We're Being Put in the Special Ed Diving Class

Since our snorkeling trip a few days ago, a lot has changed. First, the hotel we rented didn’t have a room for us for Friday night unless we upgraded to the “Superior Room” which would have run us 2400 baht, or close to $75 a night. This may not sound like much, but we’ve got a long trip here and you’ve got to cut corners where you can (such as siphoning gas out of other peoples' scooters after they park them). We moved out Friday morning and had already decided to enroll in a Scuba Dive school. After a 3 day course, we’d be PADI certified open water divers and could then scuba anywhere in the world. This sounded like the kind of adventure we were looking for. We both love the water, have an almost unhealthy obsession with fish (both in aquariums and on plates) and we love to challenge ourselves. To top it all off, while you’re enrolled in the school, they give you free accommodations – all for under $300/person.

We enrolled with New Way dive around noon on Thursday and the guy at the front desk asked if we’d mind waiting until Saturday to start the class. Not even knowing what day it was at the time anyway, this seemed like a perfectly reasonable proposition. We agreed and were told to come back at 5pm to start the classroom portion of the class which consisted of watching 3 chapters of a DVD and taking written exams home with us to be completed and checked over Saturday morning when we returned to class. The DVD was VERY boring but we made it through. Thursday night, our final night in Simple Life Hotel, we went to dinner at a Thai restaurant (obviously… but I mean they served Thai versus western food) and hit the beach bars. While down there we met another English couple that we had drinks with all night, a good time.

Friday morning, we woke up and went back to New Way Dive to get our accommodations for the next 3 nights. They took us to a hotel that’s really more of a bungalow. It’s very plain with absolutely no frills except it has a tv and we’re close enough to the main building that we pick up their wireless internet (kind of). After settling in, we hit the pool and started up a conversation with another English, actually Cornish, couple that were awesome. They’re about our ages and have the same sense of humor, distaste for Bono (from the band U2) and carefree attitudes while on the island. It’s really pretty hard to get too upset about things, even when you’re wound as tightly as I am. We hung out with them for a good time in the pool, took to the hotel restaurant for dinner and the sunset and then proceeded to get rockstar drunk down at the beach while watching the fire show (even better pictures attached below). The English couple from the night before actually ended up meeting us and we all hung out, learned a new game called sh!thead (which Molly and I ended up cleaning up in) and watched the fire twirlers while drinking buckets. Buckets are mixed drinks served in a bucket. They’re absolutely lethal. I tried to convince the Brits to play acey ducey, but they seemed reluctant to lose all of their baht in a game I could essentially be making up. Molly and I, trying to somewhat behave, left around 1:30am to come home to prepare to start scuba school the next day.

Saturday morning we woke up and headed down to school for a review of the first 3 chapters of the DVD. The review was long, but very helpful. After a long lunch break, we piled into a pickup truck with a ton of gear and headed down to deep hotel pool down the island. After a lot of instruction in the shallow end, and practicing a number of essentials, we took to the deep end to really get acquainted with the scuba ins and outs. Molly struggled a bit with some of the techniques, mostly because her mask kept filling with water. Also, if you’ve never done this before, stop for a second and think about how bizarre it is to strap on 65 pounds of gear, jump into the deep end of pool and submerse yourself for 20 minutes. Breathing at first is very difficult because it’s a very natural instinct to TOTALLY panic. We got through all of the skill tests in the pool with flying colors and left for the night feeling great, but exhausted.

We woke up at 7am the following day, Saturday, to finish our written tests prior to arriving at school. We aced the tests and finished all classroom activities and went to lunch. Thankfully, Molly is significantly better at math word problems than I am. Simple addition and subtraction is hard enough, nevermind having to READ on top of that. We got back from lunch and boarded the truck to head out for our first open water dive. We arrived on the boat, went through a quick briefing and geared up. Looking at the two of us, it was clear we were pretty nervous. Neither of us has ever been underwater further than about 8 feet and certainly not 36 feet down. Our instructor, Stephan (who sounds exactly like Arnold Schwarzenegger) identified Molly and I as the two that would immediately follow him into the water. Behind us was an older couple from Maine and a random bozo who was buddied with another divemaster. On the way down, due to my recent bout with Bronchitis, my ears were giving me a lot of trouble. We had to go real slow to give my ears time to adjust and Molly was experiencing a pretty serious case of anxiety. We finally got to the bottom, adjusted our buoyancy (using an inflatable jacket and our lungs) and were able to get perfectly parallel to the bottom, suspended weightlessly about 3 feet off the ocean floor. We saw some pretty unbelievable stuff and I wish our underwater camera wouldn’t have been crushed like a coke can under that pressure. TONS of fish, schools of literally thousands of fish all moving in unison, beautiful coral, just everything you could imagine. We spent 44 minutes on the ocean floor and finally surfaced because I had sucked my tank nearly completely dry of air. The “time to surface” number is 50 bars of air pressure. When I got to the top, I was just under 30, which would have allowed for about 4 more minutes of breathing underwater.

