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Category Archives: scuba

Gili Trawagnan

12 Feb

We have settled for a few days in the strange and delightful Gili islands, with Gili Trawagnan as our base.

It would be easy to dismiss this place on first glance as a party island and little more. There is the predictably busy main drag, with open air pizza joints and seafood barbecues and young men calling out to advertise cheap rooms. But honestly, you would have to be blind to let that first impression stand for more than an hour. Gili T, while no longer a hidden paradise, is compelling.

To start – Now that we have been traveling for almost two months, The Professor and I have this whole finding a room thing down to a routine. I am more picky, more distract-able and more patient, and more likely to be willing to take some time to shop around. So I go and find a room unencumbered while The Professor stays with the bags at a cafe, enjoying a cold drink and freed from the annoyance of my selection process.

Here is where Lonely Planet is useful – it is good for helping you pick in which neighborhood to look for a room. I could tell when I read it that the beach places would be bad value near the harbor, and too expensive for our backpacker budget on the more remote parts of the island. I rented a bike and headed a few blocks down a dirt road leading away from the shore and into the village. Soon enough, I found two good lodgings right next to each other. I was tempted by the reasonably cool fan room in a relaxed guesthouse with a charismatic innkeeper who spoke great English. But I went with the place next door, where the same price got us a bungalow with a pretty outdoor bathroom, a lounge with cushions and mood lighting underneath the bungalow, a tv and DVD player, and a big open hangout area where we could meet other travelers. And for an extra $3 a day, air conditioning, which is nice because we have been sleeping badly. We have been trying to patronize the bar at the first place to help that good-spirited innkeeper, but it turns out it is closed for the season.

Anyway, this all tells you nothing about Gili T. So, let me say that I learned on that first day that bikes yield to pony carts pretty much automatically. Pony cart is the fastest transport on the island, btw, because there are no motorized vehicles and sand drifts make the roads bad for bikes in some places.

We also learned that the coral is in much much worse shape here than in Amed when we went
snorkeling. Storms, ocean warming, coral-eating fish and turtles, and fish bombing up until 10 years ago have all done a number on the reef. There were lots of fish, however.

We have dived twice since our arrival, one at Talet Malang (sp?) and one at Shark Point. We saw a lot of good fish, one and two white-tipped sharks at the latter, which was awesome. Shark Point also had some great soft coral. However, that one was a pretty exciting dive – the current got so intense that keeping up with the other, bigger, more athletic divers had me blowing through my air from exertion. Eventually, I had to share air with the divemaster while the three of us crawled hand over hand across the ocean floor to reach a safe place to ascend, the current was so strong. The divemaster had a huge tank with a lot of air left, so I actually found the whole experience fun and educational rather than frightening, a sort of cross between diving and rock climbing. We all did everything you are supposed to do when things go wrong, and we arrived safely at the surface and then onto the boat, and on to shore.

On land, the most frequently encountered fauna are the aforementioned ponies and a plethora of young cats with naturally stubby tails, much like Manx cats but less pretty. A kitten cohort is apparently getting weaned right now, so there is a lot of feline whining.

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Hmm. I feel like I am circling around the island but not really getting you into the charm of the place. Let me try. This island is only recently settled by anyone at all, so the juxtaposition of traditional Sasak people from Lombok and tourists is not galling. I like seeing the women in headscarves walking near the women in bikinis. At sunset, the muzzien calls the people to prayer over a loudspeaker. At night, along a string of beach bars, the beats call the people to dance. Lots of children fly kites impossibly high. The air is soporific.

There is a solar array on the hill. They grow coffee here, and keep brown cows and assorted goats. We were followed by a loose pony while biking through the interior. There is a simple cemetery with wooden headstones near a coconut orchard. One one coast, you watch the clouds pile over the Rinjani volcano in Lombok. On the other coast, you watch the sun set beyond Bali, the light turning the clouds and the sea into pastel castles and liquid gold. Everyone turns out to watch these colors, whether at the downtempo bar, the acoustic guitar bar, or just along the sand.

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Indonesian food is comfort food, far less dazzling than Thai food but simply satisfying.

