Diving, Diving, Diving

After our first day of diving we had 3 more days of diving left – another 2 tank dive day, a 4 tank dive on “Super Sunday,” and a 3 tank dive on Monday which was our last day in Phuket. The rest of our diving was smooth (even if some days the water wasn’t!) We went diving all around the area, even out to Phi Phi Island which is where The Beach was filmed, and on Super Sunday did a night dive at Koh Doc Mai which is a wall dive… night dives always make me a tad bit nervous (because it’s dark and obviously you can’t see what might be checking YOU out) but it was great.

On all of the rest of these dives we saw some incredible marine life I’ve never seen before… leopard sharks (some swimming and resting in the sand), nudibranchs (mollusk family), an octopus (a TRUE highlight – watching him change colors was out of this WORLD), black tip sharks (non-aggressive towards people though not small sharks), Kuhl’s stingrays which are smaller than ones we’re used to but have bright bluish purple spots, cuttlefish, which we’d never seen, new species of eels, and of course loads of new fun fish large and small… we even got a shipwreck in, which are always very cool, too!

On one dive we took Ninja Flat Stanley Cameron which was interesting, and got some great pictures of him around underwater... what was funny is that for whatever reason, a couple of flute fish (long fish - about two feet long with a long snout) were VERY interested in Flat Stanley (I can only assume it was him as on all of our other dives they stayed far away from us) so I looked over at one point and this fish was literally right next to me checking Stanley's laminated "wetsuit" out, LOL! Curt saw it, too, so that was kind of funny.... must have been the reflection?

We made great diving buddy friends, including our dive master, Pete, a Brit who was our dive master the whole time (that was so nice – it’s so much cooler when you get to know someone and they get to know your style of diving – makes for a much more comfortable experience) and so great, the food was fantastic, and we had a fantastic time. Diving for 4 days in a row with multiple tanks is a ton of nitrogen in the body and exhausting if you don’t do it all the time so we were (and still are) a bit tired from the constant going!

What made for an exciting getaway was a little “Amazing Race” type action for Curt – he forgot his flash charger on the boat and in about 45 minutes took a dingy out into the bay at about 7 a.m. as our pick up to go to the airport was 7:30 a.m…. I wasn’t there so I can’t tell the story, but poor guy was drenched in seawater and sweat when he got back to me just as our shuttle was leaving us… turned around and reloaded our luggage – whew!

Then back to Bangkok to get ready for our trip to Cambodia, where we ventured out in yesterday after our flight got in. I had read about a market so we decided to go there, Or Tor Kor, a local and huge fresh food market. It was cool – we walked around, both bought something to try, and then walked around the city some more. Our hotel is in a nice area, and by the time it was time for dinner we opted for good ol’ McDonald’s. We’ve eaten Thai food pretty much non stop so went for a familiar favorite and oh man, it was so good! After that we ended up at an Asian restaurant where we had some tea and dessert which was nice, and then back to the hotel as our pick up was scheduled for 5 a.m.!