Diving on the Andaman Coast
I flew from Siam Reap to Phuket via Bangkok. I was getting picked up from the airport later that day and thought that I should make the most of the time I had to kill. I checked my backpack at left luggage and went straight to the nearest beach. Six hours later, I got picked up by a minibus and started to meet some of the others that would be diving with us: two American expats based in Singapore; two mad Australian expats also based in Singapore; the owner of a resort on Koh Samet (together with one of his employees/servants who wouldn’t be diving but helped him in and out of his gear every dive); and two others. The minibus took just under an hour to get to where the MV Black Manta was docked and from the banter on the way, I knew that I would have a good time onboard.
When we arrived, we realised that there were a lot more people on the MV Black Manta: two Londoners (Nikki and Ren); an English racecar driver and his girlfriend; a group of Germans and several others. In addition to the divers, there was a team of five dive instructors, about a dozen crew members and someone’s young baby.
The diving was great. We cruised overnight and spent the first day on board diving off the coast of the Similian islands. The next day, we dived at Koh Bon and Koh Tachai. On day three we had a couple of dives at Richelieu Rock before diving some other sites at Koh Tachai and Koh Bon. I did not feel too well on day four and so skipped the last two dives (Koh Bon and a wreck). I was not too upset to miss these dives: I had had a great few days.
The visibility was superb (especially after diving in Cambodia!) and there was so much to see. The highlights include several kinds of lobsters (elegant squat lobsters, giant spiny lobsters and a sculptured slipper lobster), crabs (big red reef crabs, coral crabs…), shrimps (peacock mantis shrimps, harlequin shrimps, coral shrimps…), starfish, dogtooth tuna, barracudas, a clown trigger fish, seahorses, various nudibranchs, eels (white eyed moray eels, giant moray eels, ribbon eels, garden eels…), sea snakes, rays (blue spotted kuhl rays and an eagle ray - sadly no mantas) and a leopard shark. Listing these highlights however fails to acknowledge the beauty of all the other fish swarming around: the huge shoals of glass fish, fusiliers, groupers and snapper, the various parrot fish, huge groupers and trigger fish, the anemones and feather stars, the coral formations… These were some great dive sites. I’ve got a disk full of photos that one of the dive instructors took and will post some of these when I get a chance.
We had a great time out of the water too. The boat was well organised, the cooking was excellent and there was a great atmosphere amongst the divers. The weather was not perfect, but it was still very good. All in all a great time.
I spent a night and a day with Nikki and Ren at a beach resort in Khao Lak before moving on to Bangkok by overnight bus. I arrived at the out of town Southern bus station around 5.30am and immediately grabbed a cab into town. I was heading to the Lumphu Tree House hotel. Or at least that is what I thought. When the cab stopped I knew it was in the wrong place. I had only spent two days in Bangkok before but I had a basic sense of the city’s layout and I was not in the right place. It took about 15 minutes to explain this to the cabbie who spoke only very little English. He had taken me to Soi Rambuttri (Rambuttri lane). The problem in our discussion was that (like many Asians) Thais have great difficulty differentiating between the ‘r’ sound and the ‘l’ sound. To make things worse, they also confuse ‘p’ and ‘b’. Rambuttri and Lumphu Tree apparently sounded exactly the same to him…
