Paradise Found

I became a NAUI SCUBA Divemaster at 18, the earliest age at which such certification is attainable. Fortunately, this certification gave me the knowledge and skills to dive safely in more challenging conditions. Unfortunately, all my training, from Open Water (the initial certification) to Divemaster, transpired in Lake Travis. And although Lake Travis is quite beautiful, and one of the clearest bodies of water in Texas, it is no diver’s mecca. Thus, I tend to jump on any and every chance to dive in more exotic locales. The two-and-a-half months I recently spent traveling in Southeast Asia with two close friends, Emily and Monika, offered just such a chance.

As with my trip to India, this Asiatic adventure evolved quite unexpectedly. I had mentioned offhandedly to Emily that I might come visit while she was living in Japan. One afternoon, she laid her ultimatum bluntly on the table and demanded, “Well, are you coming, or not?” Emily and I had been trying to travel together for years, and the publishing company for which I had been working had just been sold. My future employment was not at all certain, and so I quit and was on a plane to Bangkok about a month later, with Monika joining us just days later. Last things first: over the next four issues, I will be relating various adventures of our travels in reverse chronological order, starting with the four-day liveaboard dive trip Emily and I took departing from Khao Lak, Thailand. The name of this somewhat sleepy little hamlet just north of Phuket might strike a familiar chord, as it was the Thai locality worst hit during the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004. You wouldn’t know it lately, though, wandering down the main tourist stretches and through the newly built luxury hotels. You have to drive to the outskirts of Khao Lak to see the navy ship that was beached a mile inland and now serves as the de facto tsunami memorial, or to see the once-stately inland trees that were snapped off like matchsticks at 30 feet where the colossal wave crested.

But I digress: this story is about paradise found, not paradise lost and regained. And I can think of few greater intimations of paradise than the four days I spent aboard the Sea Dragon Dive Center’s M/V Andaman, purposefully drifting from one turquoise inlet to the next, with nothing more to do than eat, dive and be merry. And dive we did. Of the 28 people on board, 14 of us were paying divers, and the rest were divemasters, crew, or Sea Dragon employees that were accompanying us for (their own) leisure. With four dives the first and second days; three dives the third day; just two the last day; a few group jaunts to pristine, private beaches in between dives; and three delectable Thai meals a day prepared for us, it was all Emily and I could do to relax properly. Do you feel sorry for us yet?

Well, you might be sympathetic to our plight if you knew that the Similan Islands, the Surin Islands, and Richelieu Rock (the locales at which we dove) comprise some of the best diving in the world, based both on underwater visibility and biological fecundity. Because our trip departed toward the end of the diving season, which generally concludes in late April just before the monsoon season starts, visibility was not at its best. However, we still had visibilities ranging from 40 feet at worst to over 100 feet at best, not bad by any standards. The abundant and diverse flora and fauna we encountered on each dive, day and night alike, easily compensated for whatever was lacking in water clarity.

Marco and Remo, young brothers from Switzerland, Emily, and Ching, our Thai divemaster, were the other members of my dive group. Of all the groups, ours seemed to have the most luck encountering beautiful, and sometimes rare, marine species. Each dive entry in my logbook is replete with various types of nudibranches, clownfish, barracuda, seahorses, napoleon fish, moray eels, mantis shrimp, angelfish, lobster, mating cuttlefish, and giant grouper, to name just a trifling few. Most spectacularly, we saw two enormous manta rays on two separate occasions, the second occurring on our last dive. A few minutes before we were to ascend for our safety stop, a manta ray appeared out of the deep and began to circle gracefully around us. As we hung suspended and breathless in awe, the manta ray made a swooping turn and headed directly toward me. Instead of panicking and swimming out of the way, I waited for it to climb instinctively up and over me. At the moment the manta ray passed overhead, I stuck my hand up, coming within a few inches of its underbelly (having no intention of actually touching it), and I rolled back into a flip to follow its movements and to keep the majestic animal in my field of vision. Not that it quite mattered: I was already a bit dizzy and barely able to breathe from the sheer beauty of the experience, and my goggles were foggy from excess condensation (read: tears).

Unfortunately, as the cliché goes, all good things must come to an end: Emily and I returned back to the United States—and to the harsh reality of finding jobs—just days after the liveaboard returned to harbor. But what a way to end such an extended series of adventures. Merely experiencing Southeast Asia, gawking from one architectural, cultural, and culinary marvel to the next would have been enough. Nevertheless, Emily, Monika and I still managed to pack in an absurd number of excursions on top of the general travel schedule. Par for the course for us, though.

In the next issue, look forward to tales of mostly deserted islands, just-caught crab, and all things lost (and learned) in translation.