot of non-Aussie divers also on a working holiday visa. Slowly but surely, lots of them are winding up in Thailand now! It's great to see friends again. There's five of us now that used to hang out at the diver's bar in Cairns that are now hanging out at diver's bars in Koh Tao! It's awesome and I love having so many international friends!

March has been a pretty uneventful month so far. It's been rather quiet on the island, but still getting work! Teaching everyone to dive! April should be a bit more eventful... we've got Buddhist new year coming up next month which involves a giant water fight throughout all of Thailand! From what I hear, all of Ko Tao shuts down (except the bars, thank goodness!) and every holes up and shoots water guns, throws water balloons and dumps buckets of water on each other. Driving a scooter requires a dive mask and apparently the best part of the day is soaking all the unsuspecting tourists. So looking forward to that!

Other than that to look forward to, its been about the same around here! It's getting alllllll kinds of hot though! Miss everyone back home lots! Sending lots of love!


Love and fishes!

Apolgies from a Dive Instructor

The life of a dive instructor certainly seems glamorous, and in many ways it can be. The opportunity to travel the world, meet a million new people and see amazing things underwater, yes, it's incredible. Changing lives by introducing the weightless, alien underwater world is incredibly rewarding. However... there are some things that get slightly neglected, so in this blog post I would like to shout out some apologies.

Firstly to the friends and family who think I've fallen off the side of the earth/gotten eaten by a giant squid. I'm sorry I don't call/text/write/send smoke signals or carrier pigeons. My head gets too full of water and I fear using a phone will cause sparks and possibly a hair fire. No but really, I do wish I could chat with family/friends more often. I miss you all a lot and being on the other side of the world is hard. I wish I could teleport all of you out here because I love you all and miss you dearly.


I'm sorry I have a better idea of what two dive sites looks like (ahem... Twins and White Rock, I'm looking at you) than I do of what this island looks like.

I'm sorry to my poor hair, that gets caught in a mask or a tank valve and ripped out so often I'm going to start going bald soon. I'm also sorry that it turns slightly greenish from time to time due to the over-chlorination of the pool...

I deeply apologize to my body for feeding it on a diet of peanuts, Coke and cookies when I don't have time for lunch. But even when I do have time for lunch, I'm sorry I only feed you fried rice. But its so good and cheap!!

I also apologize for feeding it more beer than water. Especially since its Thai beer. There's nothing more painful than a Chang hangover. A Changover, if you will.

I'm sorry I seem to forgotten what "healthy eating and lifestyle" is. Are there other ways to exercise besides doing 10 minutes of treading water with your students once every three or four days?  I walk to work... doesn't that count? Move some tanks around on the boat? The fact that I can't touch my toes anymore because I'm so inflexible? Ehhh... we'll just ignore that little tidbit.

I'm sorry to all the other clothes I own that aren't bikinis, board shorts and my work shirts because they no longer exist on a day to day basis. I walked into work the other day after having an afternoon off (yes, just an afternoon... whole days off are too hard to come by at the moment) and I had showered and put on real clothes and my coworkers nearly didn't recognize me. Apparently I look weird when I'm not in my black work shirt. I can wear other colors I swear!

I'm sorry to that college educated me that used to live around here. The one who could do math without a calculator and read books for fun and knew how to write papers... ain't got no time for that now! I have to remember how to properly teach an emergency swimming ascent or neutral buoyancy and generally teach people to dive without killing me or them. And identify all the fish. At least that knowledge hasn't gone anywhere :) I'll show you alllllll the fish.

I'm sorry I've taken more certification photos of my students than I have of anything else on Koh Tao... and I'm also sorry to my computer desktop which is now covered in student pictures, temp certification cards, teaching guides, instructor manuals and dive videos.

 But really, all kidding aside, things are great out here. I'm working my ass off, yes. I've had four days off in the last month and one of them was a border run, so does that even count? Haha... I'm teaching so much I dream about briefing my students about the skills they're doing that day... like every single night. But I get to spend my time diving and teaching others to dive. Sometimes it's incredibly frustrating and challenging, but it can also be so rewarding. I've had a couple really great groups of students in the last couple weeks and that makes all the frustrating dives worth it. Especially when one of my Open Water students came in two days after the course finished and signed up for his Advanced course. I start teaching that one tomorrow :) I'm really happy with where I'm working and the people I'm working with. I'm not making millions, not by a long shot, but enough to survive and buy beers, so I certainly can't complain! :)


All the love and fishes! 