Today we are doing a an overnight trip to Gili Air, a smaller island with less going on, except for one beach bar playing music we like. Then it is back to Gili Trawagnan, where we will take care of some things with our good wifi connection, and make some decisions. We have one month exactly left in Asia. What shall we do with our time?

– the Private Eye

 
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Posted by on February 12, 2013 in Gili, Gili Trawagnan, Indonesia, party, scuba, Uncategorized

 

Ubud to Amed and the USS Liberty

08 Feb

Our last day in Ubud, February 7th, was hectic.

While down near the Monkey Forest, visiting Andy in his studio, we came across a tailor/leatherworker. Hanging in his shop was a leather jacket I thought The Private Eye might like. Back in college (a decade and a half ago), she bought a light leather jacket at The Gap. It became one of her most worn coats, due to its combination of useful features: a lining warm enough for a cool but not cold night, a hood, side pockets without zippers that scratch your wrists, and an inside pocket for a wallet and phone. The jacket has been slowly falling apart, and so for the past year or two I’ve been looking for a replacement. This jacket seemed perfect. Heavy goat leather, so it can take the beatings of everyday use, a hood, an excellent cut, her size, and a beautiful teal lining. The day before we left, I showed her the coat and in a prearranged dance of signals so the shop owner would not know her degree of interest, she tried it on and said she loved it. There was one catch: to make a new coat would take 2-3 days, and we were leaving tomorrow. So perhaps he could sell us this one? And add side pockets? Without zippers? And an inside pocket? And repair/replace the lining because it’s a little worn from show? The answer to all of these questions was yes, and at a fantastic price. The one catch: it would not be ready until 3.

And just in case it sounds like I always bargain low prices, I don’t. When the shopkeeper quickly agrees, then smiles, and touches the money to similar items for good luck, then you know it could have been cheaper. Like the Barong mask I bought at Gunung Kawi.

So we planned to leave Ubud at 3 or so. We took care of all of our last tasks (a carved wooden mask for Cleverpig, register for Burning Man ticket sale, a gift for furrybluehouse, some Internet banking, returning our library books, a waxing for The Private Eye), and arrived at the Monkey Forest parking lot at 2.

You see, by this point we had several bags of stuff for our real lives – presents for friends, a few souvenirs (Barong mask for my lab!), two pairs of pants from a cool but cheap designer, and now a leather jacket. Our taxi agreed to leave for Ubud at 3, but could not do much later. So once I picked up the jacket, I hired a scooter (R10k) to take me to the post office to mail this all home. With one hand I held onto the diver, with the other I held the four bags. Sending it all by sea (2-3 months) and packing cost about $80. So then hop on a scooter back (driven by an old man who drove a harder bargain, R14k), and call Made, the driver, to tell him we are ready.

And what a good driver Made (mah-DAY) is! We would recommend him to everyone. He drove us to the puppet and mask museum in Ubud and when we discussed Amed, he gave us a price that later research showed to be very fair (R350k, or $40) for a 2 hour drive. We had a wonderful conversation during the drive. We talked about Bali, his children (two daughters, learning Balinese dance), America, the permanency of residences and families in Bali, village life, immigrating to Bali (village head gives you rules to follow…), and Indonesia. In March and April he works for an American company that organizes a bicycle ride in Bali, the rest of the year is for hire. If you are ever in Bali and want a good driver, ask and we can give you his information. It can be hard to find a good driver and just meeting people on the street is hit or miss.

The drive began as Ubud traffic, but towards the end became beautiful. Roads high above terraced rice fields, huge banyan trees, and the ever-increasingly looming power of Gunung Agung, whose top was shrouded by a single, lonely cloud.

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It’s the low season in Bali. Ubud still has a good number of visitors, travelers, and tourists, but Amed is very quiet. It’s a line of bungalows, warungs, and dive shops along the road parallel to the beach. In the low season, the local industries are fishing and salt making. The Liberty dive is off the shore from Tulamben, which is a 10-15 minute drive northwest; we chose to stay in Amed because the beach is tiny black pebbles rather than big black rocks and the town has more to it than just diving.

