Diving part 2 - Advanced Course on Nang Yuan

After I recovered from the sandbar debacle, I started my Advanced Diving Course with Jo. Our instructor turned out to be a Hungarian guy named Attila. No joke. Here's Attila the Hun(garian diving instructor):

He's the main instructor there, recruited by his Hungarian buddy Denes (pronounced 'Danish'), who runs the place. Here's Danish, Attila, and Jo:

Jo and I spent 2 days diving with Attila. True to his historical namesake, he turned out to be a rather somber fellow, without much of a sense of humor. We did some underwater photography, but I won't subject you to the rather grim results here. I think 1-2 photos actually show a fish or two. We also did a deep dive down to 27 meters, about 90 feet. And we did a night dive, which was very cool. Using flashlights, we dove to about 20 meters. Saw 4 small squids.

Instead of swimming back to the boat, we swam to shore. When we emerged from the water at the darkened beach wearing our scuba gear, I felt like James Bond.

We also did underwater photography. Here's some photos...

and more here.

and videos...

(the whistling horn sound is the sound of Jo's f***-ed up regulator...it drove her crazy, but it did work.)



So now I'm Advanced Certified. Here I am celebrating. Jo took the picture and I look rather drunk, but I'm not...just tired:

Jo looks very dashing here...

The other funny thing about this island is that I developed a stalker. There were a whole bunch of younger women staffing the front desk. One of them, Nok, took a liking to me. She said to me one morning, "Mr. Dan, you handsome man." I kind of shrugged that off and just talked to her a little. Turns out she is separated from her husband and has a 13 year old daughter. She also found out it was my birthday on Saturday.

That night, about 10:30 PM, I'm laying in bed trying to sleep in the heat and on the rather hard bed. There's a knock at the door. Turns out there's another Nok at the door. She'd come to give me a birthday present of some incense, and then said, "Now you kiss my cheek". I managed to send her away and go to sleep.

Then when Jo arrived for the diving course, she crashed in my cabin for the one night. Nok and one other of the women thought she was my girlfriend (I didn't bother to correct them.) They started saying things like "You break my heart!" They were all very sad when I left.

The island also held one young staffer named Pen. She gave me two Thai massages and wow, they were the best massages of my life - and not because of any happy endings. I nicknamed her the Hammer (not to her face) because she was tiny but incredibly strong. I've had a couple massages since then but no one comes close to little Pen, the Hammer.