out of the fish bowl...

Last week Dad and I went to Thailand - more specifically, Patong Beach in Phuket. What a crazy tourist ridden place! Like many major tourist destinations, the place was packed with foreigners and the streets lined with locals trying to sell you stuff (or in this case, trying to pull you in to their massage parlours). The place was crowded, sunny, and damn hot!

The first day we got there we walked all around town to find a good diving school and finally settled on Sunrise Diving - a small diving outfit located right by the beach run mainly by South Africans. He signed up for the Open Water while I signed up for the Advanced. What a great place to go diving! Because of our different courses, we didn't get to do any dives together but the water is chalk full of fish and we both saw plenty. The most exciting for me was diving through a ferry wreck (the toilets were still intact!) and swimming for a bit alongside a sea turtle before it headed up to the surface. Dad, on the other hand, didn't seem to impressed. After his first open water dive he said "It's not really what I expected. It's not that exciting... it's like watching one of those nature shows on TV". Gah! It's true, except when you're diving you're actually in National Geographic!