Despite having a CMAS 2 star (equivalent to PADI advanced open water), I have never actually dived leisurely before. I got my licence from being in the Naval Diving Unit in Singapore. This was my first experience with "real" diving and it was truly amazing! Koh Tao is truly one of the most relaxing, chill places there is and I would definitely go back there again.
Feel free to skip to any of the parts below!
Background
Getting to Koh Tao
DIVE DIVE DIVE!
Onwards
Background
This was our first real holiday since the Covid 19 pandemic began. For the past 2 years, we have been stuck in Singapore doing the same old things every other week, Climb - Kayak - Macritchie - Repeat.
I've even been to Clementi forest at least 4 times already. So were FREAKInG excited when we were finally going to do something new! There were many "first-time" experiences for all of us during this trip.
Getting to Koh Tao
Not many have heard of Koh Tao before, it's much less visited as its activities are 90% diving. Getting to Koh Tao, you have to fly to Koh Samui and take a 2hr ferry there. We booked our ferry via the company Lomprayah ferries (picture below!). They have a pier at Mae Name which is about a 20-30 min drive from the airport. We read that when the weather is bad, the ride gets very choppy and most people get seasick from the long boat ride, so do prepare some seasick pills if you need them.
After 2hrs, we were on Koh Tao! Immediately, you could tell that the island was full of dive shops at the beachfront. Shortly after arriving at the port, we saw a guy from the dive shop that we made a booking waiting for us. He picked us up on a lorry and drove us off to the shop to settle some admin stuff. The place where we did our diving was called "Simple Life Divers", they were quite good and thorough with their teaching knowledge and did a really good job at it. My friends did their Basic open water with them, while I did the advance. There we paid 11,000 THB for the Basic and 10,000 THB for the Advance.
Anyway, our first impression when we were at Koh Tao was pretty Meh~. When we settled into our accoms around 3 pm and took a slow walk around the streets, we kinda expected lively streets with cool dive shops and food stalls around and many people busy with the liveliness there. But there was not much, we only got the dive shop part. we ate some mango sticky rice and went back to attend the dive theory lessons. After that, we went out for a nice dinner and rested for the long day ahead. We felt like we didn't get the Lively beach vibes that we were expecting and was kinda dissapointed. But all that changed in the next few days.
Dive Dive Dive!
Actually, the first thing I did was hike instead of dive! while my friends went for a morning pool dive intro session, I went for a solo half-day hike around Koh Tao. This isn't really the highlight of the trip so I'll keep this part short. Basically, I started from Sairee beach where our dive centre was, made my way to the main road and walked left. I turned inland when I reached monsoon Muay Thai gym and kept going up towards the peak. There was signage along the way which made it easier. Halfway through, the road ended and the path was an offroad kind of trail. After about 1.5 hr from the start, I made it to Cloud Nine restaurant/viewpoint to have a short breakfast which was pork fried rice. the view was really good as you could see the beach from there and had a nice balcony to sit at, sadly the wind was so strong and cold so I had to sit inside. After that I continued up to another viewpoint which was in between 2 rocks. Theres actually several of these viewpoints up there facing different parts of the island. Not sure what the names of the viewpoints are, but none were really amazing to be honest. Below are some pics. After a short while, I went down back to my accoms to rest awhile before my afternoon dive.
Okay, so back to the main attraction! After the warmup hike, I went back to meet my friends who had just done their first pool dive! They said it was kinda scary as it was their first time, but at the same time, they felt safe as it was still in a pool. shortly after, I met up with my dive master, Cameron, and went for my long-awaited dive!
The first site we went to was twins, short for twin pinnacles. It's named this way as it was made up of 2 pinnacles that are covered in lively corals. Our guide Cameron gave us a brief guide on what to expect down there and off we went!
Our Second dive site was just a short 5 min boat ride away called "White Rock". It's called that cus it has a White rock in the middle LOL.
The two sites were pretty cool, visibility was not bad on that day about 10+ m visibility. We saw many types of fish like parrot fish, banded fish, squirrel fish and many others that I forgot the names of haha. We even saw some puffer fish and also blue spotted stingrays!
<Heres is a cool nudibranch that we saw, these were pretty common around the whole place.
On the second day of diving, I started my advanced course. My Instructor, Ethan, was extremely experienced, when he was thirteen he already had a rescue diver licence! he brought me out to a calm site called "Mango Bay" which was a beginner-friendly site to learn new skills. While I practised navigation skills with a compass and finning counting, my friends were doing their very first sea dive. It was a very nice location for beginner dives as the bottom was flat and sandy at only around 5/6m depth. After finishing the navigation skills and doing a little box search, we swam to the other side of the bay where w headed a fun dive and saw corals and fishes. we surfaced around 1 hour into the dive, slightly longer than usual as it was a shallow dive and our air lasted longer.
Our next dive site was at a location called Japanese gardens. Also shallow at about 5-8m, it was another beginner-friendly dive site. I didn't pay much attention to the scenery as Ethan and I was busy with the skills course. We practised buoyancy at this place. We tried having weights at different points on our body to get USD to adjust buoyancy to compensate for additional weights. Evening out the weights and also holding weights at different points was something new for me and it was an interesting lesson. I didn't have many pictures on this day as I wanted to focus on the lesson and not bring my GoPro.
