August 29, 2007

Thailand Part Nine: Koh Tao to Bangkok to NYC

Wednesday, August 29th

Wednesday was our last day out on the islands before we had to start making our way back to Bangkok. I got up super early on Wednesday morning to get two more dives in. Here's the parking lot rendezvous spot!

Made it onto the diving boat around 7:30am...

...and we set out for our first diving site!

Chumphon Pinnacle - which is one of the highest rated dive sites in all of Souteast Asia! And then a second dive later in the morning at White rock.

Dive #7: Chumphon Pinnacle

I had high expectations for Chumphon Pinnacle, and the site did not disappoint! The site gets its name from a huge mountain that rises up out of the depths. The mountain's "peak" starts about 15m (~45" feet) below the surface and continues down to 40m (~120" feet) and the mountain sits right on the edge of a continental shelf that drops off thousands of feet!

Beyond having an underwater mountain, the dive site is most famous for its water visibility - you can see up to 60 meters in the water there! - and for its teeming underwater life. According to one dive site I was reading:

You can find bull sharks, groupers, remoras, grey reef sharks, leopard sharks and other large fish in the deeper areas. Gamefish such as sailfish, swordfish and cobias are regularly spotted as well. The shallower areas of the pinnacle is covered in purple, pink and red anemones. Clownfish, schools of bannerfish, yellow box fish and surgeonfish will greet you when you are doing your safety stop at eight meters deep.

I followed this fish all along the shallow reefs as I made my descent towards the pinnacle...

...and like I said before, the pinnacle did not disappoint. Here's a picture of me following one of the divemasters in a descending spiral around the mountain. Check out how many fishes there are! And if you look into the background you can see thousands more!

This is one of my favorite photos - we're down about 45m (~150" feet) and the two divers are floating above the dropoff of the continental shelf and staring down into what looks like an endless blue abyss. Every time I swim over an edge and look down into the deep, I get vertigo for a couple of seconds. One of the craziest feelings in the world. Scuba diving moments like this are the closest you can come to feeling like you're in space without leaving the planet.

After our max depth, we slowly started making our ascent back up around the mountain. I was feeling peaceful and relaxed, slowly swimming next to the reef admiring all the colors and fishes and then when I looked down, I saw my first "real" shark. And by "real" I mean a shark that looks just like a shark that you see on a National Geographic special that's big enough to harm you in the unlikely event it decided to bite you. Trying to calm my shaking hands, I descended to get a little closer and busted out my camera to try to get a movie!

No matter how many times you tell your rational brain that a shark doesn't really pose all that much of a risk, there's no stopping your limbic system from reacting. I'm surprised you can't hear the sound of my heart pounding against my ribcage in this video. The shark is a gray reef shark. And he was probably about 5' or 6' feet long.

best ˆ gray reef shark ˆ koh tao ˆ scuba ˆ shark ˆ video

Right after my shark experience, I reunited with another group of divers we were with and we came across a school of batfish!

Soooo cool!

scuba. batfish — I love this photo because it give you an idea of how amazing the visibility was that day. If you look above the batfish's head, you'll see a bunch of divers waaaay in the distance floating upright. Those are divers doing safety stops around 30m (~90" feet) above me! And you can still totally see them clearly. Incredible.

See you later, batfishes!

Here's me with my diving buddy. He's signaling that he's got to remain at 5m for two more minutes before his safety stop is over.

Dive #8: White Rock

For our second dive, we went to White Rock, which is a much shallower reef that's closer to Koh Tao. The visibility wasn't anywhere near as clear as Chumphon Pinnacle, but it was still pretty great. On my way down, I swam by the same exact fish I saw on my first dive!

A couple minutes later, while swimming over a sleepy reef, we ran into this guy! A beautiful green turtle! He popped up over the edge of the reef...

...swam REALLY close to us to check us out. And after he made a few laps, he took off.

Here's a vid I shot of him swimming off into the blue. Goodbye, Mr. Turtle!

green turtle ˆ scuba ˆ turtle ˆ video

This guy again!

Not sure what kind these guys are!

Butterflyfish!

A free-swimming clownfish! It's rare to see these guys out of the anemones that they usually hide out in.

Pretty coral.

I spent my safety stop swimming around on top of a shallow reef. Found another pink skunk clownfish hanging out in an anemone! As I swam around, in the distance I spotted...

...another very large Titan triggerfish! This is what they look like when they're not about to attack. See his top dorsal fin in the back? That's always up in the air like that, but when they're hostile, they have another little fin that appears in front of that fin that pops up! And when you see that, you better get away lest you want to part with a quarter-sized chunk of flesh!

meredith — I got back from my trip around 1pm and met up with Meredith. We walked down the road and go some lunch at a sleepy Thai restaurant.

On the walk home, we saw this raft and wanted to buy it just for the awesome packaging. At first glance, you think to yourself "Why is this guy partying so hard? It seems like he's just floating on a run-of-the-mill inflatable pool raft. Then, after a minute or two, you realize that the man isn't just floating on any inflatable pool toy! Oh, no! He's floating on FAIRYLAND ON THE WATER, and then his euphoric state suddenly makes total sense.

meredith — We got back to the dive center around 2pm and brought all of our stuff down to the lobby to check out.

Last view of the Asia Divers resort. Pretty amazing, right?