We picked Eco Divers because they have a reputation for being environmentally conscious. Seemed a reasonable distinguishing feature. We arranged to dive the next day, they helped us find a bungalow (which we chose to not spend a second night in – while nice looking and clean its architecture is such that it stays hot at night, our second night, tonight, is in a bungalow run by our dive guide, on the beach, cooler, nice, and an even better price), and arrange for a boat to the Gilis. The dive price was high; I’m willing to negotiate for goods and sleeping, but diving doesn’t seem like something to drive a price on, and a great dive is so much better than a good one.

After Sail Rock, we weren’t sure how many days we would like to dive. We figured that if conditions were poor, we’d hang around and wait to dive until they were excellent. This was a little frustrating to Eco Divers (How many nights? Not sure. How many days of diving? Not sure?), but we didn’t want to commit to many days hanging out on a beach and also didn’t want to leaves before a great dive.

And what a dive it was. The Liberty was a transport ship in World War II, fitted with two guns for self defense. The ship was 120 meters from bow to stern. In 1942 it was hit by a Japanese torpedo and limped to Bali, where it was grounded and sat on the beach until 1963. When Gunung Agung erupted, the ship rolled off the beach and settled to the sea floor about 30 meters from the shore, where it has been since. The stern is the highest point, about 8 meters below the surface. The bow is down at 26 meters (hence our deep dive training!). I wish I could have taken pictures, but renting cameras is expensive and our point and shoot can only go to 10 meters. Here are some pictures I found on the web:

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So it’s an enormous ship. Even with the 50 meter visibility (!!!!), you can’t see the ship end to end. Many supporting structures and internals have broken free, leading to side towers of life and a whole metropolitan area of coral and fish. We saw a pair of 4 foot long yellowfin tuna, a 5 foot long sea turtle, schools of tens of different kinds of fish, an enormous grouper, coral of all colors of the rainbow, scorpionfish, and so much more. In Ko Tao, there were what I thought to be large plate coral, maybe 3 feet in radius. On and around the Liberty, there were coral with a radius of 5 feet or more.

For our first dive, we were practically alone; we arrived first and only saw other divers as we left the wreck. Even on the second dive, there were only a few other groups.

On the first dive, we approached at the stern and took a path alongside the ship on the side facing away from shore, until we reached the bow. We then entered the body of the ship and swam between girders to see all of the life within it. Because the Liberty is so large, this wasn’t tight swimming. On the second dive, we reversed our path, taking a different route through the ship. We entered the ship at the stern, swam through it, then returned along the side facing away from the shore. Swimming alongside and within this enormous steel structure, covered and swarmed with life darting to and fro, this private helicopter tour of the aquatic Manhattan, well, it was as good as everyone had promised.

The water was so calm, the visibility so good, and we saw so many rare things (Tuna! Turtle!) that I thought diving again tomorrow would likely just be a disappointment. So we decided to leave tomorrow for the Gili Islands and booked a fast boat with Eco Divers. We found a better bungalow and spent a good part of the afternoon snorkeling just outside it. The snorkeling was similarly magical – while there were no turtles like in Hawaii, we saw many of the same fish we saw on our dive, but this time could linger as long as we wanted to watch them. Also, the coral were outstanding, splashes of color in all kinds of shapes, so much healthier than in Ko Tao. While Ko Tao has one clownfish, named Nemo, carefully protected by a ring of stones, we saw at least half a dozen just snorkeling along the shore.

After snorkeling, we rinsed off and had a wonderful and simple dinner (grilled fish for me, fried prawns for The Private Eye, vegetables, and rice) at our dive master’s restaurant, cooked by his wife, who also makes a mean lemon pancake. I tried arak, the palm sugar wine: it tastes similar to sake. And that leaves us here and now, sitting on the beach, looking at the stars, which look so different!

— The Professor

 
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Posted by on February 8, 2013 in Amed, Bali, Indonesia, scuba, Uncategorized

 

Sail Rock to Ban Tai

28 Jan

Yesterday was one of those days of misses that don’t add up to anything too bad, when you try to enjoy the lemonade made from the lemons. If I wasn’t that successful at doing that yesterday, rest assured that I feel better today!

