Once again, exactly a month has elapsed since my last account of this trip. This time, to avoid reader boredom, I am going to break the account into three bits: diving in the Similans and Ko Tao, riding up the east coast of Thailand, and going to Angkor Wat. First, a bit about our diving trip.
I met up successfully with my friend Greg on the 25th of April in Patong Beach, Phuket. I had picked the rendezvous spot out of a guidebook thinking that our dive trip was going to leave from Patong,although it later turned out that we chose a dive trip leaving from Khao Lak, a town 100 km to the north. I had always known that Phuket was a package holiday mecca, but I was unprepared for Patong. When I arrived, I noticed that the town was full of large, muscular men with no necks and little hair, filling the hundreds of girlie bars that make up the town of Patong. I had not seen such a concentrated dose of red light district since I mistakenly visited the town of Angeles, in the Philippines, in 1996. There were thousands of Western men trawling the streets in search of the perfect Thai nymphet to make their holiday complete, as per usual in Patong, but to add spice to the mix, there were 5000 US Marines on shore leave that evening which accounted for the muscular guys' presence. As soon as I found Greg, we decided to sleep elsewhere that evening and headed back to the relative sanity of Phuket town. The On On hotel, our domicile for the evening, is an old, traditional Chinese hotel that can boast that it was one of the sets for the forgettable DiCaprio movie The Beach.
Joanne arrived late that evening, and it was good to see her again after five weeks' absence. She had lost all of her tan, but was glad to be back in the tropics after the relative cold of Toronto. The next morning, the three of us took a boat across to the town of Ao Nang, where I had spent an agreeable few days on the beach two weeks earlier. We spent two days relaxing on the gorgeous beach and roaring around on rented Honda Dream motorcycles before heading north to Khao Lak. Khao Lak is a pretty, boulder-studded beach popular with Germans, and rapidly sprouting new resort hotels. There are still lots of cheap beach bungalows, though, and it's a pleasant enough place to vegetate on the seashore. The season had more or less ended, with the monsoon rains of May to November arriving early, so there was no problem in finding a place to stay. The rain, however, was not good news for diving, since it meant lots of wind and a choppy ocean offshore.
Khao Lak is the closest point to the Similan islands, an archipelago of 9 tiny islets lying about 60 kilometres west of the southern Thai coast. They are uninhabited, other than a palace for a royal princess and a few national park officials and a handful of campers on one island. Their attraction is less the snow-white powdery sand on the beaches than the coral-draped boulderscape underwater off their shores. The Similans are probably the best dive sites in all of Thailand, and are justly popular with divers from all over the world. Because they lie so far from shore, daytrips are not really practical, and most divers opt for a cruise of 3 or 4 or 5 days on a liveaboard dive boat. We had shopped around for a good deal and found a 4-day trip offering 14 dives in the Similans, the Surins (another island group to the north) and some small islands inbetween. It was a little expensive at $330 US, but sometimes it's worth spending the money for an unforgettable experience.
There were 10 divers and 4 divemasters on the boat as well as a crew of 6, but the boat was big enough that it never seemed crowded. Greg was particularly excited at the prospect of a 4-day tropical cruise, snorkelling and beachcombing between dives and soaking up the sun on the upper sundeck. As it turned out, it rained for 3 and a half days of the 4, and the sea was rough enough that a lot of us felt a little seasick during the crossings of open ocean. I felt more than a little seasick, and spent one afternoon and evening in abject misery hanging over the stern rail. Joanne, on the other hand, enjoyed the pitching and rolling of the boat and said it lulled her to sleep. Greg and I played lots of chess, but between the rain and being physically tired from 3 or 4 dives a day and feeling unwell, we didn't get up to nearly as much as we had hoped.
The weather aside, the diving was superb. The underwater scenery was full of enormous boulders rather than the fringing coral reefs that I was used to diving on. There was a fair amount of coral, especially colourful soft coral, but the main attraction was the fish life and the underwater topography. The visibility was superb, often well over 30 metres, and there were clouds of colourful reef fish (lion fish, angelfish, parrotfish, triggerfish, pufferfish) as well as larger, silvery deep-ocean fish like tuna, mackerel, jacks and barracuda dropping by for a bite to eat. There were bigger fish as well, although whale sharks, frequently sighted until 2 years previously, seem to have dropped out of sight. Over the course of our dives, we saw a tiny bamboo shark under a ledge and a large leopard shark lying on the bottom. Greg, unaware that leopard sharks aren't always as docile as they appear, tried to get up close and personal with one. We also saw an enormous black-blotched ray (2 metres across) resting under a ledge on our last dive. Blue-spotted and Kuhl's stingrays were everywhere, resting on the sandy bottom and flying away gracefully as we approached. Joanne saw a hawksbill turtle, pointed out the beautiful juvenile emperor angelfish to the rest of us and a jelly fish sitting under a rock looking out of place at a depth of 25m. Several octopi showed up, and I saw my first-ever garden of garden eels sticking out of the sand, their upper parts swaying in the current until we alarmed them by approaching and they retreated into their burrows. The area was alive with moray eels, some of them giant morays that were far bigger than any I had ever seen before. We saw a black-banded sea snake swimming around with alarming speed near where we were supposed to surface.
