{"id":778,"date":"2014-01-22T10:31:37","date_gmt":"2014-01-22T10:31:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/radcopter.com\/brianandmarisa\/worldtrip\/?p=778"},"modified":"2014-01-22T10:31:37","modified_gmt":"2014-01-22T10:31:37","slug":"koh-tao-thailand-the-place-to-learn-to-scuba-dive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/texandtia.com\/worldtrip\/index.php\/2014\/01\/22\/koh-tao-thailand-the-place-to-learn-to-scuba-dive\/","title":{"rendered":"Koh Tao, Thailand: The Place to Learn to Scuba Dive"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was hoping that the slow pace of Laos, where we have been since January 12th, would mean that we could finally catch up with the blog and not be an entire country behind! Sadly, this slow pace has also translated to extremely slow internet and so I have had no such luck (although, internet at all in Laos–who can complain about that!?)<\/p>\n

And so I travel back into time when we first arrived in Thailand way back on December 16th. After being in India for five weeks, Thailand was an amazing change for us: Everything was just…so…EASY! We marveled at being able to walk down the street, on ACTUAL sidewalks WITHOUT being honked at every time a car passed us. We have heard that Bangkok can be overwhelming for many, so it was really funny to us how calm and peaceful it felt after the chaos of India.<\/p>\n

Our first priority in Thailand was to quickly get to Koh Tao, an island about 8 hours south of Bangkok, so that we would be scuba diving on Brian\u2019s birthday. Koh Tao is supposed to be the best place to learn how to scuba dive, because it is one of the cheapest (if not the cheapest) place to get certified in the world. This is because you cannot walk five feet on the island without bumping into a dive shop. We wanted to get certified in a smaller school, so after a bit of research we settled on Scuba Junction which had good reviews on tripadvisor. We ended up not only taking the 3-day open water certification course, but the 2-day advanced certification where we did five specialty dives: Deep (getting down to 30m, or close to 100 feet deep), wreck, underwater photography, night, and navigation (where we learned how navigate underwater with a compass).<\/p>\n

\"Scuba<\/a>
Scuba junction.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Scuba<\/a>
Scuba junction is located right on the beach!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Brian<\/a>
Brian blowing out his birthday candles.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Unfortunately the dives themselves were not amazing as the visibility was quite poor due to the bad weather while we were there. We did get to see some cool things though including: spotted rays, large crabs, clown fish, \u00a0giant clams, and Harry Hotlips (an actual name of a fish!), to only name a few. We also got some fun pictures from our photography dive:<\/p>\n

\"Weird<\/a>
Weird looking little fish.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Christmas<\/a>
Christmas tree worms that would suck themselves into the rock when you got too close.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"The<\/a>
The best picture I took–underwater photography is really hard!!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Brian!\"<\/a>
Brian!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Me!\"<\/a>
Me!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We were surprised at how touristy Koh Tao was considering that it is one of the lesser known islands in Thailand. We ended up being there for Christmas, which was a strange experience. Christmas on Koh Tao consists of everyone wearing silly, cheap festive headbands (with things on them such as Christmas trees and reindeer antlers), loud pop music and signs lit up with fire that say \u201cHappy X-mas!!\u201d on the beach, and fireworks at midnight on Christmas Eve. It was definitely the least Christmasy Christmas we\u2019ve ever had (and I grew up in Hawaii!), but we couldn\u2019t really complain when we got to spend it on the beach and in 80 degree weather.<\/p>\n

\"Typical<\/a>
Typical stall on Koh Tao around Christmas time selling kitschy Christmas apparel.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"\"<\/a>
Can’t complain about spending Christmas here!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Can't<\/a>
Ahh, the ocean!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Can't<\/a>
Sairee beach.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Nice<\/a>
Nice sunset over Sairee beach.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Fruit<\/a>
Fruit stall on Koh Tao–there were lots of stalls selling things like produce, meat, and pastries typical of other places in Thailand.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"We<\/a>
We had dragonfruit for the first time on Koh Tao and were instantly addicted–especially when it’s in a smoothie!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

One of our favorite things about Thailand, and which we first noticed on Koh Tao is how much they love cats here! Stray cats are obviously well cared for and people put lots of food out to ensure that they don’t go hungry. As a result they are extremely friendly. We had a fun experience where someone’s cat (she was wearing a collar) followed us home one night, walking up the stairs with us to our room. She then proceeded to follow us into our room and was quite content to stay there! We eventually had to kick her out, and even then she stayed outside our door for a long time before finally leaving. I thought that would be the end of it, but several nights later she was back! She did the same thing–followed us upstairs, waltzed right into our room as though she lived there, and then demanded lots of attention from us. It was very adorable.<\/p>\n

\"Our<\/a>
Our new friend, at home in our guesthouse room.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"This<\/a>
This cat climbed onto Brian’s lap and fell asleep. Dawww!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The only thing unpleasant about Koh Tao was that you have to catch a two hour catamaran ferry to get back to the mainland of Thailand. Now, this was an extremely pleasant trip on the way to Koh Tao, with air conditioning, music videos and beautiful weather. On the way back, \u00a0however, the water was so rough that the ferry constantly swung sharply from side to side causing us to experience an incredible sea sickness, the likes of which I have never experienced before in my life. \u00a0For some reason they decided not to play the sound on the music videos like they had on the way over, so we enjoyed the pleasant soundtrack of people (myself included) continuously vomiting into the plastic bags that the crew helpfully and thankfully provided. But we did eventually make it back to Bangkok, much to our relief, to continue our exploration of Thailand.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was hoping that the slow pace of Laos, where we have been since January 12th, would mean that we could finally catch up with the blog and not be an entire country behind! Sadly, this slow pace has also translated to extremely slow internet and so I have had no such luck (although, internet […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,16,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-places","category-seasia","category-thailand"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/texandtia.com\/worldtrip\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/texandtia.com\/worldtrip\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/texandtia.com\/worldtrip\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/texandtia.com\/worldtrip\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/texandtia.com\/worldtrip\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=778"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/texandtia.com\/worldtrip\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/texandtia.com\/worldtrip\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/texandtia.com\/worldtrip\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/texandtia.com\/worldtrip\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}