100 cc's of sheer power (Feb. 25/09 - Koh Lanta, Thailand)

It was deja vu to our days on Phu Quoc Island when we climbed onto our rented motorbike this morning and set off to explore the island. Koh Lanta is about 20km long, with a short little connector road linking the two coasts half way up. Resorts pretty much lined the road most of the way down the west coast, and countless restaurants, cafes, and shops hugged both sides of the road. We missed the turnoff to continue down the west coast and found ourselves crossing over the connector road. We followed it down to the south tip, where the road ended at a small sea gypsy village on the water. Lots of small islands popped up out of the ocean between Koh Lanta and the mainland, some of which are protected in a marine park. We crossed back over to the west side, stopping at a restaurant right on a beautiful, long, flawless stretch of beach where the ocean was so calm that waves didn't even lap the shore. From there, it was about half an hour to the end of the pavement, where a bumpy dirt road persisted to the south tip of the island. Between the trees, we caught a glimpse of a pretty beach down below the road, and decided to park the bike in the shade and hike down. It was beautiful - bound on both sides by jagged black rocks, the big stretch of sand had only a couple other people on it. So we swam for a while in the water that was almost too warm to be comfortable, then kicked back on the sand for an hour or two, entertained by the speedos and topless sunbathes that had no problem showing off their European goods. Eventually, we hiked back up to the road and made our way north, crossing over on the connector road and returning to the north end on the east coast, where mangrove forests and grazing cows occupied the roadside. It made for a fun little adventure, tearing around the island without a plan or a decent map, dodging giant potholes and deliberating over which beach to spend the afternoon at. Life's rough :)


Later on, we met up with the diver friend we went out on the boat with yesterday, shared some Thai food and some stories, and then called it a night since it would be an early start tomorrow to head for the Phuket airport, Indonesia bound.

"Nemo bit me!" (Feb. 24/09 - Koh Lanta, Thailand)

Our buddy Tony at home has a friend who works at a dive shop here on Koh Lanta, so we tracked him down and signed up for a day of diving - afterall, it's what we do best! We headed over to the Koh Phi Phi chain of islands, which lie in the Andaman Sea about half way between Koh Lanta and Phuket. The southernmost, Koh Bida Nok, is a small towering limestone island with no beaches or even vegetation thanks to its harsh geometry. A trio of dolphins swam near the boat as we headed out, which caused an abundance of extra commotion when someone got a little too excited and shouted "WHALE SHARK!!!". We jumped in at the north end and followed the east side of the island around, which was mostly a steep wall that bottomed out on sand around 60-90 feet. Right away, we found an octopus half hiding in a crack and a beautiful peacock mantis shrimp fully out in the open. Lots of eels (including a tiny white-eyed moray swimming out in the open), huge orange sea fans, some beautiful nudibranchs, anemonefish, huge scallops, and some pretty soft corals and sea whips. A particulary territorial anemonefish (Nemo!) came up in my face when I was actually nowhere near his home-sweet-anemone-home, and when I kept on swimming, he actually went around behind me and bit my leg! It was a very pretty dive, nice and relaxed, with enough to see that we weren't the least bit disappointed after being spoiled in the Similans!

Dive two was off the east side of Koh Bida Nai, just a few hundred metres off Koh Bida Nok. More of the "usual" critters, plus a passing black-tipped reef shark and a cruising turtle that almost ran me over en route to his lunch spot at a particular coral head. Morays poked their heads out of holes, grouper hung out at cleaning stations, and multiple schools of various fish swirled in the shallows. So pretty!

We climbed back aboard and cruised north to Koh Phi Phi Leh, a bigger island with vertical cliffs of limestone that are broken only in one spot, called Maya Bay, where the movie "The Beach" was filmed a few years ago. The beach was gorgeous, but overrun with tour boats taking people on day trips to see the famous beach. A couple turtles paddled around in the turquoise water at the base of the massive cliffs, and boats full of snorkellers bobbed in the water over the area we were about to jump in. This was Palong Wall, a shallow sloping reef where reef sharks tend to hang out in the sand. It was a nice easy third dive of the day, above 30 feet depth and with just enough current going with us that we didn't even have to swim! Pufferfish of all different colours and sizes seemed to be everywhere, along with a huge variety of reef fish and hard corals. A pair of cuttlefish put on a colour-changing show for us, and then we started to see the sharks. A solitary black-tipped reef shark cruised by in front of us, carrying a couple hitchhiking remoras. Then another one, then three togther, all relatively small (maybe 3 to 5 feet long?), but eventually there were so many that we didn't bother pointing them out to eachother! I counted 13 sharks in total, though it could have been the same five or six swimming by a couple times. Nudibranchs, anemonefish, a juvenile harlequin oriental sweetlips, and even a turtle right at the end. The sand tapered off and gave way to a steep wall and huge boulders that had fallen from the cliffs above. Covered in soft corals and fish, it made for a beautiful end to the dive.

