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Asia Update 12:  Diving Lessons

March 2003

Ko Phangnan, Thailand

The alien landscape ripples and distorts, pulsing in time with the organic heave of the sea. I squint through cloudbursts of bubbles, willing the vertiginous scene into focus as if I’m trying on thick glasses that belong to someone else. Underwater, the world is eerily devoid of odor, unless you count the psychosomatic scent of fear swirling through my head like warning smoke from an internal brushfire. Pure air, force-fed through the tank, intoxicates me after three wheezing days in Bangkok, and the roar of the respirator adds to my alarm until I realize I’m simply breathing too fast. With some meditative effort on my part, the roar subsides to a regular whoosh, swish…

I finally learned to swim this past year, at age 32. I swim like an old, inbred lapdog:  reluctantly and without grace; a frantic, vertical paddling accompanied by bulgy-eyed, inelegant sputtering. Still, it’s an accomplishment for me. Although I traveled through the tropics all year, I hadn’t practiced swimming in months when my friend Amanda wrote from San Francisco and asked me to meet her in Thailand for a diving holiday. Amanda also learned to swim last year—another late bloomer. Unlike me, she took formal lessons and practiced diligently, determined to overcome her fear of the water and scuba dive on her honeymoon with the lying, cheating Dolphin Boy. She now proposed a celebration of her newfound skill and newly independent state, envisioning diving as both a reward and “a metaphor of traveling to the unknown abyss alone, to search for the profound and the evermore beautiful”, as she so delightfully expressed it.

Her email found me in Australia, where violent weather, cyclone-whipped water and a surprise long distance breakup had dry-docked me for weeks. Under more sane circumstances the suggestion might have been less compelling, but at the time, an island respite with some life risk involved struck me as the ideal finale for my year of adventure. Whether I could (or should) actually scuba dive, given my own aquaphobia and pitiful swimming technique, seemed beside the point. Suddenly purposeful again, I met Amanda’s plane in Bangkok and shepherded her south to Ko Samui, intent on fulfilling her mission on the tiny Gulf island of Ko Tao. As our plane descended into the early morning mist, my resolve faltered. Ko Tao’s reputation as a hardcore diver’s hangout suddenly intimidated me. Rumors of seedy dive operators sending touts to swarm the ferry and visions of yammering taxi drivers fighting for commissions fueled my hesitation. How would we track down accommodations—and more importantly, entrust a dive shop to accommodate two timid beginners—in such bedlam?

Disinclined to tolerate chaos before coffee, I suggested a stopover on sleepy Ko Phangnan, where we could relax, practice swimming, and gather information from other travelers before storming Ko Tao. Ever the adaptable Sagittarian, Amanda agreed instantly to this sudden retrenchment and we picked a random beach on the west side of the island. Without agenda, we bounced along in the back of a sóng thaw toward Had Yao until a fellow passenger pointed out a cluster of pretty bungalows against the cliffs. We hopped off the truck and secured the last available room at Sandy Bay. It was all so easy; it seemed fated. 

From the limestone steps of our palm-fringed veranda to a rocky outcrop almost a mile away, Had Yao stretched out in a long, crescent moon of unbleached flour against the bathwater sea. Our simple bungalow cost less than $10 US per night, and the open-air restaurant served good Thai and passable Western food for pennies. Thrilled at our good fortune, we toasted with fresh pineapple juice and tucked in to a spicy squid salad. During lunch, we noticed a sandwich board in front of the 8 x 10 hut next door advertising “Had Yao Divers.”  Gregarious Amanda popped over to introduce herself and pepper them with questions. With the owner away, the rest of the (male) crew found ample time to chat with her. She returned beaming and confident in their ability to initiate us safely to diving, and we decided to sample a $30 “Intro Dive” the following day.

The next morning after breakfast, we met Edan, our young instructor, for a quick safety overview. Next, Edan and another crewmember outfitted us in short wetsuits and heavy scuba gear. Ever graceful, I turtled over backward when I tried to stand up. We staggered down the beach and spent an hour learning basic skills in the shallows. The technical lesson calmed me and made Amanda anxious, but once we moved into deeper water she grew more confident while I floundered. Ready or not, we paddled out duckling-like after Edan, towards the reef. The Intro Dive would determine our readiness for a full diving course. I knew I couldn’t pass the swimming requirement to take a PADI course in the States, but Asia is less concerned with safety in general. Between that loophole and my long held belief that bravado is a perfectly acceptable substitute for confidence, I figured this might be my chance to pull it off. Also, there’s nothing like risking life and limb in a foreign country to put one’s emotional turmoil into perspective.

