Wow! After going snorkeling at the
Great Barrier Reef, we thought that any other snorkeling we did on the trip would be something of a let down.
We were entirely wrong! I found some info about the Similan Islands on the western edge of Thailand, 70 km out from Kho Lak. It’s a group of nine islands, now turned into a national park, with no commercial developments, although the park runs campgrounds on two of the islands. We decided to do a two day snorkeling expedition, which turned out to be a perfect amount of time and only cost $150 per person, including 5 meals, an AC bungalow on the island, gear rentals, and door to door bus service! If anyone is interested, we highly recommend Jack Similan tours – although their email response wasn’t the best, the rest of the tour was excellent!
On the first day we had to leave really early (6am) for a 2 hour bus ride up to Koh Lak, then an hour and a half speedboat ride out the islands. We then did one dive (each dive was an hour) in some of the clearest water I’ve ever seen. The sea floor was 6 to 10 meters, and visibility was perfect to the bottom and about 40 meters all around us! The sea was calm, the sun was bright, and there were thousands of fish and dozens of types of coral.
We headed to one of the islands for a tasty Thai lunch, then headed back out to visit another couple dive sites, seeing some different fish and coral varieties, plus lots of new rock formations and island scenery. Then we headed to the island where we’d be spending the night and had a few hours to explore and rest. Mary slept while I went rock hopping and swimming, sending thousands of crabs scurrying for safety. Later on we had dinner, then saw an incredible sunset, including having the entire sky turn yellow and then orange (seriously, check out the pictures!). Everyone passed out early, except for us, since our mattress turned out to be a piece of stone :-(
The next day came way too soon, but we were revitalized by a nice breakfast on board, then headed out for another couple dives. The first stop (Miang Island, I think) was the most incredible site I’ve ever seen – turtles, Moray eels, coral snakes, octopi, sea horses, sea stars, lots of parrot and trigger fish, visibility farther than I could measure, and no one there besides our group of ten snorkelers! Plus we chased some Barracuda for a brief bit, until they turned on their jets and blew us away. The second stop had just as good of visibility, although somewhat less sea life, but had tons of fun shooting through gaps in the rocks, riding the surging waves through them! Then we outran some jellyfish, did some deep dives, and headed back in for lunch.
On both the islands we set foot on (lunch the first day and our overnight stop) there were fun climbs up to rocky peaks of the islands, offering great vistas and lots of photo ops. Even if you don’t normally check out our photos from the trip, I’d highly recommend these, they’re a lot of fun!
We met a lot of great people on the trip, including a few very nice Canadians (there seem to be a lot of them here in Thailand!) and several Brits. Everyone had a wonderful time and was tremendously happy – how could we not be? Even the trip back was exciting, as we saw a whale surface four times, including a couple within ten feet of the boat! Needless to say we were very tired when we got back to Phuket that evening!
No comments:
Post a Comment