Sunday, February 1, 2009

otherworldly in ko tao



We then (finally!) began our trip south to Thailand's rich island's and beaches. Stopping through Bangok on the way down, our first official stop was Ko Tao, an island in the Gulf of Thailand which is famous for certifying the most scuba divers in the world. So, with the help of our generous parents' Christmas gifts, we planned to get certified to dive!

Our instructor for our four-day course was Pascal, who was as French as Jacques Cousteau. Coming into the dive shop every morning was like coming home. It is a strange sensation on a trip to come back to a place where someone knows your name and recognizes you as belonging there. After some cheesy videos and some basic shallow water training, we got to enter the world of diving. We sunk down beneath the water, our life supported by the capabilities of the tank on our backs, and entered a new universe. We swam past gardens of clownfish guarding their anemone-homes, saw an ultra-venomous sea snake slithering along the sandy bottom, a giant transluscent jellyfish hovering above us like an alien presence, and endless varieties of shining coral housing just an infinate variations of fish. Well, now that we have this certification, we can forever enter this world with the confidence that education brings, and now we have seen one tiny fraction of our world's 75% water life.

No comments: