Diving in Thailand

We traveled to koh phangan island in the gulf of siam, thailand to do some diving. My wife Pam is a new diver, I haven't done much diving since high school in the 1970's so we were looking for an easy but interesting place to dive.

We flew United Airlines from Las Vegas to Bangkok via San Francisco and Tokyo. The new business class bed seats are pretty awesome slept well on the flights. From Bangkok to Ko Samui on Bangkok Airways then a ferry to Ko Phangan. There are two ferries that run to the island, a normal one that leaves from a dock near the airport and a faster catamaran ferry that is a little longer bus ride to the dock. We took the normal boat to the island and the catamaran back. The cat was considerably faster but the longer bus ride made the travel time to the airport about the same.

Our first dive was at Ko Tao, the island just north of Phangan. We took the normal ferry and ended up diving off the big boat as it's used as a dive boat before it's next run to the South. There were many divers and even more snorkelers but our small group of 5 including instructor Don Dunlop were able to find an area we could explore without too many divers. I was amazed that the coral in Thailand seemed darker and more intricate than the ones in Hawaii. There are also many large sea anemone with clown fish living within.

Our next three days of diving was at Sailrock. We kept going back in hopes of seeing a whale shark. There seemed to be millions of fish, so many that you couldn't see the some of the other divers in the area through them. One of the videos that Don shot of our dives is at http://www.youtube.com/user/lightwatertv#p/a/u/2/i5RFLBYXI1E

Some of the fish that we observed were groupers, lion fish, clown fish, and barracudas. One barracuda looked like it was 2 meters long, the groupers were very large as well. Don is a great instructor with photography as well as diving and I learned much about shooting pictures underwater from him.

In the future, we would like to dive the nearby national park and the areas out of Phuket.

Ko Phangan's north end is very quiet and a great place to relax, the hotels and beaches are very nice, we would like to go back again.

Tourist?

Our friend Lynda who is working with the Peace Corps in Thailand said that were "doing the tourist thing". I replied that we are tourists, so we booked an all day tour yesterday on Ko Phangan island in the Gulf of Siam.

Pam got to drive me around on an elephant. It was amazing that such a large powerful animal can be so gentle. The elephant walked up to me and I hugged his trunk as suggested by the Mahat (elephant trainer). Pam rode on the neck of our elephant, named Zoe, with me in the seat on her back. She seemed very hungry as she wanted to stop and eat quite often.

When we were done, Pam fed an elephant a basket of bananas, they were eaten very quickly.

We also rented a pair of scooters rode around and went snorkeling. It's good to be able to get away from all we have going on at home. The hotel that we stayed at was on Salad Beach called Salad Hut. It's a great place, we had a beautiful air conditioned cabin just steps from the beach. http://www.saladhut.com/

There are a number of nice hotels and restaurants up and down the beach. We had dined at most of the places over nine days and enjoyed them all. Our favorite was on the south end of the beach up the hill. Cookies Resort had the best food that we had the entire trip and a great view as well. http://cookiessaladresort.resort.phanganbungalows.com/