We arose early and went to the front desk at Bottle Beach 2 to check out. Nobody was there right at 7, and neither was our boat that was supposed to bring us to the dive outfit we booked to take us to Sail Rock. But shortly, the manager shows up and says the boat may not come, because there are big swells on the water. He also tells us that, much to our surprise, though we paid for the room in advance with a credit card, we cannot settle our bill that way for meals and such – it must be cash, and more than we have, with no ATMs for miles.

Fortunately, our boat did make it, and the old captain agreed to wait for us to run to an atm when we arrived at Chalok Lam and bring our cash to the bungalow manager the next time he went to Bottle Beach, later that day. Problem solved.

We then were treated to an excellent display of seamanship. The old boatman could not cut his tiny long tail boat through the waves, as they would swamp the little craft. Instead, he surfed the giant swells, riding each until the boat could be delivered safely to the start of the next swell. The boatman had a wide frog-like mouth with no chin to speak of, and wore fisherman’s pants rolled up to his hips, an open button down shirt and a small shoulder bag with an elephant motif and gold thread. He was, in short, everything you could ever imagine in such a boatman.

We arrived in Chalok Lam and were picked up by our dive instructor, who looked an affable blonde Viking, and is Belgian. Like most dive masters here, he inexplicably smokes cigarettes. He and a compatriot took us to the dive shop on motorbikes, and soon we were on our way to Sail Rock, widely regarded as the best dive site in the Gulf of Thailand, home to the mighty whale shark, a plankton eater that grows from 3 to a whopping 12 meters.

Sadly, we did not see leviathan. One may have been there, or not, but our visibility was severely compromised by the same rough seas that showed us the quality of our morning boatman. The dive involved a long (for me) surface swim over some pretty big waves, and it was hard for me to relax after that – so much so that my normally decent air consumption rate went out the window, and I spent part of my dive sharing air with the dive master so we could stay down longer. That said, it is a magnificent site. We went to the eastern pinnacle, where we were surrounded by schools of big eyed trevaly just inches from my own eyes. There were also schools of the biggest fusiliers I have ever seen, and huge chevron barracuda, and the occasional giant grouper, and schools of smaller, sadly doomed baitfish, ringed by the big predator schools. At the end, we swam up through a chimney that started at 18 meters and opened up at five meters, with a charming pair of very large boxing shrimp inside.

But few were up for a second dive in those conditions. One by one, the dive boats left before their second dive, and we were the last. We went to a few different calm shallow water sites, each rejected for lack of visibility after we couldn’t see the dive master if he was more than one kick-cycle away. Finally, we found a slightly calmer site among some lovely coral reef near Haad Salad, and spent our time looking at rare nudibranches and other small scale life.

Our dive came with a free ride to anywhere we wanted on the island, and so at the end of our dives we did not return to Bottle Beach, but went instead to Ban Tai on the south coast.

I barely have the words to describe this trance music Mecca. But let me try. All the clothing stores sell clothes suitable for festivals. Half of the bars have evocative names. Music that would be considered very, very niche in the US blares out from nearly every bar or store. Yoga-healthy, dreadlocked, clean thirty-somethings seem to dominate the white population, and party fliers paper the entire exterior wall of the 7-11, as well as the inside of the Sicilian pizzeria and I imagine most other businesses. But there are still lots of Thai people here, and the area seems quite wholesome, perhaps lent that air by the organic coconut-palm and lime orchards and the water buffalo in the yards.

Our dive master had recommended a place to stay, so we proceeded there. But it was beyond our price range at 1500 baht a night. Happily, just nearby was a place prominently billing itself as for backpackers. After waiting for about half an hour for the front desk clerk to return, while happily reading Roald Dahl in a hammock in the front desk, a lovely hippie woman from Illinois booked us in to a happy little bungalow with shared bath for 150 baht. Though it could be locked up if you wished, when we entered the room had its windows wide open, with beads hanging over the windows and doorway. There was a mosquito net over the bed, with sheets that read “for the love” over and over again. The floor was rough slats with gaps in between, but the bed was firm and comfortable, the lighting was surprisingly good, and the shared bath had plenty of showers and a full length mirror, and a tapestry advertising the Blackmoon Culture festival. In short, the place had soul, and was in our top two places we have stayed on this trip.