Then we hopped in the back of a songthaew (a pickup truck with bench seats in the back) and headed to the port to catch the high speed fairy that goes from Ko Tao to Chumphon (on the mainland).

meredith — Twenty minutes into the ferry ride, and Meredith was totally sleeping. (I don't know how in the world she can fall asleep in the pretzelly shapes she does - but it never fails to amaze me)

It rained most of the ferry ride, but as we neared the Chumphon Ferry terminal, the rain stopped...

...and there was a huge rainbow!

The waterway on the way to the ferry terminal was filled with all sorts of really cool, wooden, hand-painted fishing boats.

See?

Gratuitous use of repetition with a rainbow!

Rainbow!

Another shot of the cool rickety boats. The place totally looked like a shipyard from the movie-version of Popeye starring Robin Williams and Shelly Long. (Does anybody else remember that movie? It used to be on HBO ALL THE TIME when I was little. I think I watched it pretty much every single afternoon I stayed home sick).

After we got off the ferry, we had couple of hours to kill...

...and then we went to the Chumphon train station to catch an overnight sleeper train to Bangkok!

meredith — Waiting for the 12:30am train!

I started a new book that I'd bought at one of the rest stops on the way to the train station.

meredith — As soon as we got on the train, we converted the seats in our train car into bunk beds!

Meredith thought she was the cat's meow for calling "top bunk!" But then the next morning...

Thursday, August 30th

...when we converted the bunk beds back into a seat, Meredith remarked that the top bunk "reeked like pee."

I flipped over the cushion that had been her mattress and...BLAMO...giant piss stain! Mystery solved!

Eight hours into the train ride and we still had about 90 minutes to go. So I started another book. (Fuck yeah, trade fiction! Nelson DeMille in the house!)

As we got closer to Bangkok, more and more little towns started appearing next to the railroad tracks.

The logo of the Thai Railroad.

We got into Bangkok a little after 9am.

Tracks 3 & 4.

We wasted no time grabbing a tuktuk and heading back to Khao San Road to get a cheap hotel!

mai kaidee, meredith — After checking in and catching a quick nap, we headed over to Mai Kaidee's for some lunch. Here's the bananas and black rice covered in coconut milk that we got for dessert! Yum!

After lunch, more reading and relaxing!

meredith — Later that night, we got dressed up all nice (well, Meredith did at least)...

me, meredith — ...and met up with a girl we'd met earlier in the afternoon that was traveling alone. We hailed a tuk tuk and headed to...

...the Asia Hotel's world famous Ladyboy Caberet Show!

I won't post too many pics, because I posted a whole bunch from when I went to see the show back in 2005 when I was traveling through Thailand by myself.

meredith — Meredith and our friend (sorry, forgot your name) posing with the gorgeous ladyboys!

Me with one of the main performers.

Durians are so stinky that a lot of hotel's that cater to foreigners forbid them from the premises!

Friday, August 31st

meredith — Friday was our last day in Thailand! We packed up our bags, checked them into our hotel's storage closet, and set out to do some sightseeing before catching our plane home later that night!

We decided to take trains downtown!

Waiting on the platform.

We started out at the huge Siam Paragon Mall looking for deals, but it was a really fancy mall that catered to foreigners and the prices weren't much cheaper than the US! So ten minutes later we decided to...

...check out the huge aquarium that's in the mall! Spider Crab! Ew, I can't believe most people that hate the fact that some people eat insects think it's totally ok to eat this freaking thing. Ew! Ew! Ew! It's basically a giant spider that lives underwater (and in my nightmares). Talk about cognitive dissonance! Blech!

After going through all the underwater tank sections, we spent a ton of time watching the coypu (more commonly known as nutria in the US) play. Their cuteness helped my crab-induced heebie-jeebies go away.

meredith — Nom nom nom!

Later that night we went back to the hotel with plans to take a late night swim before heading to the airport, but the pool had been drained for repairs! Booo!

meredith — For dinner, we went to an Italian place to prepare our taste buds for home.

We got to the airport around 10:30pm.

meredith — Our first flight was from Bangkok...

...back to Dubai!

We got to deplane...

...but we only had an hour or so before our next flight. So we wandered around the huge Dubai airport.

me, meredith — Flight number two! Dubai to JFK.

Loooong ass flight. Lots of books.

Airplane dinner!

meredith — Here's what Meredith's hair looked like after she took it down after almost 20 hours of airplane time.

Here's my greasy-ass hair. (And if you look closely, you'll see the beginnings of my mustache coming in that makes it look like I need someone to clean my top lip with a hot washcloth).

Still more time to go! One more book.

Twenty six hours after we boarded a plane in Bangkok, we found ourselves in cab leaving JFK.

After spending a month between the Dubai desert and the tropics of Thailand, coniferous trees looked strange. It's always surprising how little time away it takes to make the familiar seem foreign.

Beautiful end-of-summer NYC weather!

meredith — Happy to be home!

Happy to be home!

Home!

The view of our neighborhood (the Lower East Side and the East Village) while crossing over the Williamsburg Bridge. Almost home!

meredith — We dropped off our bags and immediately went uptown to Mandy's apartment to pick up our two rat ladies that she was nice enough to take care of in our absence. (Thanks again, Mandy!)

Then after that, we headed back to our apartment to get settled back in! 35 days and 900 photos later, it was great to be back in our good ol' New York City apartment. Home sweet home, indeed!