My first 4 days on the island were spent doing my Padi Open Water Scuba Diving certification with Crystal Dive, which was a great dive school located near the ferry pier. We had a small group of 4 (which coincidentally one of the guys in our group was from Dorset!), which was a great number to learn and get personal attention whilst learning. There is quite a bit of theory involved in the course, so the first two days involved a lot of time in the classroom and a pool session to test out all the required skills. You don't really do any swimming in the pool session, and it was actually pretty tough - my least favourite skill was definitely clearing your flooded mask underwater! It definitely tested me by having to stay very calm underwater, and that was only at 1 metre or so!
After passing our theory test the next two days involved two dives each on the Crystal boat. The first two were done at Twins, which is near Koh Nang Yuan, a small island just off Koh Tao, and the final two dives were at White Rock and Japanese Gardens. The visibility was not great for some of the dives, although Japanese Gardens was my favourite with some beautiful coral and fish. The first day you dive to 12m then 18m the day after. It wasn't as scary as I thought it might be, although the equalizing of the ears is what takes a bit of getting used to, but once you are at the bottom and swimming around I managed to forget about how deep I was!
Our dive group!
After the course I moved to stay in Sairee beach for a few nights, which is about a 20 minute walk further down the coast. There is a lot more going on here, and some great parties on the beach. We also rented a kayak at the beach one day which was fun! I spent the next couple of days doing yoga, at the beach and just relaxing which was great!
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