On the way back to Koh Lanta, we motored past Koh Phi Phi Don, the main touristy island whose west bewaches were descimated by the tsunami. The two hour sail back was smooth and relaxing, with lots of time to look over photos, reach, and chat - pretty much making for a perfect day!

Room with a view and a bedside table (Feb. 23/09 - Koh Lanta, Thailand)

When we purchased tickets on the daily minibus that runs from Khao Lak to Koh Lanta, we were under the apparently silly assumption that the 200km trip would be short, easy, and direct. We headed south, passing palm oil plantations and even a livestock trick barreling down the highway hauling a pair of elephants in the back, tails flapping in the wind and tusks resting on the roof of the truck's cab. We passed through the town of Phang-nga, a spot where limestone islands similar to those in Halong Bay jut up out of the ocean. Onwards to Krabi, famous for its beaches towered over by those huge limestone cliffs and the rock climbing opportunities they provide. The minibus dropped us for what we thought was a quick break at one of the typical restaurant/booking office places that are everywhere in this part of the world. It became pretty obvious that the stop was souly to get us to book hotels and onwards or return tickets with them so they would be paid a commission. Twenty minutes later, we got back in the van and were driven across town and dumped at another booking office. The driver took off and we were left with no idea what was going on. The staff of course said there were no 'budget' accommodations on Koh Lanta (the guidebook says otherwise), so we just waited until another minivan showed up half an hour later. It drove us about three blocks down the road before pulling into a bus station. Not impressed, we were told this stop was just to switch buses. One was there and ready to leave, but it only had three spots left so the threesom from our bus that was traveling together went first since they told us it would only be a ten minute wait. 45 minutes later, a bus labelled "Koh Lanta" finally showed up. We climbed in, climbed out again to get out of the invisibly claimed seats we originally sat in, then waited another half hour until the driver finally showed up. The ferry over to Koh Lanta was just a short drive from Krabi (thankfully), and we had the driver drop us at a hotel that sounded like it would be within our budget. If the cheap rooms weren't full, it would've been fine - but tonight they only had a 'superior' room for over four times our usual budget. We found out that we could have a cheap room for the next two nights, free breakfast, and a discount on top of it all, which made the whole thing average out to a decent price. For now though, we get to enjoy a dose of luxury that we felt a bit guilty about! Not only did the room have a view of the beach, pool, and treed headland below, but it also had a king sized bed, sheets that were clean (definitely NOT the norm!), a bedside table, satellite tv, granite bathroom counters, and one of those fancy 'monsoon' shower heads! We definitely felt like we didn't belong, but we can probably make due for now!

Sharks! (Feb. 22/09 - Khao Lak, Thailand)

We woke up this morning at the Koh Tachai pinnacle, the site we dove two nights ago. It looked completely different in the daylight, especially since we spent most of the dive in the deeper sections off the outside walls, coming up in the garden-like plateau on top (where we did the night dive) towards the end of the dive. The water was nice and clear, but there was quite a strong current running against us, which made for a bit of a workout! Right away, when we got down to the sand at 90 feet, we spotted a big leopard shark lying on the bottom. It was the first one we had ever seen - about seven feet long, shaped like a stocky nurse shark, and covered with leopard-like spots. A few minutes later, we found an even bigger one that hung around long enough to get a good look at him. From there, we navigated around the huge boulders and found lots of feather stars, grouper, anemonefish, moorish idols, moray eels, seastars, a big school of juvenile fusiliers, and a lone barracuda on the prowl. The top of the pinnacle really felt like swimming in an aquarium with so many fish mingling together, little current on top, and water so clear that you can easily see all sides of the pinnacle, other divers, and our boat waiting above.


It was a 3 hour sail back toward the mainland, but we had one more dive at the Boonsung wreck before ending the trip back at the dock. This was a dredging platform that sunk here in the 1980's, and stood on the bottom intact until the 2004 tsunami roared ashore and ripped it apart. Now it's a jumble of steel and unidentifiable parts scattered on the bottom in 60 feet of water. Unfortunately, the brown organic algae stuff that has accumulated on all the surfaces is easily stirred up by the boatloads of divers that come here daily on dive trips from the mainland. As a result, the visibility was crap - five feet at best! Making our way carefully through the muck made us feel like we were back at Porteau Cove at home! Thankfully, there was a lot to look at - tons of schooling fish, super camoflauged stonefish that we almost landed on by accident (they're poisonous!), lionfish, honeycomb and white-eyed moray eels, a pipefish, and tons of pretty little nudibranchs. They were everywhere - hard to spot because they are so small, but colourful, exotic, and plastered all over the wreck! This too was supposed to be a common spot for seeing whale sharks, but the visibility was so bad that one could've swam right over your head and you never would have known! It was still an enjoyable dive, and a pleasant end to our awesome dive trip.


