A Couple’s Journey

All good things must come to an end or so they say.  It doesn’t mean we like it!  Well our time on Koh Tao is coming to an end, boo hoo.  We have met many wonderful people during our stay and will think of them often I am sure as we continue our journey.  It is tough because as sad as we are to leave, we are equally excited to join Mark and Deb on an awesome 2 month diving marathon 🙂  I know we will be coming back to Koh Tao and Buddha View to either dive or do the IDC course!!  A big thank you to everyone at Buddha View, the Instructors, the lovely Dive Masters, our fellow DMT’s and the rest of the staff!  You sure helped make our stay wonderful, made us better divers and on occassion a little too drunk (thanks Pong and Danny, you very handsome men 🙂 !! If anyone reading this goes to Buddha View make sure to tip the Bar Staff they are awesome!   

Well after much hard work and lots of diving we have finally finished our course!  The last test we had to do was the traditional Snorkel Test! Well I am sure most of you are sitting here reading this and wondering what in the world is a snorkeling test.  Well let me explain. A snokel test is where you sit in a chair with a blacked our mask on your face and a snorkel in your mouth and one of your good friends pours a bucket of alcohol down the snorkel that you have to finish.  Sounds wonderful, any of you having flashbacks to college frat parties or nights .  Yep pretty much the same thing!  Well Jared and I had the pleasure of doing this together and although I did finish first,  I left alot of it on Jared’s lap so you be the judge.  Jared was a good boy and drank every drop.  However afterwards who was having to carry him around, because he drank every drop!  Yep you guess it that would be me.  Well ok a couple of times I had to get assistance, drunk Jared is very hard to pick up. However in his defense he did have 4 beers ahead of time and since he is good friends with the bar staff they were nice enough to put 4 shot of Tequilla in his bucket along with the rum and pineapple juice.  Mine was just rum and pineapple!  Nice that they look out for the girls hehe!!  We will have photos soon, I know our friends can’t wait to post there pictures of us!

Now to the person that made up this stupid test, REALLY how can anyone drink that much liquid in one go. My stomach hurt for at least a 1/2 hour afterwards because I was so full.  Well I am happy to say that we made it and we are now Dive Masters!  

Well Maryanne has decided to learn about taking photos underwater given our up coming trips!  Well here is some photos from her first go!

I have been very busy lately assisting in classes so that I can get Signed off (Complete all my required tasked for my Dive Master Cert). Well I am telling you this because the other day I was assisting on a Open Water course and an Advanced course. We did their Deep Dive at Chumpon (The Gulf of Thailand’s most famous site, and for good reason) Well we were just about ready to kneel down on the bottom of the sand and what do we see, 4 sharks just swimming around. It was so amazing. We finally knelt down in the sand at 30m and the sharks just swam around us. It was absolutely beautiful. I cant believe how close they got to us. Needless to say I was one happy camper. We have been here almost 3 months and I know me and Jared were very lucky to see Whale sharks but I also really wanted to see the real sharks. I got a short glimps of them a week or so ago as you saw in the blog. But this was amazing! The sharks were coming with in a meter of us. The sharks were Gray Reef sharks and they varied in sizes between 1 to 2 1/2 meters. What a great day. I was so jealous of one of the students in the class cuz it was only his 5th or 6th dive ever and he got to see all those sharks, some people get all the luck! One of the students was quite scared of the sharks as she kept moving to put other students between her and the sharks, it was really funny to watch!

Well while Maryanne was having all the fun and working her butt off, I was doing a whole lot of nothing. Thankfully my cold is about over and I can finally dive tomorrow! It has been way too long! I mostly spent my days chatting with friends, surfing the net and getting some sun. It was way too hot to hang out in the room and watch movies. Okay I did do that a bit on the first day, but there is only so long you can watch movies. Luckily last night we went to a Muay Thai fight with Mark, Deb and some of their friends! It was awesome, these little guys can move for sure! There was even a westerner who fought and won. Granted he had only been training for two weeks but he had the height, weight and reach advantage. Plus he was in pretty good shape. Anyway a great night for sure.

I have one more task to complete and then I can sign off as well!! Yippie the end is in sight, then we can focus more on our up coming dive trips! Sometimes it is tough to take one day at a time!

Oh and mom yes we are staying pretty close to our budget, right now we are below it a bit, but due to our change of plans to do more diving till the end of August we are looking at about 119 US a day. Otherwise we average about 50 to 60 US a day (food, lodging, motorbike, beer). Which is about 10 more than we had hoped to spend in Asia to save more for Aus and NZ, but well worth it in our opinion! 🙂

    Whale Shark on 3rd of August.

