I arrived in Bangkok in hot humid conditions and raining. But Bangok us very busy and I was happy to be in umongst all the people. It took me about 30 minutes to find my guest house called Siam II even although I had a map. This was largley due to no street signs and very little sinage to indicate where it was.... oh yes and maybe not asking for directions. 

Where  I was staying was close to Kohsan Road, where almost every other western traveller stays, but the area is very lively and there are lots of eating & drinking places to enjoy. I did some sightseeing and got to see Wat Krae Pro, the Grand Palace, Wat Phro, the 45m reclining Buddha, the giant swing and the Mount. I did some walking through Chinatown which is quite an experience. I only saw 2 westerners on my way out. The area is filled with street vendors selling almost anything. I mage an effort to go see all the new shopping malls and they are spectacular. It does not feel like you are in Asia at all. I also went to watch "The Two Towers". But decided to do it in style. The ticket price was about 7 pounds. What I got was my own fully reclining seat, in its own space in the cinema, blanket, pillow, free coffee and cookies. Quite a nice experience, pity the film was so crap.

I was happy to take the overnight train to Chumphon, where there is a transfer to Koh Tao island. The train trip was fairly uneventful, other than paying too much for beer. I arrived at 05:00 in the morning and had to wait for 2 hours bfore catching my ferry transfer to Koh Tao. The ferry ride was 3 hours and I ended up sleeping for most of it.

Arriving in Koh Tao you immediatley get a sense of island life and it does look stunning. Even if its all built up. When I got there I had no idea where my dive school was and so a taxi driver said he would take me there for 50 Baht. So I hitched a ride with him. He dropped me off and I went to the dive school where the guy told me that this was where they did free diving and that the shop I was looking for was about 400m from where the ferry had stopped. SUCKER!! Anyway he gave me a lift back to the dive school on his motorbike. I met Ian who was an English guy and my dive instructor. We started our lessons in the afternoon, but did not do any pratical stuff until the next day. I thought that I would take to the diving thing pretty easily and I did. Mask clearing, bouyancy control etc was fairly sraight forward. U did my PADI Open Water in 3.5 days. I decided to combine the Nitrox course with my Advanced Open water. Simply put Nitrox just allows you to to dive for longer than when diving on air. In the advanced course you do a deep dive to 30m where the Open water limits you to 18m. I then had to do a navigation dive, night dive which was spectacular, a multi-level dive and then a fish aware dive.

The water visibility ranged between 5m and 20m. At one of the divesites it felt like I was in a huge fish tank with so much coral, fish etc. The colours were amazing. I had the pleasure of diving with Grey Reef Sharks. Its a bit unnerving at first but you just need to relax and enjoy it. I saw so many different fish that it must of been close to about 80 different species. The only strange experience was having a cleaner wrasse come and pick at a small scar on my leg. And it bloody hurts when they do it and you struggle to get them to stop. They even tried to clean my ears for me as well. Little b*****s. Also saw some shrimp Gobies. Basically a shrimp makes a tunnel in the sea bottom and keeps it clean and open while the Gobi plays doorman and alerts the shrimp when danger is nearby by tapping it with its fin. Fast taps for danger and slow taps for all clear. Pretty cool to sit and watch.  

I spent a week on the island got 9 dives in. I did not really have time to explore the island in full, but that was ok. I headed back to Bagkok and caught a flight out to Hanoi to join a tour group for my 6 week Hanoi to Singapore trip.