It's another lazy afternoon in Sairee Beach. My activity for the day today was a 45 minute snorkel tour of the harbor. I found some nice corals and there are always a lot of beautiful clams, even right near the beach. Also I did breakfast and lunch, read a few chapters of White Teeth and hung around the dive shop. Then I spent an hour on the internet reading and replying to my email. Later I will watch Finding Nemo, a favorite flick here on Koh Tao, especially because they actually have anemone fishes in the waters here.

Angkor Wat has been rather rudely cancelled. I just don't have the same wanderlust since I came here. Life is just too easy. If you're planning on doing any travelling, make sure you put paradise at the end, or you may find that you don't want to continue your trip! So instead of travelling overland through Cambodia, I will waste all the effort and expense I put out to get my Cambodian visa and simply fly to Saigon from Bangkok instead. That gives me an extra week here on the island. Now I just have to figure out what to do with it! Maybe I'll mail my package. That's another half hour task that's been five days in the works already. If it hadn't been a damned Sunday when I went to the post office... but who knows what day it is here?

On a somewhat sadder than usual note, I must report the loss of a companion of mine throughout my trip so far, who will be dearly missed: my camera. Did you know most scuba diving problems have the same cause? It's diver error. Normally they bring the longtail boat up on the beach and we walk through knee-deep water to get on. On our recent night dive, the third of the day, a tired me was surprised to find that we were going out in the captain's boat and that he hadn't bothered to manouver it close to the shore. I waded into the waist-deep water and wrangled myself into the boat. Only when did I stop to wonder where my camera was. It was, of course, in my pocket, where it had been thoroughly immersed in salt water. My former $400 piece of techno-wizardry is now a $400 piece of garbage. So no more pictures for you, gentle reader, or at least not until I get to Hong Kong, where I might possibly be able to find a replacement. We'll see. Guess I should have gotten that travel insurance.

- posted by Joachim @ 5:02 AM

 
After taking a few days off from diving, I decided to go for my advanced open water certification. Mostly this gives me more of an excuse to dive, but it will also get me certified to dive to 30 meters. We went back to Chumphon Pinnacle for the deep dive, and I saw sharks.

Sharks, in case you didn't know this already, are just about the coolest fish imaginable. They're big and sleek and graceful, and unlike most fish, they move continuously and purposefully. We saw about eight gray reef sharks 20 meters beneath the surface at Chumphon. It was really an amazing experience to have them swimming all around us (they kept their distance, though).

I also saw the largest fish I've ever seen, a giant grouper (and it lived up to its name) about four and a half feet long. It probably weighed a hundred pounds. You'd need a lot of chips. And unlike the sharks, it was right in front of us, almost close enough to touch.

I missed the anemone fish (Nemo) on the second dive, but then I missed the movie too so maybe it wouldn't have made such an impression. I did see some cool stuff on a later night dive, including bioluminescent bubbles coming out of the water when I waved my hands and fins.

Sarah and Neal left today and I may leave in another couple of days myself, if I don't reschedule my plane tickets or decide to skip Angkor. But it's hard to leave this tropical paradise.

- posted by Joachim @ 12:35 AM