We were very beat, though, and booking into this place was the last good decision we made. We decided to go to the herbal sauna at the nearby Wat. But we were distracted by shopping for trance clothes, of which we bought a few, and then dinner. When we got to the Wat’s sauna, it looked wonderful, but was within 10 minutes of closing and denied us entry. A patron, however, told us of another one 20 minutes away that was open an hour later, and was near the evening’s moon-set party besides. We seized the opportunity for adventure and jumped in a sorrng-taa-ou. It took us to the bar with the party, and we jumped out and looked for the sauna. We couldn’t find it, and were told we had actually passed it some kilometers back.

Because we were stinking and desperate to wash, we jumped in another pickup truck and drove to that place. We got out and looked around, seeing unspecific signs for it, but not the place itself. Finally, I called a number on the sign, and learned we had been ill-advised: the sauna had closed two hours previous, though sometimes it stays open later to accommodate patrons already present at the closing time. To make matters worse, we realized we had left half of the clothes we had bought in the back of the second taxi, with no way to recover the items. We felt wretched, and went back to our room without visiting the party, showered, and went to bed. We decided to take the early ferry off the island.

But today is a new day. We slept beautifully in that rustic little cabin and woke to a gorgeous moonlit predawn. We are on the Raja ferry to Don Sak, on the end of which journey we are likely to see the pink albino dolphins(!) that frequent those waters. I plan to take pictures of them to share with our guide in the Amazon. And then we will bus to the Krabi region, Railey in particular, where we will see the fabled Andaman sea and climb rocks over turquoise waters. And then, on to Indonesia.

– the private eye

PS- It’s as good a place as any for me to spill the ugly truth – Lonely Planet really isn’t for backpackers anymore. I cannot see why it lists so many higher-priced accommodations but fails to talk about the remarkable budget deals in this region, unless they either no longer care about these customers, or deliberately leave these gems off the pages so that they are not swamped, the same as you would not post the location of a remarkable but unprotected tree for fear that someone would fell it. In either case, my advice at this point is to use their guides as a marker for where accommodations are clustered, but to look around at the unpublished offerings for better deals. Which is sort of sad, as we’d already written the restaurant sections of the guides off as not being foodie enough to our taste – we pretty much prefer eating at the markets to just about anywhere else. The books are useful for general planning, but your own groundwork when you arrive is the best option.

 
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Posted by on January 28, 2013 in dancing, Ko Phagnan, mistakes, Music, scuba, Thailand, Uncategorized

 

SCUBA Wrap Up/Last Full Day in Ko Tao

24 Jan

I’m sitting on Freedom Beach, at the south tip of Ko Tao. It’s a great beach, it reminds me a lot of beach 69 on Hawaii, but a bit more busy and developed. So a great beach, but beach 69 remains my favorite beach in the world. Freedom beach has a wonderful shallow white sand, and trees just 10 yards from the surf. So you can sit in the sun or in shade. Strings with chunks of white coral hang from the trees, swinging in the breeze. It’s much more relaxed here. Were I to come to the island again (and didn’t need to be at Scuba Junction at 6:45AM each morning), I’d definitely stay on this side of the island, it doesn’t tickle unease like Sairee does.

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This morning we did our last two dives. Both were at the wreck, the H.T.M.S. Sattakut. The Private Eye took notes on the wreck, its condition, and potential hazards. She sketched it while I took measurements of its dimensions (65 kick strokes long, 10 kick strokes wide). It was almost as if I were helping her with an investigation, her making a map of a scene.

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The ship was given to Thailand by the U.S. it saw service in Okinawa in WW II and was sunk 1.5 years ago to make an artificial reef.

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The old wreck near Ko Tao had been in a shallow channel and monsoon season destroyed it. At the end of the second wreck dive we came up to 23m to wander a bit around Hin Pee Wee, the dive site it’s near.

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With those two dives, the second of which was EAN, we completed all of the skills necessary for our certification. So we are now certified deep divers (up to 38m/130ft), enhanced air divers (up to EAN40) and wreck divers!