Working hard... no really!!!

Hooooo boy, do I owe an update!

So Mike and I relocated to Koh Tao. It's beautiful here... my favorite place in Thailand so far. The beaches are beautiful, there's lots of fun jungle roads and the town is small, but big enough to have room to wander.

When we got to Koh Tao, we knew we were on the job hunt. All this travel has been great, but the bank accounts were certainly starting to look wounded. If we ever wanted to leave Thailand, we were going to have to hunt for work. We spent a few days just getting our bearings on the island, renting a scooter and scooting around town. We found a place to stay for a month and moved on in. We're about a 15 - 20 minute walk from the main part of town... depending on how fast you walk! We're in a little guesthouse... its not much, but its enough. We've got a fridge, a fan, a bathroom with a warmish shower... all the best amenities here in Thailand!

After a few days of playing, we started pounding the pavement looking for work. There are around 40 dive shops in Koh Tao, so it took a couple days to hit them all, and there's still some we didn't make it to. The first day we handed out resumes, Mike got a call from a shop! He's been working there as a freelance instructor since! It took me an extra two or three days of pavement pounding, but I finally got a call and have been working flat out! I really like the shop that I'm at, but damn is it a lot of work! Not that I'm complaining... I'm making money!

I started with three Open Water courses back to back... and I mean back to back! I would finish one course at midday and start another one the same day at 4pm. It's been really challenging... the water was pretty rough for my first two courses, so the visibility has been pretty poor, making my problem students even bigger challenges than they normally would have been! But it's been good, I've certified 9 students in as many days! Today the viz finally cleared up and we had a really really nice dive for our last open water course.

I finally have a little free time today and tomorrow morning (nearly 24 hours off!!!) but then its back to the grind teaching a Rescue course! It's one of the most challenging courses to take, and its the first one I'm teaching so... eeeeek! I'm a pile of nerves! But hopefully it'll be fun. When I took the course 1,000 years ago now (aka 2010), it was really really fun, but a lot of hard work, so I hope I can create the same thing for my student! I only have one, so that should make things a bit easier.

But life on Koh Tao is good... its a lot of work, but I think we'll stick around for a little while, try and make some moneys before we run off on the next adventure. I'll try to update again soon, but if I run away for a while its because I'm working flat out!

Love and fishes!

Elephant rides and cave kayaking!

A belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all!

I had a very eventful holidays... and I got a great Christmas present! My parents turned up late at night Christmas Day, so we postponed Christmas and celebrated on the 26th. We tried to cram as much Thailand fun as we could into the week they were here, and we were pretty damn successful.

It started out with elephant riding and ATV riding. We drove ATV/dune buggy type vehicles up one of the mountains to see big Buddha and along the way did some serious 4-wheel driving. Mom and Dad were in one and Mike and I were in the other. I let Mike drive the first leg, which may have been poor decision making on my part, since Mike doesn't drive 4-wheeled vehicles. I understand my parents fear of teaching me to drive!! He does much better on a scooter. But we survived, dusty and bounced around. After that we headed up to the elephant camp!

 

Mom and Dad on their elephant! 

Elephant family photo! 

There was also a baby elephant named Lucy at the elephant camp... we bought bananas to feed her and took some photos as well... but those were on Mom's camera. When she hugged you, she wrapped her trunk around your head and made very silly fart noises on your neck. I'm glad Mom went first, so we got to see her scream a little bit and were more prepared! Riding the elephants was really cool. We had a bit of a wander around the camp, and contrary to the photos, our elephants did have drivers. But at one stage I did get to sit on his head and walk around while our elephant driver was on the ground. Mom and Mike also had a chance to try elephant-head-sitting, but Dad wasn't so game for the idea! 

Our next days adventure took us out on the high seas! We booked a sea kayaking and caving adventure that turned out to be a lot of fun. The best part was, just like the elephants, we had a kayak driver as well! It was the best kayaking I've even done! I didn't have to paddle once! It was a beautiful area up north of Phuket. The first cave took us into a protected lagoon area only accessable by the one small cave.

