Diving the Similan Islands

So first of all sorry to my loyal blog readers for not posting an update in about a month; but there is a perfectly good explanation for that: I was in Myanmar (Burma). Myanmar was a great country except the government blocked lots of websites, one of them being blogspot unfortunately, but I have now made it to India so I can once again post updates. This also means that over the next few days there will be lots of updates being posted from my travels in Myanmar and also the last two from Thailand.

First of all my second to last experience in Thailand was spent doing a 3 day/2 night liveaboard dive trip to the Similan Islands. For those of you who don't know where the Similan's are they are located a couple hundred kilometers north of Phuket and about a hundred kilometers off the coast (the west coast of Thailand). Also they have been rated as one of the top 10 places in the world to dive (I think the only location in Thailand to make that list).

The diving was unbelievable with extremely beautiful and colourful coral and lots of small fish as the Similan Islands aren't known for large sea animals apparently. However, our trip was pretty lucky I guess as on almost every dive we saw at least one really impressive sea creature.

The first dive was completed just off of an island called Ko Bon which is to the north and east of the main group of the 9 Similan Islands. Here we were told is most common place to see rays and towards the end of our dive our dive group was graced with a HUGE manta ray gliding over us, it had to have been about 4 meters across! On the second dive which was in the group of the 9 main Similan Islands (all of the remaining dives were) we saw a leopard shark sleeping on the sea floor which was pretty neat as we could swim up fairly close to it and look at it for a while without it swimming away.

The third dive was the following morning and for most part of the dive we didn't see much except for beautiful coral until the very end of the dive a hawksbill turtle swam by near us. The fourth dive again didn't contain any larger sea life but plenty of nice coral and schools of small fish, in terms of beautiful coral this was probably the second best dive site. The fifth dive brought with it lots of Kuhl's rays (much smaller than the manta ray we saw, these ones are only 50cm to 1m across) and lots of garden eels. Finally I did the night dive on the second day (dive 6 for me) which was pretty interesting, we saw tons of shrimp, a moray eel swimming around and played with the phosphorescence.

On the final day I was only able to partake in 1 of the dives (as I wasn't feeling too good) but the one that I did was probably the best of the trip I think (and confirmed by fellow divers). On this dive we saw a white tip shark swim by as well as 4 huge tunas (about 2 meters long) but the highlight of this div had to have been the coral: it was beautiful. Words cannot describe how great this dive was (if anyone wants the name of this site I can email it to them).

All in all it was a great dive trip and I highly recommend diving here to anyone that's heading to Thailand. From the Similan's I took a night bus back to Bangkok where I spent a couple of days organizing my visa for Myanmar. So the next update (to follow soon will be my last for Thailand: Bangkok).