Where’s Megan?

“Hi, my name is Megan and I’m a snorkeloholic.”

So I went snorkeling for the first time last year in the Florida Keys, and was immediately hooked (so to speak). The water is crystal clear, the coral is twisty and cool, little colorful fish are always swimming by, and occasionally bigger, somewhat scarier things… there’s just always something interesting going on. (My only wish is that it had a less silly name. I always feel dumb telling people “I snorkle”, especially divers. It’s like telling Tiger Woods you’re really into Putt-Putt.) Oh well.

My first stop as I headed south from Bangkok was the island of Ko Tao, known for great dive schools and sites. I spent 3 days on the beach,

in a little bungalow,

which I shared with the biggest gecko I’ve ever seen or imagined.

It’s about the size of my foot, and if it tried to sell me car insurance I’d be too afraid to say no.

Now, imagine the most perfect, beautiful, idyllic island possible. Include a couple small mountains, a pristine beache, colorful coral reefs offshore, and one resort and restaurant so you never have to leave.

Poof!

Ko Nang Yuan

It’s close to Ko Tao, so I just did a daytrip. I didn’t want to end up getting stuck there. The island thing was growing on me, though, so I decided to head a bit further south and visit the archipelago of Ang Thong Marine Park.

I camped on the beach:

Climbed the steep trail to the top of the mountain:

and visited a cave:

I heard there are leopards and pythons on the islands, but all I saw were monkeys that got uncomfortably close and tried to poop on me:

(Note: No zoom lens was used in the taking of this picture)

I still hadn’t satisfied my snorkeling urge, so I headed even further south to the Perhentian islands off the coast of Malaysia. With some of the best snorkeling in the world, I couldn’t resist.

I stayed at a place that was isolated form the other hotels on the islands, but had great beaches, with incredibly clear water, both out front and a short trek to the other side of the island.

The place was frequently visited by monitor lizards, including this big guy:

Oh, and the snorkeling pictures? Well, they’re a little hard to get with my definitely-not-waterproof camera, so I tried to identify some fish and borrow pictures from other people (thanks other people!):

A lot of coral scenery like this:

I saw a tons of brightly-colored Parrotfish of various sizes, loudly crunching on coral:

I came across this huge fish that scared the crap out of me. It’s called the Titan Triggerfish, and is only about 2 ft long but its weird shape and fat head looked really menacing.

I later learned that females are known to be aggressive and attack divers. (Video Proof) I knew I had reason to back away.

Slightly higher on the scary meter were very cool-looking Blue-Spotted Stingrays:

I saw 3 or 4 of these. They have 2 dangerous spikes on their tail, but those blue spots make it hard to hide.

I saw a couple of Blacktip Reef Sharks, but oddly they didn’t seem and frightening because they were always fairly deep down and just swimming away.

Finally, big but definitely not scary were the Green Turtles:

They were slow (being turtles and all), but it was neat to follow them as they swam towards the surface to breath. It was quite graceful, as if they were flying.

The further I go, the more I hear about some other great island that has even better snorkeling, but I know if I keep going, I’ll be in New Zealand before I get my fix. So, I figured that spending 9 of the past 11 days snorkeling was pretty good (I had to take breaks to travel between the islands, of course). So I took a bus to Kuala Lumpur and will be heading back up to Thailand in a couple days.

Tags: Ko Tao, Malaysia, snorkeling, Thailand, Travel

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 22nd, 2007 at 4:23 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.