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/

Japan

Pam and I got to Japan to spend a day with my uncle. We were lucky enough to get a couple of lay-flat business class seats on the united 747-400 from sfo to nrt. Almost no turbulence for the entire flight, late summer and fall is a nice time to fly.

My uncle, who is a retired electrical construction company owner, picked us up at narita baggage claim and took us to a hotel in Itaka, Japan. The hotel was the itaka hotel and on a river in a rice farming area north of narita. We rode a boat on the river and soaked at the hotel bathhouse.

The next day we toured the large standing budahh near narita and a very nice shinto shrine not too far away from the hotel.

We took the 6:30 p.m. united flight to Bangkok and checked into the queens garden hotel near the airport for the night.

San Francisco to Tokyo

We're at San Francisco airport trying to fly space available to Tokyo. As airline employees that like to travel, we sometimes get stuck at an airport when the airplane is full. After factoring in extra nights at a hotel, it's sometimes cheaper to buy a full fare ticket. An advantage of space available is that you can change your mind about where and when you want to go. On this trip we are probably returning through Hong Kong instead of Tokyo but that may change if the flights out of hkg look like they're filling up.

We took the 6 a.m. flight out of Las Vegas giving us 4 hours between flights at sfo. We chose to take the early flight as the later flights didn't have as many open seats.

This three week trip will hopefully take us to Tokyo, Bangkok, Ko Phangan (island in the gulf of siam), Siem Reap (Angkor Wat, Cambodia), and Hong Kong before returning to Boulder City, Nevada.

The above shot is of a B777 parked at sfo scheduled to fly to Beijing.

Sandy Nelson and the Sin City Termites

I've had the pleasure of getting to know our neighbor Sandy Nelson who is known for creating 'let there be drums' made popular in the 1960's. He's really fun as he has a great sense of humor and an interesting take on life.

Sandy's latest project is called Sandy Nelson and the Sin City Termites. We have posted a youtube video with the first track of his new album as the sound track.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4URuE_iSX74

Snorkeling Maui

Airline layovers are usually not long enough to allow scuba diving so it's been snorkeling on the Maui and Kona layovers. My friend Matt Ragan also of Boulder City and a pilot was vacationing on Maui with family, joined me one morning in the water near the makena boat ramp where a lot of kayak trips start.

We found a rocky cove with public access just north of the point near the boat launching area. Swam out to the five caves turtle town reefs that are popular with tourists. We only spotted one turtle but there were lots of fish, most interesting was a snowflake eel and barracuda.

I later read that if we wanted to see a shark this would be a good place. We didn't see any sharks, maybe next time.

Snorkeling in Hawaii

Hawaii is a great place to snorkel and I've been going out every chance I get. Last week near Kona we spotted a dozen or so sea turtles (honu in Hawaiian) while snorkeling. The local kayak operator wouldn't rent us kayaks due to the offshore winds so we swam out and had a great time anyway.