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— The Professor

 
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Posted by on January 24, 2013 in beaches, Ko Tao, scuba, Thailand, Uncategorized

 

Go UKT!

23 Jan

There isn’t a real University of Koh Tao, not that I am aware of anyway. But Sairee Beach has so many resemblances to a college campus, I thought the name was apt.

Most people seem to be here to study. Study scuba, that is. You initially try to schedule your classes/dives in the afternoon, so you can sleep late, but then you realize that the best classes/dives are in the morning, so you suck it up and enroll in the program for which you must arise at 6 am. Some people are clearly here to learn, then get out to the big wide world of Other Dive Sites. Others start learning here, decide to stay, and eventually become instructors or part of the infrastructure. Town/gown relations seem to be good; the ladies who work reception at our bungalows seem to like us, as do the Thai folks at the various places we go, and the Thai folks on staff at our dive school (all of the support staff, from the boat captain to reception to the guys who fill the tanks).

Of course, there are the occasional irks of college life. I missed hearing Phil Hartnoll of Orbital and a bunch of other good djs play the other night because I had a big test our first deep water dive that morning. Well, I sort of missed it. I wasn’t there. But I actually woke up at 4:30 am thinking, oh my god that’s beautiful music… The party was still raging, and loud enough that I could hear it halfway down the beach. It was lovely to lie there and listen for a while, and then get an extra hour of sleep before the deep dives.

I missed the party, but I did take a great extracurricular – I took a flying trapeze class. The owner of the shop, a pleasant woman, has a nice rig and her lesson down to a science. First, on a static trapeze, they show you how to go from hanging by your hands to hanging by your knees (you have to kick up at the very end of the swing, and not before!) Then you swing from your knees, stretching your arms like superman and arching your back. It is from this position that you make contact with the catcher – you grab each others arms and release the knees from your own bar! You are flying!

I also learned how to let go of the trapeze and do a full somersault before landing on the net. It was so much fun that I would have kept doing it every day were we not diving every day. As it is, I will definitely try it again in SF. Don’t worry, mom, in addition to the net there was also a belt with ropes attached to slow and control your fall. It was very safe; probably the most dangerous part was climbing the ladder.

If this is a university, the mascot would certainly be the Siamese cat. We have seen them elsewhere in Thailand, but never in such abundance as here. It appears to be a recessive coat color rather than a special breed, about as rare as tortoiseshell cats in the states.

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– the private eye

Ps. diving has been amazing too, but the professor has written so much about that, I will skip it.

 
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Posted by on January 23, 2013 in Ko Tao, scuba, Thailand, Uncategorized

 

Next Steps

22 Jan

We have two more dives here in Ko Tao, our two wreck dives. One of them will be nitrox. Our instructor, Gemma, will be bringing a camera so we will have pictures of us diving a wreck! It seems silly that we’ve spent so many hours underwater and have no pictures to show for it.

We’re then catching a boat to Ko Phagnan on the 25th. The full moon party is the night of the 26th, we will dive Sail Rock on the 28th. We booked a flight (through Kuala Lampur) to Bali from Phuket (western side of southern Thailand) on Feb. 1st. . So between the 28th to 31st, we will choose between diving some more in Ko Phagnan, rock climbing near Krabi, or maybe even dive the Similans as a day dive. Or some combination of these options. We can’t dive on the 31st as we are flying on the 1st so I suspect we will rock climb or travel that day.

Met a wonderful couple yesterday, originally from Toronto, now living in Gold Coast. We all went out to dinner and mid-dinner they remembered it was their second anniversary! I’m glad we chose a nice Italian place, recommended by the scuba instructor from Milan.

Today we are going to finally walk around the island a bit, as we have no more afternoon class work. Meeting up with the SF burner for dinner.

I’m missing all of my friends back home! Hope they are all having a wonderful time. February is my favorite month in the Bay Area, I’m sad I’ll miss it. Well, only kinda sorta sad. 🙂

— The Professor

 
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Posted by on January 22, 2013 in Bali, Ko Phagnan, Ko Tao, scuba, Thailand, Uncategorized

 

SCUBA!

