Diving on Koh Tao
3 days ago I moved to the island of Koh Tao which is known for having some of the best scuba diving in Southeast Asia. I am staying at a place called Ban's Dive Resort and so far it's been the nicest and more importantly, the cheapest place I have stayed at. It's only costing me 1.80USD/night (split between 2 guys I met from England). The reason the room is so cheap is because the resort makes all their money on diving packages and from the restaurant. The rooms are suprisingly nice compared to where i've been saying the last 2 1/2 weeks. It's more of a hotel style accomdation however so it's not a bungalow on the beach like before. It also has a really nice pool and a good restaurant.
So far i've only done about 5 dives. 2 afternoon dives and 1 night dive on the 17th and another 2 afternoon dives on the 18th. Today i'm taking a day off from diving to explore the island and rest. The diving here is fanastic compared to what i'm used to in Boston but I still prefer Mexico more based on the reefs that i've dove so far. The big difference here is the marine life. Massive schools of fish on most of the dive sites; much more fish than i've ever seen diving in Mexico. Other than that, nothing really special to report about. The night dive was fairly bland until the end when we starting to see lots of stingrays. On the afternoon dives, I saw a very large and curious sea turtle that seemed to follow our dive party with no fear for about 10-15 minutes. I also saw some other stingrays and a barracuta which are all too common sights in Mexico so perhaps i'm a bit jaded on the quality of the diving here. I would at least rate it on par with Cozumel, Mexico although in my opinion the reefs in Mexico have much more to see with massive swim-thrus and different coral formations. I am going to probably do one or two more days of diving then I am heading to Krabi since I only have 10 days left in Thailand. Going to try to do 5 days in Krabi and spend the rest of my time in Koh Phi Phi before heading to Malaysia.
The other aspect of diving here which I am not really fond of is the size of the dive boats and the number of people diving here. In Mexico, Florida keys, and Boston i'm used to very small dive boats with a maximum of perhaps 8 people. The dive boats here are massive with 60 people on one boat. The divemasters of course will split up the groups into smaller, more managable sizes but it still has a feeling of over crowdedness. Every dive site here is literally filled with divers, way too many. Besides these minor shortcomings, I quite like the diving here and Ban's Diving Resort is fanastic and well run dive operation. Ban's is well more organized than any dive operator i've encountered in Mexico. I am seriously considering coming back here to get my Divemaster certification because Ban's provides you free diving for life is you complete your certification here. I don't think anyone could pass up that offer.
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