Two More Days of Diving

Today we have finished two more days of diving and have now earned our advanced divers license. The advanced course was even better than our first... we spent less time in a classroom and most of our last two days in the water. We learned how to navigate around a dive site, practiced identifying fish and coral, went diving at night, and then dove deeper to depths of 30m. below the surface. We even went on one dive without the instructor and managed to come up alive without getting lost... just me, mally, and matt (from australia).

We also had some more wonderful underwater experiences. Yesterday, we jumped in the water just before dusk and watched as some of the fish fell asleep and others came out to play... I didn't know that some fish sleep verticle with their heads up. We also saw underwater phosphorescense - we waved our hands all about in the dark water and watched little sparks light up around us! When diving at night, some colors come out that you don't see in the day since they are lost as sunlight travels through the water... starfish that look a bit dull in daylight are bright red when I shine my flashlight on them. It was quite a unique and peaceful experience to be underwater at night.

Today, we had some more great diving. During our first dive, we swam with an enormous school of yellow-band fusilier. Thousands of yellow-striped fish zoomed in front of our eyes. We swam through them... and they broke apart to let us through before joining back together in a streak of yellow and white blur. The one bad thing about diving is that you have to come up before running out of air... that means most dives last about 45 minutes... I would be content to watch a school of fish all day.

Our next dive was full of more great finds including a blue spotted stingray, sea slugs (which are so much cooler than land slugs that they deserve a different name), angelfish, bannerfish, a large white fish (quite extraordinary... I don't know what it was though), a giant jellyfish, shrimp, a sea cushion... and so much more. New sea creatures seem to appear all over once I began to look under rocks and in little nooks and crannies or just focus my eyes on one spot for a while.

Tomorrow we head off to Europe where it will be great to see family and return to a more familiar culture. We have come a long way in getting accustomed to the Thai lifestyle - we are now used to the crazy traffic with no apparent rules, we've learned to take our shoes off before entering island restaurants and know what to order off a thai menu (and some things to avoid), we've gotten to know the nice doggies out of the packs of island dogs (including a seasick rotweiler who came on our dive boat and a cute puppy!!!), and we have learned how to avoid "friendly" people trying to sell us stuff, but we still haven't adjusted to the heat, the widespread poverty, and the lack of toilet paper in restrooms (in fact, we are still a little unsure on the whole flushing procedure here... there are no nice little handles to pull down and no instructions on how to use the water sprayer or bucket of water to get 'stuff' down - oh dear!)... some things are hard getting used to.