Prior to this trip I had pretty limited SCUBA experience. I did my obligatory open water certification on Koh Tao when I first visited a couple of years back and then had done two fun dives a year or two later on Koh Rong in Cambodia. To be honest, conditions hadn’t been all that great in either place and I wasn’t sure that I was really that into it.
Since it had been a few years and I felt like doing something productive (not that setting some kind of record for number of pub crawls attended isn’t productive, it just isn’t the kind of thing you could add to your resume to explain what you’ve been up to), I signed up for an advanced open water course on Koh Phi Phi. While the purpose of these dives was more on form and developing diving skills, the conditions were substantially better than I had ever experienced previously. By the end of the course, my interest in diving had been pretty substantially renewed.
This is all getting back to the liveaboard… I promise. Quick detour first, though. I have this habit of starring places in Google maps that people have told me about. A couple of months back, someone had told me about this place called the Similan Islands, so I starred them for later reference and never really thought about it ever again. I had budgeted approximately two weeks on the Andaman Sea side of Thailand and I figured I’d split it between Krabi, Koh Phi Phi, and Koh Lanta. I saw that little star representing the Similans hanging out but it seemed way too far out of the way to be worthwhile. What could I possibly see/do there that I couldn’t do somewhere closer?
By chance, on a night out on Koh Phi Phi (or was it Krabi?) this girl I met mentioned how diving the Similans was on her bucket list but she wasn’t going to have time on this trip. I mentioned that I had starred them but didn’t really know what they were about. A couple of beers and an hour or two later I was sold.
For those of you not in the know (don’t feel bad… I had no clue what this place was like a month ago), the Similan Islands are a national park in Thailand and are regarded as having some of, if not the best diving in all of Thailand.
Given that they’re in a national park, they aren’t developed like most of the rest of the Thai islands, which means no big resorts and bars and tourists. Which means they’re slightly off the beaten path and that diving them is difficult relative to diving near somewhere like Phi Phi or Tao. Your options are to take a speedboat from the mainland (probably Khao Lak or Phuket) for some day dives or to do what’s known in the biz as a “liveaboard.” A liveaboard is, as you may have guessed if you know how to read, a situation where you live on a dive boat for an extended (i.e., overnight) period of time and do a bunch of diving.
After asking around and doing some light Googling, I decided I’d give one of these liveaboards a shot. I ultimately decided to go with a shop called Wicked Diving out of Khao Lak. The only decision was whether to do 3 days/9 dives or 6 days/18 dives. Given that I’m not one for half-measures (the quote, “anything worth doing is worth overdoing” comes to mind. Fun fact – depending on where you Google, that quote is attributed to everyone from Ayn Rand to Mick Jagger… you pick), I decided to go for the full-Monty and to the 6 day/18 dive trip.
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