Today I returned back to mainland Thailand from four days on an amazing dive trip. We started on a group of islands off the coast of Thailand called Ko Similan. Similan is a corruption of the Mayal word 'sembilan' which means nine. As you might have guessed, there are nine islands in the group. We dove several of them before moving further north to Ko Bon and eventually all the way to Ko Tachai which is very close to the Burma border.

In all, I did 13 dives in 3-1/2 days. I opted to skip one night dive in order to have an early beer, smoke a tasty Cuban cigar, and watch a beautiful sunset from the upper deck of the ship. It was truly magical.

During the trip I saw just about every marine animal possible except the one I came to see, the Whale Shark! We saw other sharks, stingrays, manta ray, frog fish, octopus, sea horses, turtles, groupers, swordfish, barracuda, harlequin shrimp, various eels, batfish, lion fish and even a pod of dolphins came to pay us a visit as we were getting ready to leave the last dive site. Here are a few photos.

The boat had a UN of guests with ten different countries represented. Turns out two other divers on the boat were from the US. In fact they were from Oregon. Truth be known, they were from Portland!! Small world isn't it?

The boat crew were local Thais and they were fantastic. There were two women that did all the cooking and gave massages in between meals for 300 baht an hour ($9). There were three guys that took care of the dive deck and handled all the tank filling, picking divers out of the water, and basically just making sure every dive went smooth, Unfortunately, the actual dive staff wasn't quite as good. They seemed more interested in each other and were pretty stand-offish to the guests. A few guests were taking classes and the instructor was very abusive to them. They kept coming and asking me questions when they didn't understand the reading. It was a bit awkward as I didn't want to interfere with the other instructor, but I answered questions where I could and sent them back to their instructor when I felt it wasn't appropriate to get involved.

All in all, I would highly recommend diving the Similan's, but would probably not recommend this specific dive operator. If anyone is interested in getting info about the diving, etc. email me directly and I would love to pass on tips.

Now that I'm back in Karon, we are making plans for the next stop on the trip. We will be heading to Ko Tao, in the Gulf of Thailand, on Saturday. I plan to do some more diving there before hanging up my gear for about a month and a half until we get to the Maldives in July.

Val has also been setting up plans for Cambodia and Laos. It looks like we'll be there for about a month. It also looks like we won't be making it to Vietnam on this trip. We have spoken to lots of travelers and they all seemed to agree that the places we are going are the 'don't miss' if you have limited time as we do. More details need to be worked out, but it's coming together.

That's it for now. Take care and stay in touch.

Eric and Val