Nitrogen Narcosis

Posted by Chris

Danae and I got up at early and we went to the Flower Bar to meet Ryan and Heidi for breakfast. We later realised that as a part of the cool scuba dive package, breakfast should have also been included for free. Heidi didn’t mention it yesterday, but instead of paying for the originally organised accommodation (which was very nice and had a great view), Danae and I decided to stay in the free accommodation that you get if you sign up for a SCUBA open water course. We had to pay 500 Baht per night for Air-Con but it was a great deal and quite nice, although no view. The SSI course was 8000 baht – much cheaper than at home, and also Koh Tao is the home of SCUBA so you have to do these things (apparently in the high season you will have lots of trouble trying to find accommodation if you don’t sign up for SCUBA dives).

Anyways, we had a nice enough breakfast and the girls left as they were going on an all day snorkelling tour around the whole of Koh Tao. Ryan and I stayed at the hotel doing our homework using Ryan’s “Knowledge Sharing” technique – where I do one chapter, Ryan does another, then we swap answers (sounds a bit like cheating).

We wondered back to the SCUBA school to wait for class to begin and ran into the girls. There were lots of people going snorkelling today, probably about 25 people. As the girls left I had a very close call to death. A pair of drunken idiots on a motorbike came roaring past and almost crashed into the garden and me, lucky they just missed. Koh Tao has a huge party every night with pumping music on the beach until the sun comes up. I am not sure who attends these parties as most people seem to be here for the SCUBA. Actually, we later saw a drunken reveller asleep under one of the bar decks on the beach so some people must be going.

School today was short, with only an hour of theory before a 2 hour break for lunch. There was no power today for some reason, so no air con, which made learning difficult. The power supply on Koh Tao is really dodgy and some places have a daily blackout from 6am to 10am. The highlight of today’s lesson was when Ryan had to desperately leave the room to go use the bathroom after his morning coffee.

During lunch we enjoyed Ryan and Heidi’s view while doing the answers to chapter 5. Back at the Phoenix dive school, we loaded up a longtail boat for the short trip to the SCUBA boat. There was a crap-load of gear and a lot of people so the longboat was loaded to absolute capacity. It was a waste of time though as 4 people couldn’t fit on the boat and the longtail had to come back for them.

Our first open water dive spot was at the beautiful Mango bay at the north end of Koh Tao. We suited up, did our buddy checks (Bruce Wills Ruins All Films) and jumped in the water for the first time. We descended to about 6 meters where we all did our training drills and then followed a coral outcrop down to a bottom depth of 12 meters. The Swedes took a little while to get their buoyancy control right, but Ryan, Cy and I were cruising along like pros immediately.

Next dive spot was at the Twin Peaks, right next to the beautiful national park island “Koh Nang Yuan” (Such a beautiful island you can’t take any sort of bottle or even flippers to this island, there is even a 100 baht charge just for landing there). As we decended, my ears were hurting and I was having trouble trying to equalise the pressure by blowing through my nose.

We finally finished the decent and stopped on the bottom for drills. I was completely freaking out because I felt some very sharp pains in both my ears within a minute and I thought my ear drums were exploding (something quite common and very painful that can happen while diving). I was ready to surface and indicated to Lorenzo that I was having sharp pains in my ears, but he didn’t seem overly concerned.

We swam about under the sea for about 30 minutes which was very nice but I couldn’t enjoy it as I was too worried about the rest of my life without sound. I really can’t emphasise enough how concerned I was about my ears. I have previously had ear problems from swimming/surfing, and my ears hurt even when I swim to the bottom of a pool.

Once we finished the swim and were getting ready to surface, we did some more drills on the ocean floor. As I was watching Lorenzo a fish tried to dart right into his ear. The largish fish, that grow to about 25 cm, must have thought his ear was a cave with bubbles coming out of it, and tried to get in. I thankfully realised that maybe the sharp pains I had been feeling during our first drills were these same fish.

We surfaced while doing an air sharing exercise and Ryan confirmed that he too had felt the fish going into his ears. It was a relief that the sharp jabs were not my ear drums exploding, but it still didn’t change the fact that I was feeling pain while descending and I couldn’t equalise properly (Actually I just found out that as a child, a doctor said I had narrow Eustachian tubes).

Back on dry land we found the nicely glazed girls in the AC2 bar, drinking cocktails with two friends from the snorkelling tour, James and Anette (during the snorkelling trip, Danae and Heidi landed on the national park island of Ko Nangyuan and drank cocktails there, instead of snorkelling the Japanese Gardens – so norty). James was a single English dude who the girls were hoping would hook up with the gorgeous South African Anette, but Anette ruined those hopes when she revealed she had a boyfriend back home. I thought she might have just made up the boyfriend on the spot, but we checked out her Facebook and her story corroborates.

We had an early night, after BBQ and Pad Thai dinners, as Ryan and I were quite tired from the SCUBA. Despite my tiredness, I spent most of the night staring at the ceiling, wondering if my eardrums would survive the decent to 21 meters tomorrow morning.