Thailand - Khao Lak (Januari 2018)

We go back to Thailand and Khao Lak, and stay at hotel K10.
I liked this hotel a lot. It was a little bit on the outside of the centrum road and felt really tropical and exotic. The buffet breakfast was great, and they had good omelettes you mixed by yourself and then went to a girl who cooked. The only bad was the bread table where birds flew around and ate at, so we skipped it.

After installation at the hotel, we take our usual trip down to the dive center and find out the pickup time for tomorrow. We dive with IQ dive again because we liked them last time.

Then it's time to find the first evening meal. Green curry is a must :)
We found a little stand where they made crêpes, and it turned out to be crazy good. Now it's crêpes every night.

We dived at Turtle Rock, Three Trees, where we saw barracudas and moray.
In the break between the 2 dives, it is the usual boat-cooked buffet lunch that is so amazingly good. It's nice that it's the same crews and several guides we've known since the first tour to Khao Lak.

I like Thai food so much and we try to bring in some different dishes to try. However, I must always have a green curry as it is the favorite. On the other hand, the Thais have become cowards with the seasoning. Finally, there will be crepes with the banana and nutélla in the favorite stand.

We dived at Snapper alley where we got to see some more vivid anemones, leaf fish and an unicorn fish. At Christmas point we saw a sea star variety we've never seen before.

Boon Sung Wreck is a favorite wreck, and we make sure to catch it twice on the trip. It is so multiplant of animals there, so we constantly find something new. One dive we were lucky to get our own guide, and he showed us a lot of little things that we usually do not have time to see. Like various nudibranch, network pipe fish, hermit crayfish, white-eyed moray, etc. We went out by long tail boat both times, and it suits us well these days because we will be in port earlier, so we have time to look around a bit.

At Sea shart (Wreck) we went with a long tail boat. It's very current and cloudy visibility. This was the heaviest and hardest dive I've ever made. It was current at the surface, when we jumped in and held the line along the side of the boat, the current wanted to pull us away from the line we should go down on. I paddle like crazy and knew that if I lose the line I would go away fast. When I got to the front, I would reach the next line that was a little too far away, and now I can promise that the breathing had to fight hard, and I was hyperventilating. At the moment it did not feel possible to have a regulator in my mouth and be able to go down and get some oxygen, it feels like breathing in a straw. I do know, however, that if I manage to stay calm and get down 2 meters, I will be able to slowly breathe normally again. Calm and easy we started to go down, and finally I could breathe normally again and the power from the current calmed down the further down we came.

At premchai wreck, it was different and fun. In the middle of the dive it came a preening fish swimming. It had no one to hang on to and started to make attempts to hang itself on us divers. It looked so funny that I was laughing, and the water was flowing into my mask. I emptied my mask and kept laughing, emptied and laughing :) Then the little fish came and tried to hang on to my leg, and it was like coarse sandpaper with pressure, I tried firmly but politely poke it away. I hope it finds someone who appreciates his tenacity when we get up.

We try a restaurant I unfortunately do not know the name of, but that looked a bit more luxurious on the outside. The food was perfectly okay, but no wow feeling. We tried to ask for stronger food but it seems that all restaurants have become afraid to spice up the food. We'll probably take the hole in the wall next time again.

Koh Tachai and Koh Bon were also visited by us. At Koh Tachai it was current so it was rope down.

A wonderful pretty big octopus was outside his nest, it's make my day :)
Hot shrimp and green curry. We try to nag and ask for more spicy, but we have failed every dinner.

I feel in this journey that the underwater environment has begun to recover slightly from the first time we were here. A little more living anemones and clownfishes, a little more color.

We take a day off and take a trip with a hired guide one day to Phuket. He tries to stop at a lot of shopping places and malls, but that's not really for us. In the template it is about the same shops we got at home, then there are luxury stores with precious stones and expensive bags, etc. we run through and try to be polite and went out as quickly as we can. Phuket gets very low rating, boring, uninteresting, no coziness at all, not a place for us.

Our guide wants to show us something and starts driving up on winding roads. The sad thing when you drive on different small roads is to see that there are still poor trekking elephants waiting for tourists. To me who knows how the wild animals were subjected to the torture method Phajaan (please googling for more information) only get sad, and I wish that the information to tourists was more elaborated on the airlines so that people do not pay for animal shows, trekking, zoos, etc. Animals are ALWAYS exposed to Phajaan. I will tell you in my own post later about this for interested.

We're coming to a huge Budda. Some wild monkeys and different bowls in different shapes. There were also monks where you against a coin / gift will be blessed and got an bracelet around your wrist. Although it was very touristy, and it was possible to pay for all sorts of things there, but still it was a nice moment and quite pleasant to walk around there.
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Then we went home and ate a nice dinner and the usual for this trip crêpes with banana and Nutella.

Thanks for an amazing experience week!