We reboarded the boat and took a 30 minute ride to our next dive site. Molly and I were both having problems with our ears and were slightly apprehensive to get back into the water and dive all the way down to 36+ feet again. Nonetheless, we geared up and hopped in. The descent to the bottom was very difficult. I had real problems trying to equalize the pressure, or pop my ears. The only thing that seemed to be working was wiggling my jaw around, which caused my mask to fill with water and to get water in my regulator (breathing apparatus in my mouth). Having both of these things happen causes you to slightly panic, plus you’re still trying to pop your ears while all of this is going on. We got down to the bottom and were both fine. We followed our instructor to a sandy area where he had us kneel on the ground to begin our skills test. This time, Molly and I were scheduled to go last. At this point, I was doing fine, but began to feel like I was really out of breath. The heavier I breathed, the more out of breath I got. Then water started to come into my mask again, which promptly went up my nose and down my throat. Now I REALLY panicked as I started to cough and choke. I accidentally spit my regulator out while coughing and couldn’t take a breath. I almost broke the cardinal rule which is to not shoot straight up to the surface. When doing so, there’s a lot of potential danger due to what’s commonly called “the bends.” Thank god my lovely wife was right next to me as she was fast witted enough to jam the regulator back in my mouth. I had enough sense to hit the purge button on the front of the regulator which basically blasts a ton of air through it and clears any and all water out. Molly, now panicking herself, immediately swam to the instructor and got his attention. He swam over and tried to calm me enough to continue. I finally cooled off, as did Molly, and we passed our skills tests which included flooding you mask with water and clearing it, spitting out your regulator, dropping it and then locating it behind you as well as hovering, which is just adjusting your buoyancy to the point of floating weightlessly. Surprisingly, we both passed all of these with flying colors again. Then, our instructor looked at my air gauge and I was already in the danger zone after about 15 minutes underwater (the dive was scheduled for 45 minutes at the minimum). Apparently I slurp air at a faster rate than Charlie Sheen goes through cocaine. At this point, Stephan told Molly and I to do a “buddy breathe” and head to the surface with the divemaster in the back. To do so, we had to grab each other by the right elbow with our right hands, I had to spit out my regulator and grab Molly’s emergency regulator and we both had to use her air tank to ascend. We did so and I can honestly say I’ve never been so happy to get my head out of water.

This experience was enough to convince Molly that diving wasn’t for us and really, I had no legs to stand on to argue with her. It certainly didn’t help that Stephan kept referring to us as his “freaky students” due to multiple incidents underwater which may or may not have included soiling my bathing suit.

We woke up Monday morning at 5:30 am to be at the school for a scheduled departure of 5:50 and informed Stephan we wouldn’t be joining them. He wasn’t pleased and tried on numerous occasions to convince us that we weren’t the first or last freaks down there. I give in to peer pressure quite easily, so I was an easy convince, but Molly held strong and told him thanks but no thanks.  It wasn't, however, a total waste of time.  We did become Certified Scuba Divers and are now able to scuba dive anywhere in the world as long as a Certified Divemaster joins us.  This is no shame as neither of us freaks would feel comfortable planning and executing our dives without someone holding our leashes.  

We decided instead to rent 2 4-wheelers (one for Chris and Julie, the Cornish couple we’ve been hanging out with) and I got a dirtbike. I figured if I couldn’t risk my life underwater, what better way to risk it than flying around an unfamiliar island on a 2 wheel deathmobile with only flip flops and a bathing suit! We snorkeled in a new bay, had a beer at an unbelievable resort overlooking the bay and all neighboring islands, took the scariest and steepest dirt road I’d ever seen to try another bay and then did dinner at Buddha Beach where we all got freshly grilled seafood and landfood. It was a great day that didn’t involve any potential drownings.

We made it back to our hotel to get cleaned up for the night and go out for some buckets – which are really the most economical way to party here. They literally give you a small pail with a handle (just like a bucket you’d take to the beach as a small kid) that holds about a liter of liquid. They put ice, a bottle of M-152 (the local equivalent of Red Bull, only with amphetamine in it – seriously) a can of coke and a butt-ton of Sangsum in it, which is a local rum. After a lot of deep, drunken conversation with Chris about politics, religion and the difference in slang words for one’s genitalia (you can see how this digressed), I lost track of the number of buckets I’d had and we all decided to head home to have one more beer on the pool deck and discuss our contempt for Bono.

The night ended around 4:00 am and we woke up at 9 to move out of our bungalow. We’re now sitting aboard the high speed catamaran, traveling with Chris and Julie, headed to Koh Phangan where the Black Moon party will take place tomorrow night. That should be very interesting, as will finding accommodations because we haven’t looked in to anything yet. More updates to come, but in the meantime, please have a look at the variety of pictures we’ve taken over the last few days.

P.S. Molly completely buzzed off all of my hair.

Sunset at Sunsetburi Hotel in Koh Tao

Fire Twirlers in Koh Tao While Using the Slow Shutter Speed of Camera

                                     

From Left: Chris, Julie, Mary and Pete

Sunset in Koh Tao

Very Strange Rooster - Get Your Act Together, Bird

Another Sunset

Overlooking Aow Leuk Bay from Seaview Bar/Hotel

Aow Leuk Bay

Cool Jungle Tree

Buddha View Grill

Just After Sunset at Buddha View

Feeding Time at Buddha View

Julie With Her Found Frog

I Got My Hair Stuck in a Boat Propeller

The Pancake Man - This Guy is a Machine

Our New Room in Koh Phangan

View From Our New Balcony