Entering Cave #1

We spent about an hour paddling around looking at the wildlife and gorgeous rock formations. We saw monitor lizards, lots of birds including a hornbill! The cliffs were amazing and the photos don't do them justice.

Pretty cliffs and islands!

Our second cave, they warned us, was going to be darker and smaller than the first and may require that we lay down at one stage to make sure we can make it into the next hidden lagoon. They certainly weren't joking. The second cave's entrance was about as big as the first, but it quickly got much much darker. There was a sizable family of bats living in the cave as well. When we got to the other end of the cave, we thought it was a dead end. The other opening of the cave was so small, our inflatable kayaks had to be partly deflated and we had to lay on the bottom. The ceiling of the opening was nearly touching my face.

Mom and Dad sqeezing out of the tiny cave opening

We spent some time exploring this secret lagoon as well and saw a couple of monkeys running around. During this time, unknown to us, the tide was slowly rising. We nearly didn't make it back through the cave! Our kayak had to be so deflated that we started taking on water and when we got halfway through the opening, I had to inch-worm my way through to get to the more open area. A couple people chose to get out of their kayaks and just swim through, but my parents made it through the same as Mike and I did! We survived the cave!

Mike and I also showed my parents the chaos of Phi Phi Island. We spent one night out there. The first day we took a tour of some of the beaches around, including Monkey Beach, where the monkeys stole my Pringles. We took Mom and Dad to the nightly fire shows on the beach as well as the amateur boxing ring in one of the bars, but I couldn't talk Dad into signing up (not enough beer, I think). The next day we did two dives in the morning on some of the local sites nearby. We had some pretty eventful dives... no sharks like we were promised, but some cuttlefish, a turtle, lots of scorpionfish and nudibranchs. And it's always lots of fun to dive with my parents. Since I got certified at such a young age, most of the diving we've done together my parents have been more worried about me, but now that I've become an instructor, the tables have turned! Now I'm checking up on them! We had some great dives and got back to Phi Phi just in time to get lunch and catch our ferry back to Patong.

We spent New Years Eve day recovering from all the fun we'd been having. Lots of early morning tours and late nights of drinking, we were pretty beat. So we lounged around all day like bums to prepare to New Years Eve. New Years in Patong was hectic! We had dinner and then went down to the beach for the fireworks, it was packed and there was a DJ just on the beach so their was some silly drunken dancing. My dad initiated Mike into the family by waltzing with him. Mike hasn't run screaming yet, so I think he wasn't too scarred. We light off paper lanterns over the sea for good luck in the New Year. My parents retired shortly after the countdown and midnight fireworks, so Mike and I ventured down infamous Bangla Road... the home of all debauchery in Phuket. It was pure chaos. There was silly string everywhere and I spent most of the night picking it out of my hair, but it was definitely a wild place to be for New Years.

Unfortunately Mom and Dad had to leave us late at night on New Years Day, but not before first taking a ladyboy show. It was a cabaret show with only men in the cast, but you would never know it by looking at them. Many of them have had lots and lots of plastic surgery and look more beautiful than some Thai women. Case in point, Dad didn't realize they were all originally men until AFTER the show.

It was sad to see my parents go, but we had a really awesome week and I'm so glad they were able to come out to Thailand and explore this crazy place with me!

Now, as soon as my parents left, Mike and I had to go on a border run. His visa was up on the 3rd and mine expired on the 6th, so we decided to go together so we were on the same schedule. We booked a visa run with a company that organizes millions of these things, but that doesn't mean they explained what was happening to us. We got on a minibus with six other expats and drove about 5 hours to the border of Thailand and Myanmar. When we got there, we were met by about 10 other minibuses full of people. We got in line and they took our passports off of us and ran away. What? Where are you going with those? Come back! Meanwhile, we waited in line for AGES until they finally brought our passports back... they had been photocopying them to help expedite the process later on, apparently. They laughed at all our pictures. We waited in line forever and ever and ever and were stamped out of the country. We were then supposed to climb on a boat and motor over to Myanmar. We were literally climbing. There wasn't a proper dock, so we were climbing over all the longtail boats and other ferrys stacked in like sardines. When we got on the boat, they stole our passports AGAIN without telling us why or where they were going with them. It was rather stressful. I've found I get separation anxiety when my passports not in my hand. We puttered over to Myanmar (or Burma, whatever you'd like to call it), about a thirty minute drive. When we got their we were ushered in to the immigration room (literally just a room on the dock) and had our passports stamped again and handed back. We then had ten minutes to wander around before we went back to Thailand. Let me tell you, my Myanmar experience was very extensive, haha! We went back to Thailand, walked over 47 more longtail boats, got stamped back in to the country and finally all piled back into the minibus for another 5 hour drive. All that for another month on the visa! Phew!