Okay I know a lot of you have been wondering and asking what we are up to after we leave Koh Tao.  Well since it is fast approaching for us to leave this little island, I guess we had to make some decision.  Well our friends Mark and Deb had invited us to go to the Perhentian islands in Malaysia for a few days.  However recently they decided to do that trip plus a few more before going back to OZ and have invited us to come with them for the whole thing.  After much are pulling and begging we agreed.  Okay they told us where they were looking at going, we googled it and fell in love.  So actually we begged and pleaded to let us join along!!  Maryanne and I have really big puppy dog eyes, so tough to tell us no!!  Yippie  So now the plan stands to still go diving in the Perhentian island in Malaysia, followed by a trip to Borneo to dive in Spidan off a converted oil platform called Seaventures Platform (it is said to be amazing diving, like we would go somewhere with crap diving LOL).  After that we are headed a nature reserve in Borneo that has the orangutans. (the big orange monkeys).  Then off to Palua Weh, Indonesia for two weeks of diving and then to Lembeh Strait, Bitung City, North Sulawesi again an amazing place to dive.  Then to top off this little adventure we are off to Bali with them.  Where sadly near the end of October they have to go back to OZ 🙁  Well unless we can talk them into going to the Philippines and Micronesia, remember we have the puppy dog eyes lol!  Mark worked it out that we are looking at about 85 – 120 dives for this trip!!!  OMG we are going to be in heaven.  So Maryanne is looking to take the Underwater Photography specialty and then get a nice diving camera!  We should have some great photos!!  Anyway that is what we have planned when we leave here on the 26th of Aug.

Oh and Maryanne is feeling much better today!!! So all your thoughts, prayers, and comments really helped, she says thank you to you all!  🙂

Okay here are a few pictures for all you asking for them.  There is some from bowling if you look close you can see the pin guys in the back of the lane!  Some from our Deep and Wreck Dive Speciality courses on the MV Trident.  Yes we know we need to take more pictures!  Maryanne is still sick 🙁  I was diving in the afternoon and night so she was very happy to see me when I got home, I think she was going nuts stuck at home.  Enjoy the pictures!

Alright to set the day up for this tale of horror, it actually started last night.  We are sitting at the dive shop like we normally do when it is raining.  We chatted with one of the full time staff about assisting a course tomorrow and were told that there was a course being taught in Dutch in the morning but not to worry since no one talks underwater.  Well unless you are Maryanne and think the best way to get my attention is to yell at me!  Okay that only happened once and she was pissed at me 🙂  The catch to working in the morning is that the boat might be too full for me to get on since they saw whale sharks that day.  Most people who miss out usually sign up to dive the next morning in hopes the big fish will still be there.  Unfortunately they usually aren’t. Anyway we decide to go home early since we had to get up and dive.  Well that night it was really windy and rainy, I was half expecting the door to blow open it was that bad!  Needless to say I didn’t get much sleep 🙁  So when the alarm went off at 0615 I was not looking forward to getting out of bed.  But I did even though I knew I may or may not dive, which sucks cause who in their right mind would wake up that early if they didn’t have to.  So we slowly got ready and dragged ourself to the dive shop.  It was a little chilly and cloudy, not a day I really want to dive in.  When we get there, we find out that we can’t assist but the dive master said she would sneak us on the boat.  Cause she loves us!  So we get on the boat and straight away the captain is telling us that the Whale Sharks are at the site we are going to.  So we are all excited of course!  We were the first ones in the water and there it was swimming near the surface. So beautiful!  It didn’t stay long, but we enjoyed the rest of the dive and then saw it again doing our safety stop at the end of the dive.  Back on the boat everyone is all excited chatting away. Since we have seen them already we were like yeah there cool, last time was better blah blah 🙂  Inside our heads we were really having a party.  The staff decides to stay for another dive, fine with us.  Again we are the first in the water and there it is again.  Same thing as before we watched from a distance, amazing.  Then we go for a little dive, but Maryanne’s dive watch says we have to go up after only 30 min boy was I sad.  As we are approaching the boat, we are the only ones at the surface.  I happen to look in the water and there it is between us and the boat.  So we stay and watch, well apparently we looked cool to the Whale Shark and it comes for a closer look.  When I mean close, I mean I was touching a whale shark!  Only because it was interested in Maryanne and swinging it tail in my face!!  This thing is about 3.5 meters long WOW we have never been this close.  This think is really interested in us and wants to be right on us.  After chasing Maryanne for a bit, it turns its attention on me.  I comes right for me, mouth open and I literally had to put my hand on its nose to not get eaten.  This happened more than once for about 10 min.  What an experience!  Oh and I really did pop my head out of the water and said to Maryanne “Its trying to EAT ME!!”  Wow what a morning!  I am so glad we got out of bed!! YIIPPEEE

