Otherwise known as 'the death of the bank balance'. It's oh so easy here to just do dive after dive! In fact, I think pretty much the whole of Thailand has now developed into one massive incredibly well-evolved money-extraction machine. Obviously though, I HAVE enjoyed my diving!
Today I went to a beach in the morning with some new friends - three on one scooter and one on the back of mine. On the back of mine was quite a big girl which made the bike feel like it had a puncture sometimes (tyre-roll!). In the afternoon I did two dives - the first one was a deep one (down to 33m), saw some massive Groupers. I made a mistake of not checking my dive computer thoroughly enough - little did we know, but it was set to high-altitude mode and also high-workrate mode. All this meant was that I unexpectedly reached my no-decompression limit really fast and I had to go up with one of the dive masters and do a 10-minute decompression stop at 5 metres before surfacing (that's long by the way). A little bit worrying at first because I didn't have that much air left, but it was more than enough in the end. Had to make sure I stayed relaxed so I didn't use much air.
Because it was all due to the dive computer being in a bad mode, it meant I was allowed to dive the 2nd dive, which went according to plan! In the evening I did a night dive too which was really cool. Didn't manage to get the barracuda to kill though, but you can't win them all.
Last night before bed I managed to persuade a friend to go on the back of my scooter up to a viewpoint at night - however we were thwarted near the top by some dogs howling at us. Rabid or not, we made the not-so-difficult decision to turn round rather than try to casually ride past them and hope for the best.
Tomorrow I'm doing a full-day dive trip to their best site - it's 3 hours away and you have breakfast and lunch included and 3 dives. This will definitely be the last dive I pay for here. If I do anymore it'll be because I've signed-up to the Divemaster course. Don't know what I'm going to do yet - it will either be that or teaming-up with some of the nice folk here and going somewhere else together. I also realised today that without really knowing it, I've basically had a dive holiday!
