Koh Tao

If there were a polar opposite of my current life in China, it would be the eight days that I spent in the sun on the tiny island of Koh Tao, scuba diving almost everyday. It was an island with more dive schools than restaurants and more foreign divers and travelers than local residents. That’s just something you have to come to terms with when you visit Thailand. You’re going to see a larger concentration of sleazebags from the UK, Western Europe, Russia, the U.S. and Australia than you could ever imagine possible. Even with all the rumors you hear prior to arriving, there’s just not enough warning. Koh Tao fortunately, although full of travelers, was a break from the typical Thailand beach scene. I really had only one motive for being there, one reason for passing right on by past Koh Samui, Koh Phan’ngan and all the rest: to go diving and to get an affordable certification. For that reason, my week on the island I lived the most modest and standard lifestyle at any point in my vacation—getting up at eight and getting to sleep around ten most nights, eating regular meals, etc.

The beach in front of the dive school

View from the Mountain Bar

The Master Divers equipment room

Geck-o

View from the High Bar

The beach out in front of my bungalow

I arrived on the island after about 20 hours of travel from Bangkok. I have to give you a brief recount of the lunacy of travel within Thailand, which is far more convoluted and ass-backwards than anything I’ve experienced so far in China. The night before I left for the island I arrived in Bangkok from Cambodia. I was immediately ushered to a travel agency by a cab driver who was clearly working some angle. I had little choice. At the agency the agent told me there was no longer a bus that night—there was—and that the next one wouldn’t leave until 7pm the next day—also a lie. He charged me almost twice what it should’ve cost to go to Koh Tao and put me on a bus that didn’t even stop at the port from which the only direct ferry to Koh Tao left. Instead the bus continued right on through the middle of the night until it essentially rounded the archipelago, leaving me in a town in the far southern area of Thailand at five in the morning. From there I was placed onto several different buses and flatbed trucks that moved from one area of the city to another. Each time the drivers gave me a look like they had no idea what to do with me. I realized immediately I was in the wrong place because no one was going to the same place as I was. By noon I had made it maybe an hour down the road to the 3^rd pier I’d been to that morning. There, I received a ticket—well more like a stack of tickets—that were used to take me to three different islands on three different ferries until I finally reached Koh Tao at five in the afternoon.

The employees at the dive school made it easy on me. They had already found me a place to stay and started the paperwork. I had my own instructor, one-on-one, throughout the entire course, a nice guy from outside of London who used to be a sound technician until he decided, fuck it, and left.

The dive school in many ways is a fraternity house. And when so many are packed so close together on an island that cant be more than 15 square kilometers, you get absurd rivalries and idiotic displays of ego. Add to that fact that most of these DMs and instructors are washed-up American travelers and UK jocks that drink heavily. That being said, my school was modest, the people amazingly nice, but they still held their grudges.

The course started with videos and classroom assignments. Then, we did shallow water exercises like towing injured divers, removing masks underwater, and breathing from broken regulators. By the second day I was already 10 meters down. By the 5^th I had done my deep-water dive to 30 meters. Sometimes I went on three dives a day. I’ve never been around so much color. Where I spent many summers, my mother Mediterranean, has atrophied and lost a lot of its former brilliance. Koh Tao is fortunately a nature preserve and is somewhat protected from the destructive force of over-fishing, but every night you can still see a fleet of fishing boats with their long arms and high-voltage lights, looming on the horizon.

I saw from the tiniest flatworms moving like waves through the mid-depths, to spotted rays lurking on rocks; giant groupers of a dozen varieties to forests of phlorescent purple anemones filled with their resident clownfish; the giant Crown-of-Thorns starfish to diminutive white-eyed moray eels to massive schools of sleek, wide-eyed Giant Barracuda.  But for all that color and beauty, life and death, down there under the water’s surface, the feeling that I treasured most was that of complete isolation and calm. The night-dive was where this really affected on me. A couple of times, when rounding a boulder or a pinnacle, I was separated from my instructor. And when that pure, inky black surrounds you, its like nothing you’ve ever seen or felt. With only a small spot of light from your torch, you realize that there is still some true solitude to be had. You are quite literally in your own bubble down under the waves, away from everything familiar. You can’t communicate save for a few simple hand gestures and a little body language. You focus to steady your breath as a motor rattles somewhere above you. Once you breach the surface, you are a complete outsider—a pure observer—leaving nothing but a chain of bubbles as pass through an alien world. There’s something strangely postmodern about the whole thing. To avoid philosophizing too much, all I will say is I understand why some people give their life to the trade (even if most of those people are deadbeat jocks). I highly recommend it, if you haven’t already tried it.

P.S. I would’ve have liked to post pictures of me underwater, but the guy who took them has yet to get back to me. I’ll post them eventually.

–Leo