Ludwig's Odyssey: Thailand - Bangkok and Koh Tao

We arrived late from Siem Reap and after a quick transfer, headed back to the hotel we stayed at when we first came to Bangkok back in March.

It was like being home, lovely comfortable bed and great sleeping.

It was almost like deja-vu, on our first full day, we headed to the shopping malls as we had done before as we were in need of new clothes and various supplies. Our second day was more touristy, we visited the main sites of Wat Pra Kaew & Grand Palace and also Wat Pho, both very busy places with lots of tourists but so beautiful and very much worth the visit. Wat Pra Kaew complex has so much gold around it’s nearly blinding and we spent a good few hours taking it all in. After a pit stop, we then went on to Wat Pho which houses a huge reclining golden buddha. It’s so big you can’t get a whole picture of it.

The complex around Wat Pho also has much more to offer and again we spent a good few hours taking it all in.

After this though, we both admitted that we had seen enough temples to last us for a while, nevertheless, the following day we also went to Golden Mount, another temple but we didn’t really go there to visit the temple, moreover to see Bangkok from up high and see the sprawl of this huge city.

We spent a few days after, just relaxing and eating nice street food. We also made a visit to China Town and had delicious Prawn Wonton and Duck Soup.

Bangkok is a great city and we really enjoyed it but after a few days we were ready to get out and get to the beach.

We made our way to Koh Tao by way of train to Chumphon with an overnight stay in a very uneventful town, followed by a somewhat fast and rough boat ride to the island of Koh Tao. The sea was quite choppy that day and we were very happy to get off the boat after nearly 3 hours of feeling nauseous...

And so, here we were, on Koh Tao, a tropical paradise but the prime reason we came was to learn to dive as it is the cheapest place in the world to get an Open Water qualification/certification.

Before our arrival, we had booked up a course with Alvaro Diving. For such a small island, there are so many dive centres on Koh Tao that it is difficult to choose the correct one from afar but we were recommended Alvaro by our friends Mike and Rita who had just recently dived with them and it was one of the best bits of advice we could have had.

The owner of Alvaro came to greet us off the boat and take us to his dive centre so we could fill in the paperwork and get started the following day.

Immediately we felt the relaxed atmosphere at this dive centre and we were sure that we had made the right choice.

We chose a package that included some discounted accommodation next door and so dropped our bags off at our bungalow and started to read through the book we had been given, homework was set for us too! The bungalow wasn’t much but the view was fantastic which made up for it.

The following day, we watched a 2 hour video followed by some more reading. The day after we started to learn the skills underwater with our Instructor Sascha from Germany who speaks great english and is a great teacher too, a really relaxed guy who loves diving and teaching people the skills. We were taken out on the Sea Cutter or SS Alvaro II boat which is a great boat and much nicer looking compared to competitors boats in the bay. We spent a good 1h30 underwater, only about 3 Metres deep in a shallow bay (rather than a swimming pool which we were glad about) and by the end had a rough understanding of what it meant to breathe underwater.

Day three consisted of our first two dives in which we had to apply various skills that we had learned but we also had time to enjoy the dives and to see lots of wonderful underwater life, we even saw a black tipped reef shark on our first dive so that was pretty cool. We were only meant to go to 12 metres today but our naughty instructor ;-) took us to 21metres (you’re only supposed to go down as far as 18 metres on Open Water, to go further down you have to do an advanced course or get a deep diving certification), still we didn’t mind, we got to see some stingrays!

The last day, we completed two more dives to 18 metres and we were starting to feel more confident that we could really do this! We also had to pass a multiple choice exam and we did, all the revision we had done paid off. So that was that, we were now officially Open Water certified divers, hooray!

We celebrated with some of the guys and girls from Alvaro that night with a nice meal and a few drinks.

We then spent the next couple of days just relaxing we walked to Sairee on one day (the main beach area) and we were glad that we were staying in the quieter Chalok Bay area we also’ moved house’ to a new place with better facilities, such as a flushing toilet!!

The bungalow we were staying in was very basic, it did the job whilst we were doing the course but wasn’t so good to relax in.

