I have realized that I really enjoy acquiring new skills, especially physical ones. While I find diving very enjoyable, I will admit that after a certain number of dives, all the coral and beautiful fish and even fantastic sea turtles start to blend together a little. You start to wonder then if you should continue paying rather steep prices to keep diving. It’s fun and exhilirating but you also start to feel like you’ve seen it. Or at least I did until I tried night diving.
Night diving is something new entirely. There are added elements of danger since it’s easy to become disoriented, lose your partner or ascend or descend too quickly. There are new skills to learn like how to signal in the light. Familiar sights look very different when diving at night and the beam of your flashlight has this very other-worldly quality about it.
The real magic comes though when you shut off the lights. Like in air, your eyes adjust to the darkness and you can pick out other divers off in the distant gloom with their own lights. More special still is the phyto plankton: Swirl your hand in front of your face and sparks trail off behind it, exactly like casting a spell in the movies. It’s a pretty intense and special feeling.
After a week in Ko Phangan (Where does the time go?!) I have moved on to Ko Tao. This kind of travel really gives you a first hand view of the limitations of the Lonely Planet and it’s peers. While the books describe Ko Tao as very rural, without even fulltime power, arriving at the dock, you see a pretty thriving Scuba destination with plush resorts that exceed anything Ko Phangan has to offer. Oh well, good thing I love to Scuba dive!
I went out for two dives yesterday (first time in probably 5 years) and reminded myself how much I love it. Lots of great coral and wildlife including a huge sea turtle and a 3m reef shark. Great stuff. Today I am going out to “shark bay” in the boat of a local that my friend Danielle has met. These guys don’t speak a ton of English so we will see if we get what we expect. Lots of suntan lotion definitely required!
On my flight into Thailand, I skipped Bangkok entirely and on the advice of a friend headed directly to Ko Samui and onwards to Ko Phangan. It’s like each of those places gets progressively less developed as you go, with Bangkok as mega-metropole, Ko Samui as developed honeymoon destination ala Maui (with an awesomely cute airport) and Ko Phangan still bearing the traces of what people who came to Thailand in the 80s still talk about – simple and hedonistic. The big decisions are whether to lie on the beach or take a walk up to the lighthouse. I have not yet made it out of Hat Rin, the biggest development on the Island although still quite simple and laid back. Television has made a little too much of an inroad here and it feels like a big frat party but there’s still plenty of magic. Soon I will head up to Kao Tao an even smaller island focused mostly around Scuba diving.
I have never been very good at keeping a journal. In elementary school, I had an amazing English teacher, Mr. Lowndes and part of the assignment in his class was to keep a running diary of what we were reading, what I thought of it so far, and so on. At the end of the term, he collected them and graded them – for what I am not exactly sure, perhaps just to see that we had done them. Of course being the typical lazy student, I often would not keep up with the work and then, on the night before they were to be turned in, I would try and rush through a month worth of journal entries. It never worked of course – it’s hard to remember how you felt about something when you had less knowledge than you do now and my slacking was always obvious. Perhaps that was the whole point…
So it is with keeping a blog of my travels. It has been almost a month since my last blog entry and I’ve had the vague although diminshing hope that I would go back and “catch up” with the entries I’d missed. I’ve taken lots of great photos (captured here) but I have not been great about writing my thoughts. Part of it has been I find the keyboards in little Internet Cafes to be incredibly cumbersome, reminding me of my youthful problems manipulating a pen. Perhaps I will still go back and write about Brazil and Argentina from the notes in my trusty moleskin, but it is time to stop compounding the damage, not writing about today because I haven’t written about yesterday. Onwards.
