Day 24

SCUBA 3

After a devastating first alarm at 4.30am, reminding me fondly of my time at M&S, I begrudgingly got out of bed and packed trying to be as stealthy as possible to not wake anyone. I walk in the dark down to the dive centre, walking past the last few people at bars, where all of a sudden we reach a lively gathering of 20 ish divers ready to go for a morning dive. I say lively but in reality I was just feeling like a corpse compared to the rest of the who probably got more than 3 or 4 hours of sleep.

I get given my chicken, egg, bacon, lettuce, tomato and ketchup sandwich which was lovely and big enough I couldn't eat it all straight away. We head onto the boat and watch the sun peak over the island. Today we head to a site called Hin Pee Wee first, where there's now 5 of us, Mika our instructor, Jani our divemaster in training, Claudia, me, and a new guy who is also a divemaster in training so he was leading. Our first dive went okay. But we descended too fast for me to equalise properly so I had to faff around ascending and descending and my ears didn't feel quite right for the rest of the dive. Add the residual numb pain from yesterday and my ears were not a happy bunny. We went round some rock pinnacles, where at some point I went too close and almost crashed into one, getting stabbed in the finger by an urchin.

After a surfacing and a short debrief we waited for about an hour, where I had a small nap awkwardly on an air tank. We move to another close site called No Name Pinnacle, where there was a ship wreck. We could only dive to 18m and that's where the shipwreck started but it was still cool to see it. Also, this was definitely the best dive I had done, my equalisation was good, my bouyancy was super controlled and I had no problems. The shipwreck was super cool, being able to see the turret of a ship with small fish using it as their home was pretty cool, plus Jani was taking pictures with his GoPro so we have some really cool pictures of us diving.

After surfacing, heading to shore, and cleaning our equipment, we log our dives and get our certification! We then get to chose a free t shirt which was awesome but also 100% cotton so 100% to warm to wear here. I then head to the beach for a while and meet up with Alfie where we spend a couple hours trying to plan our onward travel. Now instead of going straight to Khao Sok, we're heading to Krabi on a night ferry tomorrow.

We head to a viewpoint called John-Suwan on the South of the island which had a beautiful view of the island with a bay on the left and to the right. After a while we head back down the scrambling path where we find that someone had knocked over his bike and it was now scratched on one side... goodbye deposit. We drige to the restaurant that my diving instructor runs with his wife, and I drop Alfie off and steal his scooter to head to Top View viewpoint to meet with Claudia. The road up was steep and a bit scary so eventually I parked up and walked the rest, going barefoot so I didn't slip out of my sliders. After ascending Everest, I paid 100 Baht to the nice lady who built the viewpoint and got given a free drink to enjoy the sunset with.

I meet a Canadian guy called Ryan, a Scottish guy called Jake, and an Austrian guy called Cristoff and we chatted for a while before deciding to head down and grab some food together at the same restaurant I dropped Alfie at earlier. Jake left earlier so he didn't join the 4 of us but it was really nice. I was going to go for Mika's Finnish meatballs and mashed potato but they had no potatoes (unheard of as a Brit) so I went for a bamboo shoot curry with rice.

Eventually we head back to our hostels for a shower and meet again at a bar on the beach, with Ryan's friend too. After a couple beers and lots of chatting (making me feel super young as they were all about 30), my 6am dive was catching up to me and we head home to sleep.Read more