Koh Tao, Thailand 07/10

When we finally got to the islands, it was overcast and rainy for about four days straight. This would have bothered me more if we weren’t going straight to the dive center to get our SSI open water scuba certifications right away. The four-day training program involved reading from the manual and completing study guides, watching a training DVD, taking an exam, and practicing safety skills in the water. We were diving by the second day, which was really cool, but also very scary. We had to practice things like taking our regulators out of our mouths and putting them back in (that’s the air hose you breath from), learning hand signals (since underwater, no one can hear you scream, hah), and filling our masks up with water and clearing it out underwater. That last one I had particular trouble with and didn’t actually complete until the last dive on the fourth day, whoops. We also had to learn how to share air and do emergency ascents. We made it out alive and with super cool dive certification cards in our wallets! Only regret - it was rainy and very wet and we didn’t take our cameras on the boats or get underwater photos. Also, because of the rain storms, the visibility underwater was only a few meters, so we didn’t see much. I did see a very large sea cucumber though. Thing must’ve been about two feet long and very fat! Our instructor also pointed out an eel hiding near the bottom. I’m very excited to see other reefs in the world now that I’m allowed!






The second day of diving was my 24th birthday, but we were just exhausted and had to dive again the next day, so I postponed celebrating for a couple days. The day we got our certifications we celebrated by going out and having fun at some of the bars that were right on the beach. It was such a cool location - you could sit at a bar and have waves lapping your feet at high tide. One had a cool bench swing we liked to sit on, and another was out on the sea so you had to walk down a narrow dock to get there. Koh Tao was gorgeous. Earlier that day though I played a little too much beach volleyball and skinned up the tops of my feet on the rough sand and bruised the hell out of my arms. My feet are still healing from that! It was a great belated birthday that day.




We spent the next couple days sun bathing, since the sun finally decided to come out a little bit, and got ourselves a bit tan. Chelsea was getting worried about spending two weeks in Thailand and coming home without a tan, but we got that under control. We got a little silly at one beach and found this shell of a crab and built it a memorial in the sand. We also rented a scooter, but soon found that the island was so small there wasn’t much road to travel! We just took it to a beach. Chelsea drove a scooter for the first time and both of us drove on the left side of the road which was interesting.
















One of our last evenings there we met yet another person interested in Chelsea’s camera. It seems that photographers have quite the community of common interest - everyone wants to talk about their cameras and photos. This guy worked at a nearby bar and was very excited to show us his work. At first it seemed a bit strange, but when he handed us his ipod to show the photos, we couldn’t stop going through them. They were amazing! He did a lot of cool shots with a fish eye lens and some cool double-exposure shots too (I really don’t know what I’m talking about, but they were badass). So Chelsea and I went on a photo-taking rampage that night and just had fun taking pictures of things.










After almost a week on little Koh Tao, we took a ferry over to Koh Phangan for the Full Moon Party that the island is famous for. Koh Tao was a nice little island to visit. It felt small and friendly, kind of like Pai. Like everywhere else I’ve been in Thailand, it was full of stray dogs and cats. I think the little island had about as many strays as human inhabitants. Luckily, there have been neutering programs recently. Also like many of the other Thai towns I’ve been in, there were a lot of ants! We even had scorpions in our bathroom. Fortunately, with bugs comes cool lizards to see on the walls and who make interesting noises in early morning hours.