Koh Lipe
If I’m going to be away for over six months, it feels like I should achieve something in that time. Before I left I decided a good project would be to get more comfortable in water. I learned to not drown as a child, but even living in Rio for multiple years I never really found the joy of being in, on or around water. I hadn’t found that much coastline in Malaysia (it’s the wrong season to go to it’s best bits on the East coast), so it was on the Thai island of Koh Lipe that my project began. And what better way to get comfortable in water than getting qualified to scuba dive.
Many people I’d met had planned to visit Koh Lipe, but hadn’t managed to find affordable accommodation. The island all except the most expensive beds get booked up fast. With a bit of research however, I managed to find a diving school with accommodation included, which solved that problem for me. I arrived on a ferry from Langkawi in Malaysia - a slightly stressful experience as the crew took passports at check in and promised they’d be returned on arrival in Koh Lipe. After switching mid-ocean to a much smaller (and therefore standing room only) speedboat for the last little bit of the journey to the jetty, we stood in the inevitable long queue as we waited for one person to give back the passports one by one. They have them organised by country, and gave me all of the UK passports and told me to give back any that weren’t mine. This all while my rucksack lay on the beach, available to anyone. It’s nice that the country (or this island at least) is honest enough for that to work as a system, but having travelled plenty in South America, it still puts me on edge!
I was lucky the dive school and its hostel were on the quiet side of the beach. It was quite a serene place to pass time watching boats come and go, small waves crashing, the sea sweeping in and out. The more touristy side had plenty of restaurants, with good quality cheap food easy to find. The massaman curries were my most common order, but I also found delicious pad Thai, mango sticky rice, and one day when splashing out a little, a whole deep fried red snapper in chilli salt.
I was here to dive though. I’d been working on my theory online since George Town in preparation, and finished the last bits on my first evening there. The practical side of the course started with learning how to connect and test all the equipment we were using, then various exercises about 2 metres underwater. I was surprised as how calm I was doing them all. I had been nervous about removing my mask underwater, or feigning running out of air and asking to share someone else’s, but the world is so serene underwater that I didn’t feel anything other than calm as I swam underwater with my mask off, before putting it back on and clearing it of water. Some stinging plankton made for a slightly uncomfortable end to the session, but overall I was pleasantly surprised with my progress.
The remaining 4 dives over the next days were all open water dives, to 12m depth, then to 18m. It was great to get properly under the water and see coral and colourful fish. The world is truly beautiful under the sea. There were some exercises left to complete, like emergency ascents and removing my entire kit underwater, but again nothing fazed me. The most difficult part was learning to control buoyancy. When scuba diving you control your buoyancy, or whether you go up or down in the water, by breathing. The more breath in your lungs, the more buoyant you are and the faster your rise. The less breath, the less buoyant and you start to fall. The change is delayed by quite a few seconds though, so I spent most of the first two dives flying up and down, overcompensating and trying not to go deep enough to hit the scary spiky Sauron-eyed sea urchins that decorated much of the coral. I now realise the skill the instructors have in controlling their position in the water with such precision. Their micro movements, and their having the right amount of air in their lungs 5 seconds before they need it allow them to hover exactly where they want to be.
There was a slight mishap where I was supposed to complete an exercise navigating with a compass for a short distance before receiving a tap on my shoulder then turning around to navigate back. Unfortunately my partner’s English wasn’t very strong, and as a result he didn’t come with, and I received no tap on my shoulder, so kept going. The instructor came flying after me to stop me, but not before I’d descended from 5m to 19m, one metre further than the limit to which I’m qualified to go. No-one tell PADI. There was also a fun challenge on the fourth dive, where a medium current was carrying me sideways, and I had to do some buoyancy control, some dodging and rolling in order to avoid walls of coral (they wouldn’t have hurt me, but I might have hurt them). I managed not to hit anything.
I very quickly felt comfortable diving. Even 18m depth, with the surface looking a long way away, I didn’t feel at all in danger. I could take off my mask or take out my regulator and I didn’t feel in danger. This won’t be the last time I go diving on this trip. It’s another world down there, and it’s beautiful.