Into the deep blue (pool)

Posted by Ryan

Day 2 of Koh Tao we started off with a stroll down to get some breaky. I had an omelette and an instant coffee. About 10am Chris and I went to another theory lesson for diving with our dive instructor Lorenzo a 44 year old Italian “farang” covered in tats. Our class of 5 students also had a Canadian bloke called Cyrus or Cy and a Swedish couple called Pavlo(I think) and Sandra. The morning’s theory session pretty much consisted of him telling us if we ascended or descended too quickly or did anything wrong, we’d die of some horrible nitrogen related illness. Then we got measured up for our wetsuits, fins and other diving gear that we’d use over the next couple of days.

We had a couple of hours interval before our first “confined water dive” ie in a pool, so we decided to find the girls and have some food. God knows it had been at least 2 hours since we’d last eaten and we were starved. We headed back into the main town where we got the ferry in. The day was pretty hot, so I decided to have a spicy duck soup to really get a good sweat going. After all of us were sweating like hookers at a church, we had a quick look around the town, I grabbed a decent coffee and we headed back.

That afternoon Chris and I turned up at the dive center, ready for our first SCUBA dive. After a brief run down of the equipment and checks we plunged into the pool. I think at that point the group was just more excited about getting out of the heat and being submerged in cool water.

We did a few drills, a couple of which involved taking off the mask and putting it back on. I made the mistake of opening my eyes with the mask full of pool water, which seemed to consist of 9 hundred thousand parts per million of Chlorine. Insert Mc Baine joke “Ze goggles zey do nothing!”

For dinner we went to one of the local BBQ joints and Heidi and I shared a BBQed squid and chicken kebab with sides of fried rice and spring rolls. We were going to hit up the Maya bar for some party on the beach, but then it started raining really really hard, so had to move in off the beach. Boooo. On the way home I had some fried chicken from a street vendor that was very delicious, or which tasted very delicious after several tallies of Chang beer. Awww yeah.