On the third day, I clocked SO MANY DIVES! In total, I went for 5 dives that day. The first 2 dives in the morning were at "Twins" and "Hin Pee Wee". The first site, twins I was already familiar with as I had dived here on the first day. I used my own knowledge of the area and also a compass to practice navigation. This time, I was the "guide" bringing my instructor Ethan around the site. It was a pretty easy place to navigate as there were only 2 pinnacles and around it was pretty much just bare sandy bottoms. I managed to get back to where we started and in the end after some searching, found our dive boat!
The second site was at Hin Pee Wee, which was a deep dive and wreck dive. The Wreck is found at about 25-30m, and at the front of the wreck about 20m away was another pinnacle. My instructor brought us down from the pinnacle towards the wreck. We weren't supposed to touch anything there as it might be potentially dangerous/rusty/sharp. When w were beside the wreck at about 27m, Ethan brought out a pack of potato chips and showed me the colour. It had totally changed colours, the vibrant colours that it once had! mainly the red and orange hues that the chips bag once had were completely gone, with only a blackish and grey hue remaining. Also, notice that the chips bag looks crushed on the right side, this is due to the pressure of 27m of water above me at the time. that's 2.7x of the normal atmospheric pressure! if you haven't experienced this before it might be hard to believe, but in the picture below, the left bag is actually after the deep dive and the right bag is during the dive at 27m.
After that, w had a quick lunch break and got ready for our afternoon dives! I got to join my friends as they had already completed their basic open water and these were fun dives! We visited Twins and White rock again! below are some pictures.
After the 4 dives w head in the day, I was reeeally tired and at first, I didn't want to continue on to do the night dive. But I thought to myself, that since we were already all the way here, we might as well do all the dives that we could. So we went ahead with the night dive which began at around 7 pm just when the sun was about to set. It was a shore dive, meaning we walked down by the beach till we were at about knee/waist level, then we put on our fins and continued to find out. It was a pretty peaceful dive, but a bit scary as it has been a while since I did any night dives. There were quite a lot of sea urchins which made the dive a bit scarier than it was as I kept thinking they were going to poke me hahaha. We saw some different marine animals like large hermit crabs, several blue spotted stingrays, and sand crabs in addition to the other fish we also saw during the day. When we like maybe 300m out or so (wild guess as it was very hard to gauge the distance at night), we turned back and started to follow the lights back to shore. About 10 mins after we turned, I noticed that we were heading in the wrong direction as the compass was pointing elsewhere. I signalled to Ethan and we corrected our course. But while later, we were again going in the wrong direction. this time, we surfaced and tried to find our bearings. we were in a totally different spot from where we thought we were going. As the beachfront was full of lights, we had followed the wrong lights and ended up about 100m off course from our intended path. I was kinda worried? as it was dark and cold and I just had a really long day of diving and this was my 5th dive. However, we were still pretty confident as our destination was still in sight and Ethan has been diving around here his whole life anyways LOL. So we followed the correct direction and made sure to check our bearings more often. Because we were on a different path, the way back was very different from where we came from. the corals were more abundant and it was really shallow. At some parts, my cylinder was already at the surface and my fins were just scrapping on the corals as I kicked. luckily, I didn't scratch myself on any of the corals or that would have hurt. about 20-30 mins later, we finally reached back to the beach and I could finally take a break after a long day.
After that long night dive with my friends and had a quick dinner and a good rest. For there were still 2 more dives the next day. Initially, we didn't plan to dive as we had already spent the past 3 days diving almost the whole time. But the dive shop said that they were going to a site called Chumphon. It's a few kilometres out from the island, hence the corals and fishes there are more abundant. Most importantly, it was a known spot for whale sharks to hang out! Unfortunately, when we went we missed the whale sharks :( However, we did see so many schools of fish much larger than any at the previous dive sites. The fishes here were just so much more abundant! at times, my dive buddy who was just a few meters from me would be completely blocked out by a school of barracuda swimming between us. They weren't just bigger, but larger as well. The guide told us that the groupers were many times bigger than those we previously saw. Overall it was a really good experience at this dive site. unfortunately, there are no pictures as my GoPro hung moments after we got in the waters.
During the few days there, we tried out several restaurants and we found 2 VERY good ones! the first is Sairee Cottage Restaurant which was a beachside restaurant with stunning sunset views! the place had all the basic Thai food, cocktails, and even BBQ and handmade pizza! the pizza was really good and w came to this place twice during our stay here. The second place was mama tam. They had super good and authentic Thai food at a very cheap price, it was one of the best Thai food we had anywhere in our 2 weeks trip in Thailand. Below are some of the pictures of the food!
Onwards
For us, Koh Tao is an island that grows on you the longer you stay there. Although small compared to some of the bigger places (eg. Koh Samui, Krabi, Phuket) it has so many things to do! we spent a whole week there and we haven't even been to the other side of the island yet where many other snorkelling and diving sites are! I saw that there are even rock climbing crags there. We felt much more connected to this island than Krabi or Bangkok where which were our next destinations. I would definitely be back one day for the dives and mama tam :)
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