For the first half of the week I carried on in the same groove. Wake up in the bungalow. Eat at a good, cheap breakfast place. Carry on to the work café. Work on the AI project. Back to the bungalow. Pool and beach before sunset. Dinner and relaxing in the room until bedtime.

Midway through the week, though, it was time to move on. Not because I couldn’t have stayed on Koh Pha Ngan. I could easily have seen myself staying another couple of weeks in the same groove, and my AI project could have done with a couple more weeks of focus. But I decided to leave. Partly because I was looking forward to Koh Tao. Partly because after a little over two weeks of a very monotonous routine, I needed to get moving. And partly because the next couple of months need to line up with Bali and the Philippines later on.

Moving on meant Koh Tao. Koh Tao had long since been labelled the diving island, which was the reason for the visit in the first place. A friend of a friend who had worked as a divemaster on Koh Tao had recommended a company called Hydronauts, and that’s who I went with. My stay is going to revolve around the Open Water 20 certification, which lets me dive down to twenty metres.

When I signed up, I naively assumed that was that, but I quickly found out that the course came with homework. Ten lessons, each with its own PDF and quiz. Five of them had to be read and understood before the first session. That ended up filling my last couple of days on Koh Pha Ngan. And yes, it meant putting my little AI project on hold for a while.

On to Koh Tao

I said goodbye to the receptionist, the owner of the breakfast place and the staff at the work café. For a couple of weeks I had become part of their daily rhythm just as much as they had become part of mine.

The ferry to Koh Tao was very straightforward. You could buy the ticket at the pier, and the departures ran to a fixed schedule throughout the day. An hour and a half to two hours on the water. I just stood on the open deck in the shade and enjoyed the breeze while daydreaming about adventures on the open sea.

The first thing I did when I arrived on Koh Tao was find a doctor. The dive course required a medical certificate confirming that I could dive without any problems. I had declared that I get migraines from time to time, and that meant a hundred-kroner visit to the doctor before they’d take me underwater.

In practice, what needed checking were my eardrums. To be able to dive, you need to be able to equalise the pressure in your airways, and that requires the eardrums to be intact.

I sit down with the doctor, a woman around my own age, who starts the examination. She looks into one ear and asks me to equalise. Breathe out gently while pinching your nose. Check, no problems. In the other ear she can’t really see the eardrum, because there’s too much earwax. It needs a clean. The cleaning requires an examination couch, a special solution and a wait while the wax is properly loosened up.

As I turn onto my side on the couch, one of the assistants comes over and shows me a bill for 3,000 baht, around 520 kroner. And what do you do when you’re lying on your side at the doctor’s and being told that they do need to see inside your ear if you want to dive? I just have time to think “then hand me a cotton bud and give me two minutes” before I hear my own voice say, “Sure, I’ll pay.”

They pour the expensive solution into my ear and leave me waiting for twenty minutes before coming back over. The doctor and the assistant then clean my ear by squirting a bit of water in, scraping carefully and squirting a bit more. They keep this up for four or five minutes. Just as I’m thinking they must be finished, I feel a cotton bud go in and take a lap around my ear, before they tell me that the eardrum is visible and intact.

I leave the clinic with my medical certificate and a slightly bitter taste in my mouth. Should have just asked for the cotton bud.

The Diving Island

Koh Tao is full of divers. Every other shop sells dive trips, dive gear or dive courses. The other half uses the theme to sell food, drinks and souvenirs.

I walk from the main town down to the south coast, where the resort is. It’s two kilometres. Koh Tao is a small island. The diving theme continues all the way along the road. On Koh Pha Ngan there were billboards advertising parties. There are here too, but on a much smaller scale, and as I’m about to learn during the course, mixing alcohol and diving isn’t a great combination anyway.

I arrive at the dive resort itself. I’ve booked my accommodation at the same place where I’m taking the certification. Not the cheapest option, but this was about keeping things simple so I could focus on the diving.

The resort sits right on the water. There’s a pool, a restaurant and a lot of diving facilities. No surprises there. I spend my last day before the course starts reading up and watching some of the others training in the pool.

I had some vague idea that I’d be able to explore Koh Tao alongside the dive course. Instead the course took up three full days and then some, morning to evening. So rather than rush through it here, I’m writing the dive course up as its own story, which I’m working on getting out over the next few days.

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