Expatriate Forums in Asia - Pacific

Peter · Guest Home Country: countryx

Hi guys, I am sure there is diver up here

Phuket is connected to the Thai mainland by the Sarasin Bridge. The tropical island of Phuket is about the size of Singapore, and the thing I loved most about this place was the people. None of your blank-stare "blinkin tourist" attitudes here, they love visitors and 'patient' hardly begins to describe them. Aside from the fabulous diving that I'll describe in a bit, there is simply too much to do here in just two weeks whether you dive or not.

Arriving late in the day my wife and I started by dining out at one of the numerous open-air restaurants before taking-in the night-life. The gaily painted well-lit streets were crowded with hawkers, tourists, American sailers, scantily-dressed maidens and the usual assortment of characters found in tourist hot-spots. The next day we arranged our diving schedule and took in some sights like Wat Chalong, an opulently-decorated temple famed for it's gold-leaf covered statue of an abbot remembered for his skill at setting bones during a Chinese invasion. We snorkelled at the beautiful Kata Noi beach and dined in Phuket town, a sometimes drab collection of three-story Sino-Portuguese style shop houses with the shop on the street-level and the house above it. Some of the older parts of town retain the charm of a wealthy era when fortunes were made in Phuket in tin-mining while other parts boast new shiny buildings declaring modern success. The crocodile farm is an abomination and the managers should be jailed. We ate well, bought some tacky souveniers and went to bed excited (about diving the next day).

The next day we were driven to Patong Bay to meet our vessel and soon we were en` route to Raja Yai and Raja Noi, two islands to the west in the Andaman Sea. Rather than drift about aimlessly I paid an extra $50 or so on top of the gear hire/boat fees and took a PADI Naturalist Speciality. I read the chapter in the manual on the way out and then listened to an interesting talk about the local wildlife illustrated with a few photos and identification books. Evi, my instructor, explained that it was mating season and sure enough once we were underwater everywhere I looked the wildlife were in pairs. Visibility exceeded 20m and I found the 3mm shorty warm enough even after an hour exploring the coral reef. Evi pointed out spot-faced moray eels, garden eels, a yellow and brown trumpet fish riding "piggy-back" on a puffer fish, lots of moorish idols, cube boxfish and the usual clown anemone fish and cleaner wrasse that we all expect to see on these trips.

Back on board we lunched while the boat moved to another spot and the crew refilled the cylinders for the next dive. This time I noticed a few of the smaller residents, finding harlequin shrimp, squirrelfish and a small blue nudibranch hitching a ride on the back of a large sea cucumber (or was he an optimist ?). Evi warned me not to touch the fire coral and the warm water was filled with the sounds of our exhalations and the triggerfish crunching and chomping their way through afternoon tea on the reef. Everywhere we turned something caught my eye, a school of barracuda glided by, a white-specked grouper ignored me while I examined flouro-purple and black Crown-of-thorns sea-stars, flutemouth studied us nervously. We followed around a masked porcupine fish because it exceeded 30cm in length, much bigger than the globefish I'm used to at home.

After my second hour-long dive we ascended and then snorkelled back to the boat and upon reaching the ladder many hands reached down to unclip and remove my scuba-unit. Before I'd even got my fins off the weights and scuba unit were aboard and the crew were waiting at the top of the ladder with sun-warmed towels and ice-cold cans of coke, enquiring "how was your dive?, see much?, did you enjoy it?," etc. They take customer satisfaction VERY seriously here, and it's a delight to meet such enthusiastic people, being as I'm sort of enthusiastic about my diving too.

Allways PADI Travel organise trips to Phuket all the time, for divers and/or groups, and especially recommend MV Fantasea and South East Asia Divers for liveaboard trips to the fantastic Similan Islands, Surin Islands and Burma. If you're thinking 'Phuket' give Allways a call because it's too far to go to risk ending up having a dud-trip. The best time for diving is from November through May and we arrived in the last week of May, (it was really spectacular). There are lots of great snorkelling sites from the beaches around Phuket, a great marine aquarium and a developed tourism infrastructure to ensure that even the most active visitor finds more than enough to do. We can recommend a visit to the amazing Phangnga Bay where you'll find the gravity-defying limestone islands filmed in James Bond's 'The Man with the Golden Gun' and on the way back to the mainland we stopped at a village-on-stilts for lunch. The refugees from Burma have built an entire village on stilts and walking from shop to shop is exactly like walking the plank, you can even look down at the murky water below (on second thoughts, probably best if you don't look down).

Give Allways PADI Travel a call and book your dream holiday today. You'll never forget it.

Peter

erica · Guest Home Country: countryx

Hey

thanks Peter, I am very interested in doing my PADI in Phuket, can you pass me some good contacts of diving school in Phuket

Zigo · Guest Home Country: countryx

It sounds interesting. I plan to go there for my honeymoon but still do not know if I would have the courage to pass my PADI...

Still thinking about it, as a matter of fact, water is not my element and I feel a little stressed when I am under water !

Zigo
http://www.clairement-plus.net[/code]


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