A new kind of hero

Down on Ko Lanta at the moment enjoying relatively quiet gorgeous white beaches, blue seas and sky. The sea is being ridiculously flat at the moment which is lovely for swimming up and down when I’m not lazing around in my hammock. It’s a hard life in paradise, init.

It’s not all fun though, oh no. Yesterday I completed my Rescue Diver qualification, the last PADI qualification before you can start the Professional ones. Apart from a few days in a classroom this also involved a day out on the reef doing fake emergencies… Now, on a normal visit to the reef I generally come across ooh, about zero emergencies a day – perhaps one a week of diving! So to have to run about and ‘save’ six people in an afternoon is completely exhausting. By the end of it I was ready to push them under and say ‘don’t dive any more’! Good fun though and very exciting giving people rescue breaths as you drag them along the water while everyone stares at you like you’re mad.

Oh, and eventually we got to go on a fun dive out at Ko Ha, which was really stunning. Lots of bizarre little fish like harlequin shrimps – about 1 cm long and living on an anemone. Not quite as big as the leopard shark we saw the other day at Ko Daeng. Still hoping to see some whale sharks and manta rays… fingers crossed (no luck yet Vera!).