Okay we have hit another milestone in our diving adventures yesterday!!  Yippie  The last speciality we did was Peak Performance Bouyancy, basically it is a course that helps us to be better with our air consumption, keeping off the bottom and coral, and figuring out how much weight we really need.  So I was diving with 2.4 Kilos, but found that I really only need about 800grams.  Boy did I have a hard time with the first two dives trying to stay down for our safety stop when the tank was nearly empty.  Although my air consumption was so much better.  Maryanne dropped some weight as well but her booties  make her feet float too much which is quite funny to see 🙂  So I think we might get her some really small ankle weights.  With less weight her air consumption was as good as the instructors!!  Great for her but she still kicks my butt.  Thankfully though I pretty much run out of time before air now so it isn’t too bad for me.  I know I will get better with time now that I have only one weight, considering I had no problems on my last two dives with staying down.  Go Team America!!  That is what they call, there is very few Americans here.  After four dives yesterday we are taking it easy today, which sucks because the morning and afternoon dives show more whale sharks 🙁  Oh well at least we swam with them once already.  Alright that is all I got for now, tonight just a quiet night playing poker 🙂  Then probably diving in the morning, man diving the next morning after poker is rough.  I know you guys feel really bad for us, it is such a hard life!  🙂  We are at 60 Dives!

Alright we just got back from our Visa Run.  I can’t remember if we told you what that really entails.  First we decided to take the day time ferry over to Chumpon.  This is a high speed catamran, it is really comfy, AC and shows a movie.  This differs from the Night boat which is like military sleeping barracks, 20 bunk beds and it smells.  So this trip was a pleasent one.  It only takes an hour and a half to get to Chumpon.  Once off the ferry there is a little man yelling out Visa Run so we follow him to a minibus AC again for the 2 hour trip to the Thailand border.  Once we get to the border the driver takes us right to the immigration place.  This time it was part of a resort, very nice.  From there we take a 20 minute ferry across some river to Myanmar.  The place we went to was a Casino Resort, so the boat over was very nice, as opposed to the small fishing boat we crossed with last time.  This boat had AC as well.  Okay so now we are in the resort for an hour, all about the duty free shopping.  Well for some I guess, I was more excited about the fact that in the bar they had POPCORN!!!  Yeah it is the little things I like 🙂  So we are with a nice group of strangers, whom we chatted with most of the way over.  There was even an American on the trip, nice guy from California Jeff.  He is a dive/rock climbing instrutor obviously not at the same time guys….  I know someone was going to get confused about that. Anyway there was a Dutch girl on the trip of about 18, very nieve.  She even asked Jeff if the US was a country!!  She thought it was just a bunch of States, wow and people think Americans Geography sucks!!  So we had a nice laugh about that.  So we hangout at the bar eating popcorn drinking beer, and watching a guy pretend to play the piano (the music as actually coming from a laptop)  He did sing but his hands barely ever moved, that is how we knew he wasn’t playing the piano.  Anyway so back on the ferry, back to the minibus and then to Chumpon.  We decided to spend the night, for the sole purpose of KFC!!!!  We hardly recongnized anything on the menu, very Asian!  But it was still worth it.  We found a little hotel recommended by Jeff.  He said they had rooms for 280 Baht a night ($8) however upon getting there we found we could get the Deluxe room (AC and TV) for $15 a night.  Yeah we splurgged baby!!  Unfortunately we had to get up early, cause the bed was so comfy! 🙁 Oh well we got back to Koh Tao in time for Maryanne to get a massage and go for a dive in the afternoon.  Good thing too, cause I found a knife on the dive still in the sheath. Sweet, go me!  🙂

   Ok Jared forgot a very important part about the dive that we did this afternoon we saw a turtle..  Yeah we are some lucky people in the last week we have seen whale sharks, Black Tip Sharks and a turtle.   Tommorrow I am going to be assisting a rescue course. I cant wait this is alot of fun.  I am going to be the one pretending to drown or get hurt.   I am really looking forward to it.