February 14, 2006
And onward to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
After staying in Krabi an extra day, I start a 20 hour, 850 Baht journey to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. At 1030 in the morning I board the first of three Toyota minibuses that takes me to Hat Yai. There I’m passed on from one travel agency/private bus stop to another via minibus. After three hours in town several of us board my third minibus of the day and head south for the Malaysian border at Dan Nok. This is a heavily trafficked, efficient border post and we were through Thai and Malaysian immigration and customs in less than half an hour. After we get back on the road the minibus driver takes us to Georgetown on Pulau Penang island via many stops to let people off, mostly in Butterworth.
It is about 10pm when we arrive at the travel agency in Georgetown where I wait for over an hour. At about 11:15pm a big, VIP bus pulls up and I plop down into seat 3A. Soon we are on the road, and I’m fast asleep. Our arrival was at a painful 4:45am in Kuala Lumpur. Ouch.
Posted by stu at 07:44 AM | Comments (0)
February 11, 2006
PADI Certified Advanced Open Water...at last
The next day I woke up bright and early and was at the dive shop over twenty minutes early. There I meet for the first time my Advanced Open Water instructor, Johannes from Sweden. After two cups of coffee and a loose discussion of the three dives we will do day, every starts to load up the truck. An hour later we are on M/v Petchmanee headed on a two hour cruise for our first dive site, the wreck of the ferry Kingcruiser, where we will accomplish my first PADI Adventure Course, the wreck dive. Cool.
We suit up and jump in the water with the other dozen or so divers. After descending to some 18m we encounter the 1997 wreck we begin to circumnavigate the 85m long ferry clockwise. It is starting to collapse but a few brave divers pop inside for a quick peak. That kind activity is way out of the scope of our dive so we continue on checking out the wreck. Besides the aquatic life, like eels and scorpion fish, we came across the caved in roof of the ferry’s latrine with porcelain toilets very much intact in comparison to the remainder of the vessel. Our dive took us as went as deep as 24m which limited our time and we had to surface after 37 minutes.
After surfacing, unsuiting, drinking some orange Gatorade-like drink and some 75 minutes later Johannes and I were back in the water at Anemone Reef. There he took me on Underwater Naturalist Adventure Dive, along with a big, blonde Ozzie who was also working on his Advanced Open Water certification. His situation was sorta funny because he was actually in Krabi on his honeymoon, but his wife was up in Bangkok visiting relatives and shopping. (Her parents are Thai.) Some honeymoon! Anyway, our big goal for the dive is to circumnavigate a reef (clockwise again) and take notes on five different aquatic life forms. I really grooved on this and took detailed notes on seven different things with an effort to be diverse: coral, plants and fish. It turns out what I thought were plants, some sea fans, are actual a form of coral. Learn something new every day. After 43 minutes at depths up to 22m we surface again, unsuit and it’s lunch time.
While eating lunch, along with the other few diving boats from the local area, a shout from the Phi Phi Scuba vessel asked if we had any cigarettes, even offering to pay for them. Two minutes later a beautiful blonde women was swimming over to our boat declaring, and this is a direct quote, “I am not desperate, just drunk”. We all had a good laugh out of it and she made off with a few fags to hold her over. Junkies, the lot of them.
After an hour and forty some minutes we arrive, get our gear on again and dive onto Shark Point for the PADI Peak Performance Buoyancy Adventure Course. We had to do silly things like hold our fins and levitate like a Jedi Master, swim around and then over another diver, approach them from the back, float over then and then come down head first until we were looking at their crotch.
A seemingly more important exercise consisted of an instructor handing up a 0.8kg dive belt weight and we had to hold our current depth without using our BCD. I’m pleased to say that I did fairly well at most of these assignments. My fellow Ozzie diver had much more difficulty but we discussed it top side and we he seemed to be overcompensating on both downwards and upwards movements and depending on his BDC too much. After 45 minutes underwater we surfaced for the last time, debriefed, ate some fresh watermelon and pineapple, and headed back in for the two hour journey to Ao Nang.
Knowing now to behave myself, once we reached shore I had a quick dinner with Terje again, did some internet junky stuff, and hit the sake early—tomorrows dive was starting an hour early and we needed to be at the dive center at 6:45am. Ouch!
