Swimming with the sharks ;)

Evening all! going to be a short one

We are still in Thailand, have just arrived in Phuket after a long day of complications- Nothing unusual about that tho, In fact i think things would be very boring if everything ran smoothly!
Since we last updated we have pretty much become beach bums! We moved to Koh Phi Phi last Monday. This was a major culture shock not sure what we were expecting but it was about 10 times crazier. So as soon as the boat docked we had the usual swarm of people trying to get us to stay at their house.... after we bypassed these we went into this maze of streets. At this stage it was very hot and we had no clue what we were at. so dropped off our bags with some travel agents and decided to go and hunt for a room.... this was much harder then expected! High season has just started here! must have went into about 10 places that were full...then came accross the ones that were way out of our budget. getting pretty desperate we settled for a small new guesthouse that was very cheap. cheap because it had no ceilings or floors and some seriously messed up roosters living outside the window! anyway it had a good shower and thats all we cared about at that stage!
So if that wasnt energetic enough for one day we decided to head to the viewpoint...up the mountain...approx 700 steps!! steep steps, dont think i would have went up if i thought about the coming back down again
Anyway that was worth it , view was really cool! I think we collapsed on one of the beautiful beaches after that.
that night we met up with Bernie and Keir ( Krabi friends) for a small few sore heads all round the next day.

Phi Phi is a nice place but its is seriously overloaded with tourists, you can guess that by the price and difficulty of getting somewhere to sleep. I'm sure it was once a really beautiful place and it still is in a way but the amount of construction and building things on top of each other is a bit much.

Denis booked himself into an open water diving course for the next 3 days, after we found a new room cos the mozzie bites were starting to get a bit much! So we moved into a lovely place right beside the beach that was twice the price but worth it! It made Phi Phi a much better experience!

I spent the next few days reading and working on my freckles while Denis became Mr Scuba!

Diving course - Denis's entry
We weren't too sure how long we would stay on phi phi after we first arrived. It didn't seem to match what we were expecting but there was also supposed to be excellent diving there. I had wanted to do the course for a few years now and it only cost 200 euro compared to 700 odd back home. So i went into a dive school get some info I was told that I would have to swim around a large boat 3 times and then thread water for ten minutes as part of the course. This scared me off doing but I was very disappointed. The fact that I was hungover and not feeling in the best place at the time didn't give me much confidence either. But Louise knew how much i wanted to do the course so she convinced me I'd be ok and showed me how to float(cme in handy for 6 of the 10 minutes threading water). I went back to the dive shop and got more assurances that I'd be grand so booked the 3 day course.

There was two others on the course with me, a Swedish girl and a lad from Armagh (Marc Thompson). neither of them had dove before so it took them a little time to get used to the whole under water breathing and safety stuff. The dive instructed was very patient and very good at calming and making sure we were all ok. The first day was spent on the beach in shallow water gong over the basics.

The second day we headed to Phi Phi lai. We had two dives that day, more safety procedures which were a big mad when you were 10m at the bottom of a reef and there are leopard sharks and turtles swimming around you. We spent about 2 hours in total diving. Me and Marc had to surface before the others cause we took deeper breaths that the girls(bigger lungs). At lunch time came the dreaded swim test. I let all the others go first cause I wanted as many instructors keeping an eye on me as possible. We I jumped in to do the swim my instructor wanted me to do the breast stroke, slowly. I tried this for half a boat length but was knackered, i managed to finish it but needed a few mins to catch my breath. The threading water went ok for the first 4 minutes, (which seemed like 20) after that I was wrecked so I floated for the rest of the time, much to the amusement of the whole boat. They didn't know that floating was allowed, ha ha. I passed the written exam that evening.

The third day we had a different instructor, a French girl who didn't seem as aware of us as the other instructor. She spent most of the time looking ahead of us, not really checking we were ok. It was hard get her attention when we needed something. She even sent me and Marc to the surface by ourselves when marc reached to the low air safety limit. We were floating around the island for 15 mins before we found our boat. It was a good laugh tho. We seen a whole rack of fish and coral on the two days diving. The most spectacular of which was a 10ft leopard shark. I floated over him about a meter above him while he slept. He woke up and cruised along beside me for about a minute. I was told they were completely harmless, as they are bottom feeders but he sure was an intimidating looking critter. We also saw some massive silver finned tuna, scorpion fish, nemo's, turtles, Squid, a few big octopus, and hundreds of large shoals fish. Its was really amazing down there and the feeling of weightless was something else. I also spent almost three days off the beer while doing the course. Wooh!