Visa run to Mynamar
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008Ok so before all you guys start freaking out cuz you told us not to go there. This place is all set up for this stuff. This was no Rambo retake! So our evening started with a night boat to Chumpon from Koh Tao. No problem, We arrived on the boat at 9 which gave us plenty of time to get a bed.. If you get there late no bed for you. I slept like a baby on the boat like always, but Jared on the other hand was awake the whole way. He said the boat broke down a couple of times through out the night.. Hmm I don’t seem to remember that! All is well we made it to our destination. Now I must say if you are going to travel from Koh Tao to Chumpon the night boat is the way to go. Cheap and a very comfy bed. I believe it is more comfortable then the bed we have in our little bungalow. So we make it to port and off we go into a nice van with AC, what luxury. It is amazing what we take for granted. It was a 2 hour trip in a van with a crazy driver! He seemed not to know what side of the road he was suppose to be on. It was crazy we were going up and down hills like mad the roads were curvy as hell and all kinds of blind spots but there he was driving on the wrong side. What a ride! We just kept bouncing from one side of our seats to the other! But we made it safely. Maybe a little queasy from the ride but safe none the less. So we get to customs in Thailand check out and get on a very small boat. Not to bad so far. On the way people are waving to us like crazy. I mean 10 white people on a boat we don’t stick out at all right? Well this goes on for a while with guys waving, blowing kisses this sort of thing. All is fine. Until we see this nice little kid on his porch waving at us. We do the friendly thing of waving back and what does he do. Grab his toy automatic gun and point it at us. Well lets just say I don’t want to see that kid in 10years. 🙂 We make it to Myanmar and go from the pier straight to customs. On the way to the customs office we have people trying to sell us things like normal, now I would not normally even put this in here, but it was not that they were trying to sell us things what I found was funny it was what they were selling. “Whiskey, Cigarette, and Viagra” They keep chanting like a broken record. Cheap Cheap. Well none of us bought anything which I think upset them a little. We made it back to Thailand checked back in with Customs. Back to the pier and on to the high speed boat to Koh Tao.. Now let me explain something here. There is a big difference between the high speed boat and the non-high speed boat. What took us 7 hours there and only took us 1 1/2 hours on the way back. What a difference that is!
Jared’s thoughts – Okay don’t really have any, Maryanne pretty much said it all. Except two bits, one the Myanmar people look a little like Thais and two we can pass for Swedish people in Myanmar. How awesome is that, “YA I am from Sweden”! Anyway we are happy to be back to Koh Tao. The next two weeks will be a little rough since we have lectures and exams for our Divemaster course. We have three exams tomorrow, wish us luck.
Oh on a side note, a couple of days ago we attended a Technical Wreck Diving seminar which was quite good. A few days later they came to the Dive school with their gear and explained how it worked and let us try it out in the pool! So Maryanne and I gave it a try. Feels quite weird to have twin tanks on. They had us do some out of air drills, so we could see what it was like to have to reach behind us and shut off one of the tanks and then swap to the other mouth piece. It was really cool! They offer a one day wreck dive experience, going to 40 – 45m so I think after we going through the Nitrox course next week, we will give that a shoot. Anyway I will get pictures posted soon so you can see us in all that gear!
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