Hopefully we'll be spending that month working! Today we took another long bus ride and a ferry over to Ko Samui in the Gulf of Thailand on the other coast. We're going to start seriously looking for work, since Phi Phi and Ko Lanta didn't pan out so well. We're on Ko Samui for a couple days before heading over to the dive mecca, Ko Tao, where there are about 40 dive shops on a tiny island, so hopefully we'll find something! Off on a new adventure!

Love and fishes!

Merry Christmas and Mantas!

Hello and Happy Holidays!!!

A very Merry Christmas from Thailand (maybe a day or two early... depending on where you are!)

So for the last two weeks, we've been holed up in Ko Lanta, checking out another island in the beautiful Andaman sea. It's been amazing. As soon as our ferry moored up to the dock, we knew it would be an awesome laid back kinda place.

The first few days were spent renting scooters and zooming around the island, checking out beaches and running up and down rainforested hills. The island is beautiful. It's a lot bigger than Ko Phi Phi, but smaller than Phuket, so its perfect for scooter rides around the island. We're staying up in the northernmost bit of the island in a little town called Saladan. There are some really beautiful beaches down the west coast of the island and on the east coast you can find Lanta Old Town, where some of the wooden buildings are nearly a hundred years old.

After a day or two of land exploration, we hopped into the water. Our first day diving was off Ko Ha. Ko Ha means "five islands", all massive limestone cliffs. The first dive, I had some serious fish-nerd moments and saw some wild new fish... including a fish called an ornate ghost pipefish... a mouthful of a name for a fish only a few inches long. But they're related to seahorses and not terribly easy to find, so I was pretty pumped. One of our other sites was called the Cathedral. You entered a little cavern and after swimming for a little while, you can surface inside a cave under the island. There's a huge air pocket, so tall you can't see the top of the cave, but there's light coming in from the water below giving the water a luminescent green color. Very very cool dive.

Our next dives took us to a place called Hin Daeng and Hin Muang... allegedly some of the best dives on this coast. Can't say I disagree. The first site was just beautiful... lots of bright purple and red soft corals and millions of fish... The second dive we had a couple of manta rays!! There's only been a couple manta-free dives for the last few weeks, so after our first dive was lacking mantas, we were starting to get a little bummed. 5 minutes into our second dive, a big 4m manta cruised by. That was enough to get my manta fix, but they just kept coming! There were at least 3, maybe 4 different mantas that came by, including one big female. She was nearly 5m/20ft or so and she wasn't shy at all. At one stage, she swam straight at me, cruised underneath me and plopped down on the reef so all the cleaner fish could give her a good cleaning. It was one of the most amazing experiences... she was so close I could see her eyes and I really felt like she was looking at me just as much as I was looking at her!!

I got loads of video on my gopro, and as soon as I get motivated, I'll edit it all up and hopefully be able to share it!

On a drier day, we took a scooter down to the national park at the southern tip of the island. A beautiful spot, really nice beach hiding in some rainforest and infested with monkeys and monitor lizards. I've already had a bad track record with monkeys and this adventure certainly didn't help. I bought a couple of Cokes from the park's store. The women at the cashier warned me that the monkeys might try to steal my drinks, but I wandered back into the nature anyway. Within two minutes I was chased back into the store by two monkeys that were really after a caffeine fix. I used to think monkeys were cute! Not so sure anymore... they're too clever for their own good.

Ko Lanta has been a really great adventure... we've been passing our resumes around the dive shops here and on Ko Phi Phi as well, hopefully we'll find some work around these parts.

