Similan Islands

It’s a sign you’ve gotten too used to reckless New York taxi cabs when someone driving the speed limit with their white-knuckled hands super glued to 10 and 2 makes your skin crawl.

My flight from Chiang Rai to Phuket landed on time and in one piece. I had a private driver that made the two hour trip up to Khao Lak. Excited to finally be in the islands, I was looking forward to the windows down and the radio up—a wish I regretted immediately when we pulled over to turn on the radio and the radio painfully played the slowest Thai music ever created. The music was so depressing I half expected Sarah McLachlan to appear for an impromptu PETA commercial on animal abuse.

Arriving in Khao Lak at Casacool (“cool” is in the name, how could this go wrong?), I took note of the brightly colored buildings and the stones throw proximity to the dive center. I walked into the hotel ready to unload my luggage and begin exploring the area. Unfortunately, Casacool overbooked and I didn’t end up having the room I had reserved weeks back. After 30 minutes of Thai-English pantomiming, they were able to help get me relocated to a hostel 5 minutes away.

Settled in, I set out to explore Khao Lak. Judging by the number of bars and restaurants lining the drag, I would have expected to see people everywhere, but it was surprisingly dead. Even the shopkeepers seemed resigned to some non-existent back-room. Given the time of day, I assumed everyone was in a recovery period between having spent all day on the sun-drenched beach and preparing for bottles and cans of Chang beer late into the evening hours.

I stopped into a vacant restaurant and ordered red curry—it seems to be growing on me. I made my way down to the beach front, which was also vacant, and walked the shoreline taking notes of the longtail boats. Exhausted, I made my way back to the hostel, lying in the air conditioning until plans with a long-lost coworker in the evening. When plans fell through I did the unthinkable and forewent dinner in favor of sleep.

Friday morning I met Keith, the attractive and boisterous jack-of-all-trades, who seems to run the show at Wicked Diving in Khao Lak. Keith regaled me with his morning tales of woe—broken motor bike and condiment splattering are best told in animated hand gestures I’ve found.

Shortly thereafter, I met Morgan, an enthusiastic and diligent US transplant. Morgan started me off with a quick quiz to see what I recalled from my last dive. I’d like to brag and say that out of roughly 30 questions, I only missed one (decompression sickness does not cause euphoria, only nitrogen narcosis), except I’m fairly confident that the questions are a.) written to lead you to the correct answer and b.) built to reinstill your confidence.

After thoroughly…very, very thoroughly reviewing the questions and answers, we finally made it to the back of the dive shop to get me fitted for my gear. When I say it’s nice to be able to wear a shortie because the water is so warm, I mean, it’s really freaking nice! Weights, shoes, wetsuit, BCD, mask, and fins in a duffle bag and we were ready to head to the pool, and by pool I mean a jacuzzi bathtub with enough room for me, two 6’+ sized men, and some dive gear.

Marco, a 20 something Stanford grad from Brazil with sun-bleached curls and a boyish smile, was studying to become a divemaster, and working on a really nice tan until he goes back for his master’s degree. He joined Morgan and I as we climbed into the back of a pickup and made the ten-minute drive to the pool. In the pool we did exercises in buddy-checks, mask clearing, and neutral buoyancy. I left the pool feeling thankful to both Morgan and Marco for doing the refresher and starving.

Once we were back at the dive shop we ventured to an employee favorite around the corner with an ancient Thai woman who serves as the sole cook. Marco says he frequents the spot at least once a day as he orders a coconut. We tell stories of dive trips and memories from our hometowns and I inquire about their plans for when the dive season ends in May. My tab comes to 60 baht, or $2 bucks, for rice with an over easy egg, chicken with basil, and a bottle of water.

Back at the shop I thank Morgan for his help and tell him I’ll do my best not to drown or slow Chris down, too much. Marco is joining me on the 4 day, 3 night trip, so I tell him I’ll see him at 6 and I make my way back to the hotel for a hot shower and a last charge on my phone before boarding the boat.

Chris and I met when we were both working an internship with Mattel Toys subsidiary Mega Brands. My world revolved around my boyfriend at the time and attempting to major and minor in as many subjects as possible in 4 years. I don’t remember a lot about Chris, except that he was intelligent, and he got along with our boss and her mother—at least one of us did.

Somewhere along the way I remember seeing  on social media that Chris was leaving for Korea to teach English for a short stint. This was ten years ago—I guess I didn’t ask him to clarify what he meant by ‘short’? Once or twice a year we end up connecting over social media, usually with me threatening to come to whatever Southeast Asian country he’s in at the time to do some diving and him only thinly veiling that he’d really rather I didn’t.