20 Jan

We’ve now settled in to Ko Tao. We are staying at least until the 23rd, and might stay longer depending on how our Ko Phagnan plans shape up. The full moon party is on the 26th, and finding a room can be difficult. If we can arrange one from here, we might leave later. Otherwise we will probably need to leave on the afternoon of the 23rd. We’ve moved from our B1200 bungalow to a much smaller and minimal B400 one:

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Our diving schedule is this:

  • Jan. 17: arrive, arrange for refresher course, sleep
  • Jan. 18: refresher classroom in the morning, skill refresher and fun dive in the afternoon
    (Twins)
  • Jan. 19: arranged for dives and courses in the morning, fun dives in the afternoon (Twins, White Rock)
  • Jan. 20: fun dive in the morning, deep diving classroom in the afternoon
  • Jan. 21: deep dives in the morning, nitrox classroom in the afternoon
  • Jan. 22: nitrox dives in the morning, wreck classroom in the afternoon
  • Jan. 23: wreck dives in the morning, catch the ferry to Ko Phagnan in the afternoon?

Deep diving is learning about the issues and dangers that arise when you go below 60ft, which is approximately 3 atmospheres of pressure. The basic summary is that you need to be more careful when you ascend because you can have nitrogen in your blood at higher pressure. That’s the really dangerous thing in diving: coming up too quickly from higher pressure, so gas dissolved in your body forms bubbles (like a soda you have just opened). Nitrox is using a gas mixture that has a higher oxygen content (lower nitrogen) than regular air, which lets you stay down longer, something very useful when diving deep. You have to learn about oxygen poisoning and new dive tables. Finally, wreck diving is learning skills and guidelines for diving sunken shipwrecks, such as don’t touch anything because it might fall on you. You typically want deep diving certification for wrecks because they are deep, and nitrox as well so you can stay that deep for more than 5 or 10 minutes.

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Our instructor for the refresher course was Leane, an English woman who used to work in corporate finance and wants to return to school for a Ph.D. in psychology, most of all at… Stanford! We talked a little about it and I offered to talk with her about her motivations and whether a Ph.D. is right for her. She was a fantastic instructor. The Private Eye sometimes takes 2-3 minutes in her initial descent (her ears equalize slowly), and Leane was very supportive, helpful, and patient. We did lots of high fives under water.

Today, our dive leader was Rachel, also from England, who used to be a punk, loves hip hop, and I’m sure could beat me up in a fight (not that that’s saying much). She was also excellent. When we found a lionfish hiding on a rock, something she had recently discovered and not told many about yet, she did a little underwater fist pump dance. Enthusiasm is infectious!

After a dive, you log what you did: how deep, how long, where, when, conditions, and what you saw. The post dive logging generally involves the dive leader walking you through everything you saw, a long list of fish, coral, sea cucumbers, and crustaceans. But, in all honesty, these aren’t the things that capture my attention or imagination. The lionfish was kinda cool, yeah, but the moments that made me stop and stare were much larger in scale. Like the time on our first dive when I looked up at the reflective surface of the water and saw silhouetted two schools of fish, one made up of hundreds of silvery fish about 6 inches long, the other 8 longtail fishes, these yellow, black, and white fish that are about a foot long and have a long, thin, white trailing fin on the top of their body. These hundreds of fish filled my field of view, not quite blotting out the sun but putting me in deep shade. Or, in our White Rock dive, when I looked down in a deep region and couldn’t see the bottom, just a blue green nothingness below, with shadows of fishes of all sizes flitting back and forth before fading into the unknown depth.

We have chosen this dive schedule because one of the instructors at our school, on hearing we wanted to dive the Liberty wreck, nodded a lot and said it is a fantastic dive. So in our agenda of seeking peak experiences, spending our time on Ko Tao diving to learn skills so we can dive the wreck is the plan.

Our camera can actually go to 10m underwater. I’m going to see if we can get some pictures to post. Given we are diving deep it might be tough, but hopefully I can figure out a way.