But before that happens I've got some silly parents coming to see me!!!! Mom and Dad are flying out in a few hours to come to Thailand!!!! I'm really excited, we've got some fun adventures planned. Elephant riding and sea cave kayaking and what not, so expect some stories from there! Also... Dad will be in a town full of ladyboys, so that should be entertaining.

Until then, HAVE A MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR!


LOTS OF LOVE! (and fishes!)

Phi Phi, Patong and Island Hopping fun!

Hey all!

After a couple days with Mike in Phuket, we ventured off to the islands. Phuket is very touristy, loud and in your face, so we though heading to the islands would be the right speed.

We headed to Phi Phi. I spent a couple days there when my friend Mark came to visit a few weeks ago. This time Mike and I were planning on staying for longer, to really check out the scenery and see if it was somewhere we could work. Obviously, the most important scenery was underwater, so just about as soon as we got there, we booked in for some underwater time.

The first dives we did were fantastic. We did three dives, the King Cruiser wreck and two reef dives, Anemone reef and Shark Point. The King Cruiser wreck was a vehicle ferry that sank mysteriously with no cars or passengers on it, just the captain, in the 90's. It was probably an insurance job, but they decided to leave the boat there anyway... made for a good dive spot. And now it is! There were SO many fish inside the wreck, thousands of little yellow snapper and other schooling fish. Lots of big buys, like baracudas and jacks, were cruising along the outside of the wreck. Our next dive was Anemone Reef, which was my favorite site of the day. It's named because the coral pinnacle that makes up the reef is literally coated in anemones and in most of those anemones there are a couple little nemos cruising around! We also saw a bright yellow seahorse, some really neat little eels, lionfish, scorpionfish and lots of squid! The last dive was called Shark Point, named because the reef come out of the water in the shape of a shark fin, not because there are any sharks. Another really cool site... saw some more creepy crawly guys... mantis shrimp, lionfish and eels!

On of our land days on Phi Phi, we went up to the viewpoint up on the top of the island, you can see the whole tourist village area. It's a beautiful spot, but holy hell does it take some effort to get there. Of course we took the long way accidentally.  

 

 Worth the hike! 

Another day, we rented a kayak and decided to explore the "quiet" beach nearby. It was called Monkey Beach for exactly the right reasons.... it was full of monkeys! So therefore, also full of tourists. "Quiet" beach, my ass! But it was still a beautiful little cove, the water was gorgeous and clear, the sand was white and fluffy and there were monkeys roaming wild! Some of the tour operators were throwing them bananas to get them closer to the beach and out of the trees. After checking out the beach, we went on kayaking for a bit more before returning to the monkey beach for a healthy snack of Pringles. We pulled the kayak up on the rocky end of the beach where there were no primates of any sort. I sat clueless on a rock, eating some chips where out of nowhere, one of the biggest monkeys jumps on my lap and tries to steal my can of Pringles! I threw a chip at him and ran in knee deep water. Even though they can swim, they don't seem to get in the water very much. The hungry monkey had brought along his family and before we knew it, there were eight or ten monkeys in our kayak looking for more food! Eventually they got bored and wandered back to the tour boat operators with the bananas.  

After our stint on Phi Phi, Mike and I had to venture back to Phuket... he needed to get his visa extended and I needed to hop on a plane to do my very first border run to Malaysia and back. We stayed in Patong, which seemed to have the cheapest accommodation. Patong is the Las Vegas of Phuket... it's loud, it's neon and it has no rules. Anything goes. We went out for a night, just to see the spectacle of it. Mike was terrified, because he couldn't tell if the people hitting on him were women or ladyboys... and it really is hard to tell! Some of the ladyboys are beautiful!!! It was a very weird night in a very weird town. Literally anything goes and everyone wants you to be a part of it. Let's just say there are some things in life you can't un-see. Although, I did get to hold an animal called a slow loris... google it. They're adorable. 

 My border run and Mike's visa extension were successful, so now we've hopped over to Ko Lanta, another island in the area, a three hour ferry ride from Phuket. So far, its awesome. It's slower paced than Phuket and Phi Phi and has some really beautiful beaches. We're off to check out the underwater world tomorrow, so hopefully that proves equally as beautiful! 

Love and fishes!!