Once we finished our now routine dive center-to-dive boat transfer we were off an and extra long three hour voyage to Koh Haa Yai. There we had two pairs of Advanced Course: Deep Diver students, the Ozzie and myself. Before the dive we had two complete two silly exercises. The first was to spell our name backwards and the second to pick out numbers from a 4x4 grid with the squares numbered from 1 to 16. Our instructor timed our results so that we could compare with our times down deep when we would should be under the increasing (as the deeper you get) effects of nitrogen narcosis. We kept separate for the initial exercises, which turned out to very interesting: I was faster at the exercises at 29m than I was shipside. When Johannes wrote the results on his slate a laughed through my regulator so hard is was audible to everyone around us. Too funny.
After that the Ozzy’s instructor had some eggs with him which he broke open and we played with the yolk. It was interesting because it the pressure condensed it so much that you could push on it and your finger indentation would stay in it until manipulated later. The fish were also interested and we had to keep ushering them away. Afterwards we slowly ascended until we were ready to surface
Now that I think about it, before we descended to depth we also went through some caves at Koh Haa Yai. One could look up and see the surface of the water, but it was not exposed to the open atmosphere, which was really cool. At one point it got a little narrow and my fins kicked the sides, but other than that all was cool.
After ascending and boarding the dive boat we spend nearly two hours moving onto the next dive site, Koh Hoa Lagoon. There we were to complete my most dreaded Advanced Course, the underwater navigation dive. This stems from my follies in Marbella, Spain where I completed my initial Open Water certification and really disliked the underwater navigation exercise. Anyway, things went OK. There was this one area where we started out every maneuver where locally known porcupine fish hangs out. I forget his name, but it is something like "Perky". He is like a cat that demand attention and wants people to rub his underside…so much so that he gets in the way of what we are trying to accomplish.
Anyway, we complete the four navigation tasks and then head off to check out some rare aquatic life that Johannes is really excited about. They were interesting, but I can’t exactly put to words what they looked like.
We surface, board, head back for Ao Nang on the three hour trip and everyone relaxes…eating fruit, sleeping on the foredeck of the boat, a beer or two, and chatting. Very relaxing. Once we get to shore we all head back for the dive center where Johannes and I filled out the log book and paperwork for my official PADI Advanced Open Water certification. Oh, yea, I also had to drop over 13,000 Baht on the old UBS MasterCard.
Posted by stu at 05:59 PM | Comments (0)
February 09, 2006
Day trip to Patong Beach, Phuket
So having missed the dive boat that third day, being a bit worse for the wear because of the booz the previous eveing, and having no interest in hanging about the not-too-pleasant Ao Nang area of Krabi, I impulsively rented a 200 Baht/day 100cc Honda Wave scooter from the Internet shop next door that was getting to know me because of my frequent visits. Now I was on the road for Phuket, a ~240km. It took about 2.5-3 hours to get there (I was hauling ass—averaging about 100kph and topping out at 120kph) mostly along route 4 which takes drivers most of they way. Because of my high speed, I had to stop for some petrol halfway there—85 Baht for about 3 litters of 91 octane juice.
I must have made it into Patong Beach, the most popular and seedy part of Phuket Island, at about 11:30am. Once I became orientated I parked my blue scooter along the beach and headed for the water to cool off. Patong Beach is so much like the south coast of Spain or France that it is frightening—packed in beach chairs, topless women of all ages, and enough trinket vendors to drive the most tolerant person mad.
It was interesting to see the damage and recovery of the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004. Many hotels and beach front infrastructure were either fully fixed up or under construction. But there were a disturbing number of buildings fenced off and clearly nothing having been done to fix them up since that horrible day.
Around noon I realized that there was some sort of festival/parade going on and walked around randomly until it was clear what the route was. It turns out to be the Gay Pride Parade for Phuket and is centered on that famous seedy road and the main beach road, Thanon Thavee Wong. It was a great opportunity for people picture taking and soon I should have plenty of interesting photographs up in the gallery. This is the second Gay Pride Parade I’ve witnessed in the past six months, the other being in Reykjavík, Iceland last September. 
