Thailand 2021

Arrived home after an uneventful and easy flight. The aircraft was half empty so again had space to lay on three seats, the positive sides of the pandemic I guess. I had pre-downloaded a ten hours work course on the phone so had things to do too, so the flight time passed fast. Train and taxi took us home to snowy and slippery Turku, with the bags somehow feeling even heavier than earlier..

Well, at least the days are already much longer than when we left. I think next winter we have to do something similar, a bit longer trip to Asia combining first vacation and then working. Was not a bad way to spend the worst part of winter.

Hngh.. Towards the cold with an early morning wakeup. And the lounges are closed. :p

Just a day in Bangkok. Proper steakhouse, some shopping and sushi.

Arrived to Bangkok, actually my one minute accommodation search resulted in finding a quite good hotel very close to the airport railway. We left the heavy bags at the airport luggage storage, so no need to carry them around in the train.

Samui airport was a cute small open air airport, like a small village of separate houses in a garden. These days the flights and the airport are not exactly crowded, so they even let us select an earlier flight when we arrived early to the airport. So, we were actually already in Bangkok when our original flight was only scheduled to depart.

Snif, the journey to home begun. Left our favourite island by a speedboat to rainy Koh Samui for a one night stay before the flight to Bangkok.

Two more dives today in very clear water, and I managed to finish one of my goals for this trip, Master Diver certification. :)

I already completely recovered my flu a couple of days ago, but Iryna seems to be still a bit in progress. While she has been working and healing I did a bit different kind of diving today: My first dive on a rebreather unit instructed by the cave guy Mikko himself.

The normal open circuit diving in shallower than 40m depths is very simple, you just take a bottle of air with you and breath it via simple equipment with just a couple of moving mechanical parts. The rebreather units are a different story. You have only a small tank of normal air (or other gas mixes depending on depth) and a tank of oxygen with you, connected to a hightech system that washes out CO2 in chemical reaction, measures the leftover oxygen and adds just the right amount of oxygen back to the air for any depth. The air is not pushed to your mouth from a pressurized cylinder, but your own breathing circulates the air between your lungs and a counter-lung on the machine, through the processing system. That allows multiple hours long dives, unchanged buoyancy while breathing and silent dives due to no bubbles.

The predive checklists are long with testing the correct functionality of the system, breathing and buoyancy control feel very different and you have a dozen more buttons and computers to take care of. That requires pretty much learning to dive all over again, from the beginning. Although after an hour long dive I already started to get the idea and managed to handle the basics, and I even saw a turtle which Mikko missed. :)

Now just need to avoid getting addicted to rebreather diving, due to the machines being extremely expensive... It was fun though, definitely need to try again later on.

Tomorrow morning I should do two more dives with normal open-circuit tank for my navigation course and I think those will be the last dives for this time. Booked a Wednesday morning boat to Koh Samui and a one night hotel there, so then begins our journey towards home.

Koh Tao Divers had to sell their boat earlier to survive over corona, and that's why their operation has been very limited and kind of boring now. They only use the boats of other dive schools with a lot of other people on board and the boats usually only go to easy nearby dive sites due to beginner courses etc. That will be fixed soon, as Mikko today ordered a new boat for the company and it will be by far the coolest dive boat of the island, a brand new and very fast catamaran boat which can easily reach the faraway dive sites in short time. I think that means we need to return to the island when the boat has been delivered, maybe next winter for some weeks. :)

Full week of work training, so mostly just staying inside while also healing some flu. That's starting to be better and the training ended, so maybe we will get to do something else during the weekend.

We almost considering of postponing the return tickets one week to 19th, but seems Finnair has raised their prices back to more normal level due to Test&Go program reopening so there would be a fare difference to pay instead of free change. So, 12th it is, even though it's warmer here...

This time neither of us wants to take an extremely slow and uncomfortable bus to Bangkok like in 2018, so the plan is to get to Koh Samui island by fast ferry and fly from there to Bangkok. The flights are now booked for 10th evening and there's only one boat per day, so I assume we move to Samui either on 9th or 10th morning.

The weekend has been quite slow, not doing much anything special. Today the wind direction had changed so that the east side of the island and Shark Bay would be not so windy, so we took a new attempt to snorkel there and see the resident turtles.

One turtle we actually found, happily minding his own business and not caring about us at all. Also a couple of sharks and a very curious remora that obviously thought Iryna was a shark and tried to taste her a bit. They attach to sharks with a suction cup and keep them clean by eating parasites, and this time it wanted to taste a bit different kind of shark.

Busy work week, so not much else is happening. Our coffees finally arrived so the mornings have been saved, and the Tao Hub coworking space is working well.

Today we did some dives too, as Koh Tao Divers went to new dive sites on another side of the island and they were too interesting to miss. Interesting places, but unfortunately a bit too bad visibility today.. I saw my first Great Barracuda though, a huge one well over 1m in size, maybe around 1.5m. Just was a bit too far for a clear picture.

I also completed the theory part of the next diving specialty course (underwater navigation), have to do the dives during the weekend maybe.