Diving in Thailand
February 2004
About a 2 hour boat ride from Ko Lanta is an up-thrust of rock in the Andaman sea called Ko Ha. It has beautiful coral and a tidy little beach.
The outfit that took divers out provided a good breakfast on the boat and a lunch between dives.
Weeee!
The rock on the right looks like a skull wearing a samurai helmet.
Suiting up. Had a sore left ear later that day.
As you dive lower you feel the pressure in your ears. You simply pinch your nose through the rubber portion of the mask covering your nose and "pop" your ears. My right ear popped fine, but my left ear caused me some problems. I was finally able to get it to pop. But on the boat ride home I started to feel a lot of pain. When we got to the dock I mentioned it to one of the instructors. He said not to worry unless it started to bleed. Not very comforting. He told me if it started to bleed to go see a doctor on the island who was an expert on dive-related problems. I didn't bother, since I saw no blood, and instead went to my bungalow and lay down with my left ear on the pillow. After a few hours it felt better, but the next morning I woke up with a cold. I never had this ear problem last year, so I figure the cold had everything to do with the pressure-equalizing problem. You're not supposed to dive if you have a cold or flu, but I felt totally healthy the day of the dive, except for the ear later in the day.
So the next day I woke up with a cold. Now remember, I had chickens roaming around my hut bungalow, and the Avian flu was spreading across Thailand. It makes you ponder a few unlikely scenarios. Happily, I never got a fever, I never got pneumonia, and I never got the Avian flu. In fact I felt healthy pretty quick, just a snotty nose for a day or two.
There were a few boats in the area, each of them with about 25 divers and a few instructors.
One hilarious looking fish I observed is called a porcupine fish. It was about the size of a volleyball, with a goofy grin on its face. Above is my rendition. It is actually cute, kind of like E.T. I didn't know why it was called a porcupine fish until I saw the photos of what it does when it feels threatened. It gulps water to inflate its body, and these quill-like things thrust out. I stole the images below off the internet. I could have reached out and touched one of these fish, they were so close. None of them were inflated, so they didn't feel threatened. I never saw any of these goofy things last year when I scuba dived at Ko Phi Phi.
A neat little beach in the middle of nowhere.