Chris was the first person I thought of when I started looking into liveaboards for Thailand. Ironically, I reached out to him and asked him for suggestions on which liveaboard to go with—I didn’t realize he was in Thailand, actively working as one of only two trip leaders on a dive boat. It was a no-brainer to sign up with his company, and I was really looking forward to seeing Chris after 10 years.

There were 13 of us boarding for the Similan Island dive trip. The mix of people ranged from a 30-something couple from Hong Kong to a mom celebrating her retirement with her daughter who had been teaching in Korea. Once at the dock, we were immediately asked to chuck our shoes into a crate—that we didn’t see again until we reached land four days later.

The first night it rained. It poured. It was the first time I’d seen anything other than sun in Thailand. The evening was an easy one, with no dives, a safety brief, dinner, and a general mingling of people and crew.

New York living has taught me everything I need to know about a liveaboard—it’s expensive and it's small spaces, so you better really love the environment you're in. Every cabin held two bunk beds, two shelves, and a polyester swatch of curtain. Plenty of room. There were three dual purpose bathroom/showers, equipped with hot water—which is more than I can say about a lot of New York apartments. The kitchen was the size of a small closet. The dive deck was complete with tanks, dive gear, and an exposed shower. The second deck held the captain’s quarters, picnic tables for dining, a stocked supply of cereal, a much used white-board, a cannister of sea-sickness tablets, and served as our diving brief headquarters. The top deck was a sunbather or cigarette smoker hideaway.

If smoking is dead in the USA, it’s alive and well in Thailand. Everyone on the boat seems to smoke, toting their packs with catchy slogans like, “Cigarettes cause cancer.” Someone should really speak to the marketing director at Marlboro.

Looking back, the three days were really a whirlwind. We did ten dives in all—a deep dive, a dive with compass navigation, a wreck dive, and a night dive were all somewhere in the mix. We saw a turtle, a cuddle fish, several large moray eels, some honeycomb moray eels, lots of lion fish, some puffer fish, a few sting rays, countless schools of fish, and something extremely small and rare that I think was purple? (Somewhere Chris is reading this and rolling his eyes and saying I should have written this down in my dive log). No shark, manta ray, or whale shark sightings. Nothing that could easily eat a human.

My reunion with Chris took a little longer than expected. I guess I’d forgotten that he isn’t the type of guy you run and jump into some flying/leaping bear hug and ask a million personal questions on life over the past decade—which, let’s be honest, is my default. Chris sat six feet away from me while I chatted up the 13 people I’d soon be trapped on a boat with. Eventually he ambled his way over and quietly said hello. When I say it took effort to remain calm, I’m not kidding—I don’t know how to not be excited when diving AND a reunion are taking place all on the same boat (someone should really be filming this). I think I managed to, relatively, calmly say hello and give him a hug (don’t worry, it wasn’t a bear hug). That wasn’t enough to break the ice and on the first night I don’t think we said more than two words to each other.Notice the restraint on my part.

Chris was my dive guide for the trip. After three or four dives he seemed cautiously optimistic that I wasn’t going to drown, drown someone else, or sink the boat. I don’t know if the diving helped break the ice, or if it was the cans of Leo, but we did finally get an hour one night talking, just the two of us, about life and relationships and siblings and apartments. I did my best to prolong the conversation—I’m a master of interrogation and I still wanted to hear more about how life was coming together in Asia, but around 10, his need for sleep won out. I guess when you’re babysitting a bunch of want-to-be divers, you get exhausted.

Somewhere along the way I got suckered into Monopoly Deal, a slightly worse, but shorter version of Monopoly with cards. To make matters worse, we were playing with a foreign deck—not even a Park Place or Boardwalk to be found. Steve, a dive guide and Colorado transplant, and I became fast friends (or he was tolerating me because he works in the hospitality industry—it’s definitely one of those two things). It also helped that I let him win the one and only time I played Monopoly Deal.

The dealings and dives continued non-stop and if we weren’t diving we were eating or sleeping. We made it back to the port shortly before 2 in the afternoon.

Once we were back from our trip, I stayed and had a few drinks with the guys. Chris and I never got another chance to talk, just the two of us, but I figure I’ll trap him again, in another country, in another ten years.

I now have my advanced diving certification and a poorly filled out dive log book. Unstoppable.