Jarrod and Sara’s Site

What’s up everybody? Hope everything is going great with you back home. We can’t believe we’ll be back in a little over a week. Thanks again to Mark for setting up this blog, its been a great way to keep our family and anyone who’s interested updated about what we’ve been up to. We’ll probably only have two or three more after this, so I’ll try to finish it strong.

(Sorry for the lack of pictures on this one, the Internet here is slow and expensive. Not a good combo for uploading pictures and only a few came through, we’ll try to add more later.)

After a marathon two days of traveling (and a great rest day in Bangkok) between Cambodia and Southern Thailand (4 buses, and a border crossing) we hopped on a small speed boat that would deliver us to the liveaboard scuba-dive boat (South Siam Divers 4), where we would spend the next 4 days and three nights. Before I continue, I would like to interject that this was the one real splurge of our trip (besides the whole trip itself). We booked and paid for this before we left… not a normal budget backpacker activity… it was a really, really nice start to the tropical honeymoon portion of our trip before returning to $10 a night “value rooms”.

For anyone who dives or has any desire to at some point, this trip would be one of the highlights of a dive career, and we would recommend it to anyone. The Similan Islands are part of a national marine park that protects them by requiring dive and other boat operators to avoid damaging practices that would hurt the coral reefs. There are no buildings or inhabitants on these islands, and fishing is strictly monitored. This has resulted in the place being absolutely pristine, in the sites we dove at least, with beautiful healthy reefs filled with tons of different types of hard and soft corals and just teeming with hundreds of species of fish and other wildlife. The following list will probably not mean much to everybody but some of the highlights of the things we dove with are: white-tipped reef sharks, sting rays, green sea turtles, tons of shapes, sizes, and variety of grouper and parrottfish, pufferfish, boxfish, moray eels, sea snakes, scorpian fish, lion fish, butterfly fish, batfish, nudibranches, seahorses, frogfish, various shrimps and gobies, tons of soft coral anenomes with clown fish (think Nemo and his reef house), just ridiculous amounts of all different tropical fish, and huge schools of various fish that swarmed around you while passing through. These are just a few examples and its fairly impossible to try and describe the completely different world we were in there, but it was simply spectacular.

I also want to take this opportunity to thank Sara for being such a trooper. She loves to dive (but not as much as I’m obsessed with it) and it does make her nervous each time we get ready to enter the water. During the 4 days we spend a total of about 14 hours far underneath the surface of the ocean on 15 dives. These were not easy 30 foot, bubble-blowing dives either. Almost every dive was 80 to 90 feet deep, (my deepest dive was 112 feet, hers about 105) and they all lasted about 50 min to an hour each. The currents at some of the sites were really, really strong, more than we had ever experienced or expected. At one site we literally held on to rocks as we swam into the current to rest (imagine a cartoon person hanging out of a flying airplane) and at another we felt like we were in a washing machine as the current surged in and out against the various rocks. We always had a guide on these dives, thankfully, or it would have been fairly terrifying. And though I was afraid I might have lost her when we ascended from a particularly brutal (and stunning) dive site and emerged in a school of literally thousands, if not tens of thousands, of lightly stinging jelly fish (where we waited for the boat to pick us up for 10 minutes in 5 foot waves and emerged with small welts on our exposed arms, legs, and on my neck/face), she didn’t miss a single dive and she loved it (even the night dive!). You totally gripped it Sara, you’re the best.

Besides the diving, we had a beautiful room with ocean level view, the boat was big, nice, well organized, and not too crowded. The other people on the boat included a mix of people from Thailand, Japan, Germany, Austria, England, Switzerland, and a group from Russia. The food was fantastic, which was particularly great for us since we have been living on small portions due to a small budget. Here it was all prepaid, a huge buffet for breakfast, lunch, and dinner along with free coffee, tea, and toast with various condiments including peanut butter (which we had missed dearly) that you could serve yourself 24 hours a day. This was a huge novelty for us as we’ve been eating out 3 meals a day for 3 months.

I am probably rambling now because we loved this trip so much, but two other cool highlights… We spotted a turtle while moored between dives, jumped in with snorkel and mask and hand fed it banana and cabbage while swimming with it for about 30-45 minutes. It was so friendly and fun to swim with in the open ocean, so great. Also, on one of the dives the guide told us about a cleaning station on one section of reef where if you swam to the right spot these little fish would clean your ears and any exposed skin by biting the bacteria or whatever off of you. I forgot about this and as I was checking out a certain section of reef I felt something in my ear and shooed it away, then felt something on my leg and looked down to see two of these cleaner gobies feasting on the peeling skin of my knee where I had gotten a bad sunburn while motorbiking. It sounds gross but it was really funny and cool to see. The dive guide got in close and took out his mouthpiece and a troop of little shrimp walked into his mouth and did a teeth cleaning, hilarious to watch.

It was a great trip, one of the highlights of this or any other trip we’ll ever take.

We can’t wait to see everyone soon.

Jarrod and Sara