Week six was a good one. I spent nearly all week scuba diving, eating food, hanging out with friends and sleeping on Koh Tao. The days were long, and I was wiped. It was wet. Like, really wet. It rained hard pretty much every day, for at least half the day, sometimes more. If you’re still unsure how wet it was, the picture below should give you a pretty good idea.
In some ways it made scuba the perfect activity because I was going to get wet anyway, and I didn’t feel like I was missing out on doing much else. It was really nice to have a bit more structure to my days. Many of my vacations in the past have been centered around a single activity rather than sightseeing, and this week reminded me that I enjoy that type of travel much more. Now I just need to figure out how to build sections of that into the rest of my trip.
As scuba was essentially the only activity I did throughout the week, this newsletter will look a bit different. I started writing out all the details about my scuba courses and I realized there was a lot more there than I wanted to include here. So, I’m going to give a little TLDR here to keep it semi-short. If you want the version with all the details of the course structure and each day’s dives, it’s up on a post on my website that I’ve linked in the blog posts section (or you can click here).
LOCATIONS
- Koh Tao, Thailand (Nov 20 – Nov 26)
- Krabi, Thailand (Nov 26 – 29)
ACTIVITIES
Scuba, Scuba, and more Scuba
I’ve always been curious about scuba diving, but have never had a good opportunity to try it out. Koh Tao is known as one of the best places in the world to dive for the first time. It’s quite cheap compared to other places and there are a good variety of dive sites that are suitable for beginners. Most of the island’s infrastructure is built around scuba. There are dive shops seemingly every third door.
I was both excited and a bit nervous about diving. On one hand, I love water and am very comfortable in it. But the water I’m most comfortable in is a pool, where I can see everything and there are no surprises. I wasn’t sure how I’d respond to what I might see beneath the water.
The super short version, I loved pretty much everything about it. So much so that I decided to do the advanced course so I could dive down to 30 meters instead of being limited to 18. The world underwater is wild and unlike anything I’ve seen before. Diving is miles cooler than any snorkeling I’ve done in the past. I also really enjoyed the aspect of trying to master diving from a skill and technique perspective. I’ve got a long way to go, but I made a lot of progress in my five days diving and even got kudos from my instructor on my air consumption and buoyancy control.
I wish I had pictures I could show you, but unfortunately, I don’t have a camera that I can take underwater. As a next best effort, here’s a list of my favorite marine life I saw under the sea
- Pufferfish (unpuffed. Fun fact – I learned puffing is incredibly taxing on the pufferfish and due to this some can only puff up a handful of times in their lives. The more you know.)
- A big ole hermit crab crawling along
- Moray eel
- A massive school of barracudas that were almost entirely surrounding me
- Angelfish
- Bannerfish
- Blue spotted ribbontail rays
I was able to snag some pics of me and my dive buddies though. The first pic is my open water course crew and the second is my advanced course crew before our night dive (check out the longer post if you want more details about that one!).
REFLECTIONS
The Grounding Nature of Priorities
I read something this week that struck me. It was a reddit post written by an individual who was two months into traveling, and they were feeling burnt out. They had a lack of motivation to do much more and were lacking purpose. This was impacting them to the point of questioning the value of continuing their travels and if it would be better to just pack up and go home.
I’m at a similar benchmark in my travels. The idealized, dreamy expectations of nearly a year around the globe are starting to wear off and there’s a lot less novelty in the day to day. There have been days where I’ve had similar thoughts questioning the purpose of my trip.
As these have come up, I’ve been very grateful for all the people that helped me process the why of this trip before I left. If you’re one of those people, I want to say thank you. Many friends asked me hard questions and these helped me clarify for myself what the purpose of this trip was. Having a clear list of priorities has been incredibly grounding on challenging days. When I don’t want to do much from an activity or sightseeing perspective, I know that there are other things I can do that are wins. I can spend time writing. I can have a conversation with someone. I can try a new meal for dinner. Not every day has to be about the “traveling” as long as I’m creating space for my priorities.
Coffee Chats
A few days ago when I was in Krabi, I didn’t have much of a plan. Well, I had one, but then rain hit not long into the morning and I was much less inclined to be outside all day. I was eating breakfast and someone started up a conversation with me. I was planning to go to a coffee shop a bit later in the morning and I extended the invitation to join. We ended up sitting down and just chatting over coffee for an hour. It’s the first time in a while where I’ve been across the table from a single other person with no real activity or agenda besides talking, and it was really refreshing.
It made me think about the classic “We should get coffee!” that gets tossed around all the time in Seattle. Most of the time this just ends up being no more than a greeting between two people. Or if there is an intent to actually hang out, it’s simply forgotten shortly after the interaction ends.
Don’t be that guy (or girl). There’s so many opportunities to connect with people that are just a bit of follow through away. Take the initiative to reach out to the people you want to spend time with instead of waiting to be reached out to. If everyone wants to hang out but no one ever initiates, everyone ends up losing.
NEXT UP
I just finished a few days in Phuket and I’ve got two more islands to stop at in Thailand (Koh Lanta and Koh Lipe) before I cross into Malaysia. The plan is to get one or two more days of diving in and then relax. Then go eat a bunch of good food in Malaysia for a bit.
As always, if you know anyone that you think would be interested in anything I’m writing about, I’d ask that you consider sharing this with them.
Thanks for being here. Talk to you next week.
– Trevor