Diving is an experience difficult to elucidate. It is immensely tranquil, the sensation of weightlessness, and the sound of your own breathing (or rather the bubbles being released from your regulator each time you exhale) leads to an almost meditative state once you have reached a proficiency with diving where it is second nature. Tropical diving, or in particular diving the west coast of Thailand, is like someone turned up the saturation settings on your eyes, this amazing collage and myriad of tropical colours, brighter than we tend to see on land is accessible to you just a few meters under the surface. The sheer perfection, fluorescence and vibrancy of the pinks, reds, purples, yellows, blues, greens etc., leaves one feeling blessed, wishing to soak in every minute of this world so near to our own, yet so very different.


The dive sites around Ko Phi Phi offer a vast array of marine life: corals, soft and hard, sponges and vases, seafans, staghorn coral, bubble coral, brain coral…at points resembling icing on a cake as it rises in pinnacles, or covers a wall or spreads across the reefs. To regularly swim alongside the semi-clumsy hawksbill turtles; leopard sharks, bamboo sharks, black tip reef sharks (along with the occasional remora hitching a ride on their backs); the seasnakes gliding and slithering effortlessly; oriental sweetlips; emperor angelfish, parrotfish, anemone and damsel fish; crabs in their many guises (hermit, porcelain, red…), lobsters, barracudas, tuna, groupers, trevellies; tigertail seahorses amongst the rocks and pinnacles or behind a seafan…believe me the list could continue. To witness shoals of hundreds or thousands of fish, yellow, black, silver, fusiliers etc, all moving as if choreographed, in unison…mmmm, makes you wistful eh? And this is not forgetting the tiny cleaner and boxer shrimps at their cleaning stations, the moray eels (giants, honeycombed, white-eyed etc.), and the beauty and perfection and variety found amongst the nudibranchs, (they may well be known as sea slugs but believe there is no aesthetic comparison with the land-based blighters!)