There were lots of little things to see as well: sea slugs and colourful nudibranchs, a rare anglerfish that looked like Picasso's conception of a tropical fish, all angles and odd, bulbous shapes, as well as cleaner shrimp that kept the moray eels' razor-sharp teeth clean. The boulders, washed by strong currents, were ideal places for huge gorgonian sea fans and long whip corals to grow, providing a great backdrop for the more mobile attractions to swim by. Since we were in a national park that was doubly protected by being under the watchful eye of a royal princess, the coral was in superb condition, with little damage from dynamite fishing or careless anchoring. Even with overcast and rainy skies restricting the light, it was still a wonderfully colourful world underwater. At some dive sites the boulders overhung and formed underwater tunnels that made for exhilirating swimthroughs that gave it all the feeling of a magic carpet ride.
We came ashore from the trip a little wobbly from four days of rolling and pitching but exhilirated from the wonderful time we had had underwater.
Greg, who had limited time and had to go back to Japan in a few days, made a beeline the next day for Ko Samui, while Joanne and I spent a lazy day in Khao Lak, nipping out for an elephant ride in the nearby jungle before the rains struck again. The next day's long bus and boat ride to Ko Tao, off the east coast of Thailand, reminded me of why I hate bus travel in the Third World: long waits for buses that turned out to be full, quarrels over the fare, lugging Joanne's boxed bicycle from place to place, hours of standing on crowded buses with ceilings too long for my giraffe-like neck, the stupefying dullness of watching the asphalt glide by without being able to see beyond the edge of the road (I really am too tall for buses in short countries). After dropping off Joanne's bike in Chumphon, next to mine, we caught the slow night boat to Ko Tao. Not paying enought attention to the date and its significance, we found ourselves travelling at the beginning of a five-day weekend in Thailand, the single most popular time for Thais to visit Ko Tao. The boat was comically overcrowded and there was no space to spread out and sleep. After hours of extreme discomfort and sleep deprivation curled up on the upper deck with hundreds of Thais and their enormous piles of luggage, it started to pour rain to add to the misery. We were a wet and grumpy pair of tired travellers when we stepped ashore before dawn.
Joanne had been to Ko Tao two years ago, and was looking forward to the perfect little cove that she had stayed at then. It was her vision of tropical paradise. Excitedly she led the way to where it was, only to find that its splendid isolation was a thing of the past, as four separate large bungalow developments had erupted in the interim, shattering the tranquility of the scene. Disconsolate, we retired to her beloved Swiss bakery for breakfast only to find that it now provided service with a snarl. All the accomodation up and down the main beach was booked solid for the weekend, so I rented a motorbike and set off for remoter beaches in search of nice sand and a good bungalow. After a harrowing ride down a track that a mountain goat would have hesitated to descend, I found a hotel with bungalows available and struggled back to town to find Joanne chatting to Greg, who had arrived on the island the day before. We also found friends from Japan, Trish and Stephan, later that day and had a little reunion, snorkelling in Joanne's ex-favourite cove. After a great pizza dinner, we said our goodbyes to Greg, who was bound for Singapore the next morning, and returned to our little secluded bay.
We spent a couple of days doing nothing at our beach aside from swimming and reading. We finally bestirred ourselves to go diving, since that's what Ko Tao is famous for. A whale shark is seen most mornings at one of the dive sites, but he didn't show up that morning, perhaps scared away by the vast hordes of divers that gathered to see him. There were so many divers there that it was unpleasant diving; there was little to see other than other wet-suited figures and their silvery trails of bubbles. The visibility was poor and, compared to the Similans, the coral was nothing special while the fish life was poor. To cap it off, our divemaster was not particularly good and I managed to drop my weightbelt into the depths before the first dive. The second dive was at least quieter, and we saw a hawksbill turtle, but the overall experience didn't leave us with much desire to continue diving at Ko Tao. As in much of Thailand, the sheer number of tourists has eroded the quality of the experience of visiting Ko Tao. We left the next afternoon for Chumphon, back to our bikes and the scenery of the mainland.