The waters off the Similan and surrounding islands were more vibrant and impressive than we had expected, and even though we didn't see any of the commonly seen manta rays or whale sharks, we certainly did see an abundance of bizarre fish, nudibranchs, random critters, and beautiful corals. Similan Dive Safaris provided a great boat, great staff, fabulous food, and professional service. It might have been a splurge for our budget, but it was worth every penny, and some of the memories made here will no doubt be some of the highlights of our whole trip!

One of the world's best (Feb. 21/09 - Similan Islands, Thailand)

Richelieu Rock is one of those dive sites that seasoned divers have heard about and read about, as it ranks as one of the ten best dive sites in the world, and a spot where whale shark sightings are common. We sailed overnight, traveling east from Koh Tachai, and mooring up on the reef at sunrise before any other boats had a chance to arrive. Mainland Thailand is visible to the east, and Koh Tachai and the Surin Islands are off to the west. Official patrol boats had a noticeable presence, as we were sitting within swimming distance of the Myanmar (Burma) border. Richelieu Rock is a horseshoe shaped formation of submerged rocky outcrop, which ranges from about 100 feet deep on the outside walls to less than 20 feet on the shallowest rocks. We jumped in and were instantly impressed - the reef was completely carpeted with purple and white soft corals, and schooling fish were everywhere. Fields of purple and blue "magnificent" anemones covered the rocks, housing hundreds of anemonefish of different varieties, including the endemic tomato anemonefish. We came across a huge blotched fantail stingray lying on the sand, lots of lionfish hanging in the water above the soft corals, a tiny tiger egg cowrie on a sea fan, no less than four ornate ghost pipefish, urchins, massive grouper, a red-spotted coral crab, several little eels, and big schools of fusiliers, snapper, and rainbow runners. Whew! It was a beautiful and relaxing dive with photo opportunities all around, definitely worthy of its world class status!

Luckily, we were able to do a second dive at the same spot, giving us another hour to soak in the gorgeous marine life. There was a bit more current and a bit less visibility, but we still found some scorpionfish, a pipefish, a seahorse, a big school of sedate barracuda, and a massive school of big eye snapper that swirled around us in a dizzying cloud. We could've hung out in the shallows all day long, watching the little anemonefish dart in and out of their host's tentacles, playing a game of hide and seek with our camera. But every dive has a time limit, so up we went to avoid being left behind as we packed up and set sail for the next destination.

Koh Tachai, where we did our night dive last night, was close enough and good enough to head back for a couple more dives. This time we headed for a reef that fringes the northeast side of the island, where the sloping sandy bottom turns the water a brilliant turquoise colour from the surface. Coral bommies and fields of staghorn coral hid white-banded cleaner shrimp, Durban dancing shrimp, nudibranchs, ornate ghost pipefish, moray eels, and even a couple small octopi that put on a colour-changing performance when we got close. This site is a favourite of leopard sharks, but apparently our group was the only one that didn't see any - some people saw six! But we would be diving here again tonight, so maybe we would luck out then. We actually took Bocce diving with us so he didn't feel left out, stuffed in a ziploc bag to keep him dry. He didn't complain even though he didn't look too thrilled about it!

A pretty stretch of beach beckoned us to come for a visit, so we spent our surface interval meandering the sand and reading until it was time to gear up once again. After dark, we piled back into the water to explore the same area at night, with half the fish asleep and the rest trying to hide from predators. We found another of those oscillated dwarf lionfish, a fibrilated moray eel, some tiny squat lobsters, and a skinny sea cucumber that was at least six feet long! During our ascent, when we were swimming midwater back to the boat, we covered our lights and swam in the pitch black, with only the illuminated sparks of bioluminescence flying off our fins. It's a very cool but very creepy feeling to be underwater in total darkness!

Back on the boat, we had some dinner and then watched a slideshow of the photographs taken by Tom, the onboard photo pro who has joined us on every dive to capture our trip and the beauty of this place. Virtually every shot could be on the cover of a magazine - they are flawless, brilliantly coloured, crystal clear, and creative all at the same time. Portraits of us having fun underwater, close-ups of sea life, and unique wide angle shots of divers hovering amongst massive sea fans. It made me really want to some day get a housing (and lenses, and strobes...) for my SLR camera, as the results you can get with the right gear are incredible - most of them make things look even more beautiful than they do in real life!