— The Professor

 
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Posted by on January 20, 2013 in Ko Tao, scuba, Thailand, Uncategorized

 

Ko Tao

19 Jan

There are three islands close to one another on the east coast of southern Thailand: Ko Samui, Ko Phagnan, and Ko Tao. None of them are cheap like Laos is cheap (all you can eat buffet for $1.25!), due to their being beautiful tropical islands, but I listed them above in decreasing cost. Ko Samui is a well developed resort island, Ko Phagnan is famous for its beach dance parties, and Ko Tao, the little brother to the others, has become a diving mecca. Here you can see dive boats clustered around a dive site (I think this is Twin Pinnacles):

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Of course it has fine diving (we dove today and it was the best dive of my life, except maybe the time I swam alongside a turtle off the Kohala coast in Hawaii), but other places in the region have fantastic diving. As the cheapest of the three islands, Ko Tao is the place to learn how to dive and to take more advanced diving courses. Half of the places you can stay have dive schools, and in the afternoon every pool is filled with classes of people learning.

So this is our first stop in tropical Southeast Asia. The Private Eye and I haven’t dived in two and a half years, so we wanted to stop here to refresh our skills, maybe learn some new ones, and get recommendations from the local divers. After this, we’re thinking we want to dive Sail Rock (either from here or Ko Phagnan), I’m excited about the wreck dive near Bali (the Liberty), and we are considering going to the east coast of Thailand to dive the Similan islands. Originally the Similans had been high on our list, but it can be expensive, since it’s near the higher-end resort beaches of Phuket. So depending on how money is feeling when we wrap up here, we might head to Phuket, or, if money is tight, we might instead head to Railay Beach and Krabi, also on the east coast, for some oceanside cliff climbing.

Arriving here was, for lack of a better word, a bitch. We took the night train from Bangkok to Chumphon. We wanted a sleeper car, but it’s still busy enough around here, and we did it the day of, that all we could get were 2nd class seats. Since there was no AC, the windows were open, which meant passing trains were a deafening roar. A lot of other uncomfortable things meant each of us slept 3 hours at most. One night of poor sleep is not too hard, but we’d also only slept 3-4 hours the night before. We arrived in Chumphon at 5 am to take a bus at 6 am to a high speed catamaran to Ko Tao, departing at 7. The sea was rough enough that I started to become queasy, and almost lost it as I made my way to the back of the boat. What made it especially hard was that my eyes were so tired I couldn’t stay focused on the horizon – looking at the horizon I was fine, eyes closed or unfocused was bad. But once I was at the stern and could watch the churn of the water from the engines, I was fine. I actually feel asleep, sitting down, head resting on the railing. I arrived soaked in salt water, but with a stable stomach.

We caught a soorng-tao to Sairee beach, where a few of the most recommended dive schools are, found a too-expensive room that was fine for one night (B1200/$40) since we needed to sleep so badly, arranged for a refresher class the next day (Friday the 18th) with Scuba Junction, a seemingly awesome diving school (they are), and crashed out.

So this is a tropical island, with all that entails: beautiful white sand beaches whose sand is so fine in parts it feels like clay. The beach itself is all bars, restaurants, and dive schools. So you can, for B60 ($2), get a cup of coffee as well as toast with jam and butter, and eat them lounging on a patio that ends 10 feet from the surf. All of the beach is free access, so you can walk up and down it as much as you want. It’s not crowded. While it might be hard to find a patch of beach which has no one else for 30 feet, it’s trivial to find a spot for your towel. Sairee beach is about a kilometer long, with rocks at both of its ends, so you can walk it in 15 minutes.

I woke up before The Private Eye so did exactly that, walked up and down the beach, sitting down a few times, for an hour or so. Three people gave me fliers for events that evening as I walked: a new yoga studio, a flying trapeze show with free trials, and a bikini/trunk fashion show. I tried to be in the Burning Man spirit; rather than say no, I took every one offered with genuine interest. The Private Eye awoke, we had grilled barracuda for dinner (actually a big, square meal) and went to the trapeze show, whose details I’ll elide because I think The Private Eye night have more to say.

So we went to be early, woke up at 8 or so, booked a cheaper room, and made our way to Scuba Junction for our refresher course at 10AM.

— The Professor

 
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Posted by on January 19, 2013 in beaches, Ko Tao, scuba, Thailand, Uncategorized