Asia by Hammock

Imagine combining the beaches of Hawaii, the diving of the Great Barrier Reef, the animals of the Boston Acquarium and then taking away all the people and you would have something approaching my Similan Liveaboard Dive Trip. The weather was brilliant and the seas were calm. The whole experience was absolutely fantastic and probably the highlight of my trip (so far). We did nine dives over three days and spent the rest of the time either enjoying incredible food or chilling out on hammocks or deserted beaches. And they were literally deserted, there was not another dive boat out there and there was a grand total of 7 divers, 4 dive staff and 5 boat crew. There are 9 Similan Islands, so that means each diver could have had an entire island to himself. The beaches were pristine white sand, the water was turquoise fading to dark blue (with like 15-25 meters of visibility - thats a lot) and the hardest decision was choosing whether to sleep on deck under the stars or in the air conditioned bunks.

The crew on the boat (from Sea Dragon) was phenomenal, especially the owner Gunter who would wake us every morning with his "Good Morning, wakey wakey, lets go diving" (he also finished every dive briefing with "all right, lets get wet" and encouraged us to, literally and philosophically, "stare out into the blue"). We saw almost everything you could see there (no Mantas or Giraffes), on one dive we saw a White Tip Reef Shark, a sleeping Nurse Shark, Kuhl's (pronounced, at least with a German accent, "cool's") Stingrays, a Turtle, Barracudas and a bunch of Tuna. That was one dive. We also saw cuttlefish, crabs, shrimps, anglefish (a juvey that was really cute), lots of eels, a clown trigger (the scuba sign for that is hilarious), napolean wrasses (another funny sign), trumpet fish, big fish, small fish, red fish and blue fish! On the ride back to the mainland we even saw Dolphins! It honestly was about as perfect a three days as you can get.

And now I'm back to Khao Lak with my busted cell phone (concrete + cellphones = kaput), a town that is out of stamps (till Tuesday hopefully) and a bar that doesn't get the Food Network on satellite (Tonight, 8pm Eastern I believe). Oh well, I'm excited about working tomorrow and hopefully getting on that air ticekts.

Cheers! (think of it less as me saying cheers and more of me doing a scuba motion for cheers underwater)

Steve