The contrasts were interesting: Patong participants were generally male and dressed up in drag, while in Reykjavík there were many more lesbians and less men dressed as women. In Reykjavík it was basically a local and family affair with lots of kids, families and a generally good feeling about it. “Gay for a day”, is how Clement of www.ontheruntur.com described it. (You can also checkout my entry about the parade on www.runtur.com) The Patong parade seemed very commercialized—may of the floats and parade participants were employees of bars and discothèques dressed in commercially uniform outfits. Some where even handing out flyers to come join in the after parties, naturally held at the bars themselves. In Reykjavík it was much more of a civic affair.
A funny thing was that the Katoey community seemed to be left out too, along with the lesbians. (Maybe there aren’t that many Lesbians in Thailand…I do not really know.) But a group of about seven or eight rebellious, flamboyant, seductively dressed Katoey were roaming around half disturbing the parade. The officials did not seem to happy about it. The crowd loved it as they posed for pictures with all the tourists hanging out on the street. All in all, it was very entertaining. 
About 5pm I realized that I needed to start heading back for Krabi. Unfortunately, I got lost on the Island of Phuket and ended up east of Phuket Town, which delayed me nearly an hour. Once the sun set and the bug came out, I had to slow down because I was now not wearing any eye protection. Then it started to get a little bit chilly for my shorts-n-T-shirt attire. And finally I missed some of the side roads off to Ao Nang and ended up in Krabi Town central…all of this costing me another hour. Once back in Ao Nang at about 10pm I bumped into Terje while tracking down some dinner.
Whew, what a day.
Posted by stu at 09:40 PM | Comments (0)
First days in Ao Nang, Krabi
My first day in Ao Nang, Krabi was just checking out the local scene and securing my diving reservations. Shortly up the road from my guesthouse, I found Ao Nang Divers where they organized two days of PADI Advanced Open Water course dives, and a day of two ‘fun’ dives. From then on I just checked out what little there is to check out in Ao Nang, spent a few hours on the crappy beach with a bit of swimming, took pictures of interesting little bits, and checking out the local knickknacks for sale. That evening it Terje, my travel buddy from Laos, and I exchanged emails and coordinated a meet up the following day after my dives.
The next morning I met the Ao Nang Diving staff at their headquarters on the premises of Krabi Sea View Resort on route 4203 the Ao Nang high street at 7:45am. After loading up the truck with our gear and food for the day we headed the kilometer or so down to the beach and moved everything off onto a long boat. The long boat then took us out another kilometer to see where we transferred everything to the 25m, 2.5 deck M/v Petchmanee dive boat and set out on a two hour cruise to the island Koh Bida Nok.
After suiting up with my dive master, Kirre from Norway, and a beautiful young Swedish woman’s name who escapes me, we spent 57 minutes at Koh Bida Nok. It was fantastic…I have nto been diving for over two years since my Christmas holiday on San Salvador in The Bahamas with Steve, Charlotte and her parents. It was like riding a bicycle.
After about fifty minutes for lunch and the cruise to our new dive site, The Pinnade at Koh Yun, we jumped back in for our second 61 minute dive. While the visibility was not as stunning as San Salvador, both dives were incredibly amazing and lots of fun. On the two hour ride back to Ao Nang I grabbed myself a 70 Baht Chang Beer that as for sale, slipped into the rear corner of the top deck and relaxed.
Once back on shore I met Terje for the first time in Thailand. We went out for dinner, had some drinks, and played some pool with two young kids from America and two young ladies who claimed to be from Jersey…but Essex seemed more likely in my mind. Anyway, after only five beers or so I was completely pissed and went into the trademark Steve-Owens-walk-away-without-saying-a-word crash mode. Heading straight for the guesthouse, I accidentally stiffed Terje with my 700 Baht bar bill. (It was an Irish bar and the Guinness in a can was a whopping 250 Baht a pop which we discovered on the second round.)
Apparently, diving and drinking afterwards are not so compatible and it really messed me up. The next morning I missed the dive boat by ten minutes, but that is probably a good thing considering how poorly I was feeling.
Posted by stu at 07:11 PM | Comments (0)