Frogfish and pipefish and eels, oh my! (Feb. 20/09 - Similan Islands, Thailand)

Our sunrise dive at 7am this morning was at East of Eden, a beautiful site on the opposite side of the island from West of Eden yesterday. The sloping sand bottom was punctuated with large coral bommies, so we made our way down to almost 100 feet to a particular spot where special critters were known to hang out. Sure enough, we found a small black frogfish almost indistinguishable from the surrounding coral, an awesome little ornate ghost pipefish hanging out on a soft coral, a vibrant orange and black nudibranch, a dwarf oscillated lionfish (rare apparently!), and an incredibly tiny little lionfish, less than about an inch long! We circled around the bommies as we headed for shallower water, loving the forests of neon soft corals, massive orange sea fans 6 or 8 feet across, bright anemones hosting cute little anemonefish, a yellow juvenile boxfish (looks like a poka dotted yellow box with a tail!), two moray eels, and even a small octopus. Hard corals dominated the shallow reef gardens, and then we heard the boat moor above us just in time for the end of yet another fabulous dive. And all before 8am!

(this is a frogfish!)
After breakfast, we did a live drop into one of the Similans' notorious divesites - Elephant Head Rock. Between islands #7 and 8, three rounded rocks outcrop from the Andaman Sea that are said to resemble the head of an elephant (you'd have to squint pretty hard to see that!). Underwater, the big smooth rocks form steep walls and flat sloping tops, where sporadic corals cling and reef fish hang out. The current was pretty strong against us as we rounded the southern side of the rocks, so strong that we could barely swim against it. On the overhanging wall of a rock face, we found a tiny pair of mating "roboastra arika" nudibranchs, black with bold stripes of orange, green, and red. We cruised through a couple swim-throughs, across the open water to a nearby wall, and eventually up onto the sloping flank of the main elephant rock. A black-tipped reef shark cruised along the slope ahead of us, and several giant trevally raced by, probably to avoid becoming lunch!

Let's see... sleep, eat, dive, eat, dive... next step must be lunch! Then we set off north, leaving the Similan Islands behind, bound for the little island of Koh Bon, a few miles north of Similan Island #9. A ridge off the west side is a popular spot for manta rays to hang around at both to find food and to be cleaned by the resident cleaner fish. We swam around, hoping for some action, but today just wasn't to be our day. It was a beautiful dive nonetheless, with carpets of small soft corals blanketing the walls and thousands of fish of all sorts milling around. We came upon three giant moray eels, a lionfish, a couple barracuda, a scorpionfish, and a school of fusiliers that formed a dense cloud inside a coral head that swirls around your arm like smoke when you move into it. Sunshine sparkled in the shallow water as we ascended, and on the surface we had to wait an unnervingly long time for the boat to make its rounds and pick us up - we've heard stories of divers getting left behind so it always makes you a little nervous when the boat is nowhere in sight!

Onwards to Koh Tachai, another little island north of Koh Bon. On our way, a pair of dolphins cruised by and Thai fishing boats cast out their nets in the deep waters between the islands. We pulled up to the island's south end just as it was getting dark, and moored up to the pinnacle submerged just offshore. Ken was going to sit the night dive out in favour of a nap, so I joined up with a bunch of other people going in. We descended the mooring line onto the flat top of the pinnacle, and were surrounded by plumes of multicoloured feather stars and soft corals that made it look like an underwater flower garden. Scorpionfish were all over the place, easily spotted in the dark since they tend to land on corals that don't match their regularly very good camoflauge. Lobsters, moray eels, and clearfin lionfish were out in droves. At one point, we noticed a huge barracuda hovering around in the dark, looking a bit suspicious... suspecting that he was hunting, we all had the same idea at the same time, and moved our lights over to a few innocent fish that were minding their own business nearby. Sure enough, the barracuda took advante of an easy illuminated target and slowly glided toward the fish, then in a split second lunged forward and swallowed it whole. He chomped it down in a couple big gulps and then disappeared into the dark. I felt a bit guilty for having a hand in that fish's death, but it was pretty cool to see the food chain in action! We carried on, and later we were hovering over an odd scene where an eel and a large parrotfish were hanging out side by side under a table coral... when all of a sudden, out of nowhere, the same barracuda came flying out of the darkness behind us, blasted into our light beams, mouth open, coming within a couple feet of one guy's arm! Just as fast as he came, he disappeared, having scared the hell out of us and the poor parrotfish, who burst out of his night time mucus sleeping cocoon and went to hide under a rock. We all looked at eachother, realizeing that he amost made dessert out of us! He was clearly circling the pinnacle hunting, so we were extra careful after that to not shine our lights on eachother! It made for an exciting night dive - one of those dives where everyone can't stop talking about it when your head breaks the surface.