Regardless, I failed my personal safety test. The primary rule of diving is “Don’t touch anything”. Actually, that’s the secondary rule; the primary rule is “Don’t stop breathing”. Clutching the depth meter in one cold hand and gripping the inflation device with the other, my arms were safely occupied but I lost track of my legs. My bare knees bumped and scraped across delicate needles of coral, leaving stray threads of blood hanging in the water. I clenched the rubber mouthpiece nervously between my teeth until I gagged on petroleum essence. When I tried to loosen my jaw and swallow, my tongue had dried to an immobile husk. The invisible, omnipotent force of the tide quickly adjusted my misperception that diving would be static, like floating in space. I flailed in the gentle current, panicked when I couldn’t equalize, became dizzy and forgot my hand signals. Breaking protocol, I ascended by myself to stop the pain in my ears. I knew that no one at Had Yao Divers would stop me if I insisted on going through with the course, but clearly my unresolved fears and bad water habits would be dangerous to me and to other divers if I continued on, not to mention hazardous to the fragile ecosystem. 

While it seemed perilously deep to me at the time, we dove only 3 or 4 meters below the surface that day—more like snorkeling in space suits. I noticed some fantastic fish when I wasn’t busy hyperventilating, but nothing more exotic than I would snorkel over later with a good mask and fins. Amanda passed her self-imposed swimming test and with a little prodding, she signed up for the PADI Open Water course. Belying her apprehension, she powered through the four-day course and completed her final test dive in spite of severe motion sickness. I lived vicariously, proud and jealous and quite a bit relieved to be championing from the sidelines. 

During her absence, I amused myself by comparing the qualities of various nap locations:  beach mat vs. hammock, shady veranda vs. hot sand, etc. When not dozing, I read, swam, snorkeled, and slaked my hard-earned thirst with fresh papaya shakes and Thai iced coffees. It turns out that I needed a vacation from traveling. In the evenings, we feasted on grilled tilapia and squid while Amanda reported the day’s diving lesson and various gossip-gleanings. She found out that our original destination, Ko Tao, supports more than forty dive operations while Ko Phangnan has just five. And lest I presume that Had Yao reserves premier attention for attractive, vivacious females, the only other person in her diving class scouted all five options before he chose Had Yao Divers for their pristine equipment and outstanding safety reputation. Knowing none of this when we signed up, Amanda and I marveled again at our innocent stumble into the kind lap of Fate.

The diving crew started work before 8 a.m. every day and closed the shop after dark, often hanging around the restaurant pavilion drinking Singha and chatting until 10 or 11. The Sandy Bay Bungalows, just a few unpaved miles from the site of the notorious Full Moon Parties on the other side of Ko Phangnan, attract a completely different set of travelers. Although everyone there was interesting in some way, I bonded with Edan, the 21-year-old Israeli who led our first dive. He too was recovering from a broken heart. Perhaps that was the bleak beacon drawing us both to the water’s edge every night, where we sat apart from the group and rambled on under the stars. He occasionally burst into Hebrew songs and when I asked him to translate, he told me he sang about the woman he loved and setting her free in order to free himself. Between the lulling waves and the rising moon, we talked of diving and why it’s “the best thing there is”, of love and why it is impermanent, of freedom and why it is worth everything.

One such night, I demanded a story. Edan promptly launched into a fanciful tale about palm tree people, the fierce and ancient protectors of the islands (much later I recognized the image, stolen from Lord of the Rings II). In his version, the tree people are angered by humans’ abuse of power so they uproot themselves, leaving deep crevices in the sand and dooming the entire island to sink into the ocean. He then handed the story off to me. I finished it with the pea-faced palm tree people taking pity on the struggling land creatures. They sweep the stars from the sky with their long, leafy hands, scattering sparks into the ocean to light a path to safety through the dark sea.

Tonight, in my memory, I am still foraging through the powdery sand of Had Yao with my toes, listening to the rough engine buzz of squid boats chugging out into the night, and wondering if or when I might attempt to dive again. The horizon blurs and expands in the darkness and the trail of the sun grows faint, as does my yearlong path through the Eastern hemisphere. The months flew as I flew—and rode and swam, walked and trekked and hitchhiked—through Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Laos, Australia…crossroading through Thailand so many times that once-exotic Bangkok became as routine as a business trip. I scrutinize the inevitable tide, as I have done on more nights and in more locations than I can remember. The waves roll in like stories; always different, yet always the same. Love was found and lost, friendships forged and forgotten, Kismet honored and betrayed in this year of discovery, of trial and error, of mistakes and opportunities, of regret and euphoria and wonder. The destinations already fade, but the journey has just begun. 

And at the end of our tale, Edan’s lavender turban brushes against my scabby knees as we both tilt our heads to the luminous sky, waiting for the stars to tumble down over us like shattered glass and disappear sparkling into the unknown abyss of the sea.

The End...for Now

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(c) 2003, Laurie Weed. All rights reserved.