The diving bug was now set in and we spent the next two days diving. Our first two fun dives at South West Pinnacle and Shark Island were enjoyable because we could just dive and enjoy without having to stop and practice skills. The visibility wasn’t as good on these dives and we don’t think we saw anything new (as we had already dived at these two sites before) but great fun all the same and we could now practice on improving some essential skills, Wendy her buoyancy and Me my breathing so as to not consume too much air and stay in the water longer.

The next day, we dived twice again but at a new location and these were our best dives yet in terms of what we saw. Absolutely amazing. It really was like diving into an aquarium fully loaded with big fish such as big schools of Barracudas, Queenfish and Cobias, we also saw some other huge fish that are more solitary such as Bluespotted Stingrays, Moray Eel, Groupers and Titan Triggers. I won’t list all the fish we have seen as it will be boring to read but suffice to say that every colour of the rainbow was accounted for. If you wan’t to see what they look like, this handy page lists the fish you can see around here and we’ve seen about 90% of them I would say.

Aside from fish, the corals are beautiful and all the wonderful little creatures that live on them, our favourite strangest sighting are Nudibranch, they are amazing little things, so colourful.

These two dives at Chumphon Pinnacle were by far our favourites to date, the visibility was great and we had the biggest grins on our faces when we came back on the boat. It also helped that we had such a great guide in Daniel from Switzerland, such a nice guy.

It made us think of dear departed Ray that day, one of his passions was diving and he would have been so happy for us.

A few more days of relaxing and not doing too much in general (sitting on the beach reading our books) ensued before we departed on a special day trip to Sail Rock. It takes about two hours to get there from Koh Tao as the site is closer to Koh Phangan so this meant an early start but breakfast and lunch was included. This is meant to be one of the best dive sites in the world when the visibility is good and I think we were lucky that day, we enjoyed two great dives with our guide Sofia from Chile, such a sweetie, (it really is a good cosmopolitan mix at Alvaro) and saw lots of the impressive Bat Fish and big schools of other fish as well as lots of varieties of the omnipresent Angel Fish which are so colourful. I’ll quote one of the Instructors who said he loves this site, it’s like “fish soup” and it really was, so many fish all around us. Another bonus at this site was the ‘chimney’ that goes through part of the pinnacle, it’s good fun to go through at around 18 metres and swim up and out of it at around 6 metres.

We also enjoyed a third dive as part of the package back at one of the sites we had dived at before but with our confidence growing now, we could really enjoy this site more than the previous times we had dived at South West Pinnacle even if the visibility wasn’t as good.

We decided to stick around Koh Tao for the last week off our Visa, we had thought of moving on to other islands nearby but we were settled and we made some nice friends so it was good to not have to move for the sake of moving, I don’t think we would have gained much by going to Ko Phangan or Ko Samui (the diving isn’t as cheap that’s for sure). As they say in this part of the world “Same Same, but different”.

We spent most of our days at the beach although it did rain or was overcast on a couple of days so we couldn’t ‘top up the tan’ quite as much as we’d hoped. Oh, how we suffer... ;-)

There are many shallow bays just around where we are staying so we made the most of it and did some snorkelling to see if we could spot some Green Turtles that live around here, and we did! We swam with two different ones on two separate days who were very big so must have been quite old, we just watched them whilst they fed on the algae not really taking too much notice of us so we could get really close, probably only a metre or so from us. Just beautiful. Hopefully we’ll be lucky to swim with one in the deep someday.

We did two more dives, bringing our total up to 13 which were good fun, one back to Chumphon and we did see something new, a Porcupine Puffer, much bigger than we thought then to another site that we hadn’t been to before called Twins, the visibility wasn’t so good there but we did see Nemo at last! poor little soul all on his own with his dad. There are lots of clown fish in the area but 99% are of the pink variety.

The only thing that could have made our diving experiences better would have been a underwater camera as we haven’t been able to take any photos, maybe next time!

So it was with mixed emotions that we left Koh Tao, keen to move on and visit new places but sad to leave new friends behind.

A long journey awaits on a night ferry and two buses to get to our next destination, Penang in Malaysia.

Bangkok