Hello again everyone!

It's been quite a while since I wrote a new entry for this blog. The truth be told, I had a bit of a technology nightmare. I had written the post before this one many weeks ago, but then when I tried to publish it it disappeared into thin air. But thankfully, after much toing and froing with Blogger support people, I found it again!

So, I am now writing this one just after publishing the last one. Which means you'll probably be reading this in about a week's time - I don't want to rush and publish loads of new stuff at the same time.

Aah! It feels good to have recovered the text! Now my cyberspace persona is just as happy as the real me. I am at the moment so totally full of happiness, it's amazing! Perhaps spending the last two weeks almost entirely underwater at an average depth of 12 metres has done something physiological to my brain's pleasure centres. Or perhaps it was just fab wonderful diving and fab wonderful new people that did it.

I left Bangkok - ironically just one day after discovering that the falafel stand on Khao San Road is bloody amazing - and headed for the islands of the Gulf of Thailand. My original aim was Koh Tao, but heavy seas meant the ferry was cancelled so instead I went to Koh Pha Ngan. This is the setting for "The Beach" (you know, that movie with Leo DiCaprio which is also a very good book, I am told) but not the island it was filmed on. Why, I don't know. Apparently, they had to ferry a load of crazy hippy types from Koh Pha Ngan to Koh Phi Phi where they did the filming, to make it look authentic.

Anyway, after an overnight train to Surat Thani, I got on a boat to Koh Pha Ngan, when who should I run into but Jo and Nathan, the couple Frankie & I met in Hanoi and again in Vientiane! We ended up heading to the same beach, Haad Yao. And what a beach it is! For some reason, even though there are quite a lot of bungalows and hostels, the beach just never looks even slightly full of people. Which is fab.

I quickly found what I was looking for: a nice dive shop. Haad Yao Divers is somewhere I would recommend to anyone. The people there are competent, friendly, relaxed and lovely. It helped that I speak German, since the owner is Swiss and some of the staff Germans, but they all spoke perfect English as well anyway.

Diving was just fab. I did my Advanced Open Water with Raymond, a Welsh instructor, but most of my subsequent pleasure dives were with Wendy, from London. I like to think we got on well. As Wendy said a few times, it's always nice to dive with someone you've got to know, as it makes the whole thing a bit more relaxing. Wendy is something of a superbrain on different fish and aquatic creatures, so my log book is now bulging with the names of everything I saw. Just to give a very brief flavour, I saw triggerfish (actually I got attacked by one, which was interesting), wrasses, trevally, barracuda, fusiliers, flutefish, angelfish, bannerfish, nudibranches, hard corals, soft corals, basically every bloody thing! Fab.

Through the diving shop I met a few great people too. Dave from England was over doing his Open Water, and we got on well. Reto from Switzerland is another advanced diver, and the two of us (with Wendy) formed a formidable underwater team on a number of occasions. There were lots of other interesting characters at Haad Yao. But despite the many temptations, I managed to keep up with my dry month (yes, folks, I haven't had a drop of booze since 1st March!). I have discovered that it's possible to go out to bars and not drink. Crazy! But there it is.

I finally managed to tear myself away from Haad Yao (the guys at the shop will attest to the fact that I threatened on a number of occasions that this was "my last dive", but then ended up diving again the next day) and headed across to the Indian Ocean side of Thailand, to Khao Lak. This involved a night ferry which consisted of a large three-foot-tall room with wall-to-wall thin mattressing. On arrival at the west coast after a three-hour bus journey through lush forest - which was a real change for my eyes after the deep blue and the yellow of the beach - I booked myself onto a four-day diving boat trip to the Similan & Surin Islands. The price was too good to be true, and the sell was hard, but I paid up in spite of my reservations...