Diving in Cambodia

After our double boat trip we just relaxed and enjoyed the hotel pool, I finally finished the last book Dom and Katie had given me back in Manchester and I was a little worried where my next book was going to come from!! In the evening we decided to indulge and went to a European restaurant for tea, it was nice not to have rice for a change and we had our first bottle of red wine in nearly 2 months. It tasted great!

During this time we were wandering past the many dive shops cluttering the resort and decided to enquire. It had been something we had both been keen to do at the beginning of the holiday, but the opportunity hadn’t arisen yet. We popped into a PADI dive centre, and we were instantly sold. We signed up for a 3 day ‘Open Water’ course, were given a text book and told to come back the next day for a classroom session.

We spent the next day learning all the main principles and basic apparatus from a DVD and our books. After passing a test at the end of the day we were ready to go! Not that me and Rob are at all competitive but I am pleased to report I got a higher score on my test! However I knew this was the last time on the diving course that I would be better than him at something, so I thought I would use this opportunity to gloat!

The next day we climbed aboard a boat and sailed to the island where we were to spend the next 2 nights. The island was beautiful, very picturesque. We unfortunately didn’t get an opportunity to explore the island beyond the rickety wooden pier that was our accomodation, but we certainly did explore the waters!!!

Once we had arrived we had to show our swimming competence by swimming 20 lengths between the 2 piers. We looked at all the gear, were shown how all the various meters, buttons and connections worked and then got to put it all on and waddle into the water. There were four of us in our group with a very amiable French guy called Olivier as our instructor. The first day was all about learning the various drills. We did this in the shallow water near the beach so you could stand up if you had any problems. I got the whole inhaling/exhaling confused a few times at first while trying to clear my mask of water while under water - which I can tell you is not so pleasant, and trying to breathe water is not necessarily the best idea, I soon learnt not to get these confused!!! Once Olivier was happy we could do all the drills to a safe and competent standard, we finished the day by doing our first ‘dive’. Although we never went deeper than about 5m and stayed within the bay we had been practising in, it was magical. We saw a large colourful hermit crab, some sea cucumbers, sea urchins and loads of yellow and blue stripy fish. It was such a great way to end the day as it really inspired us to do well the next morning so we could get out into open water as soon as possible to start the real thing. I also felt lucky as when we got back to the shore we saw the other group of 4 older dive students were not doing as well and so did not get this experience.

The second day we set off bright and early and went to much deeper water. I was incredibly excited and slightly anxious as we jumped off the edge of the boat and into the water. Rob was a great dive buddy though and was always making sure I was comfortable and ok. He was a very natural diver. We went down to a depth of about 10m and did some of the more important drills again. Then it was back in the boat, and back to the island for lunch. After lunch we were back in the boat and went to our first proper dive spot. We jumped in, gave the sign that we were ok, and slowly sank below the surface. As we swum around I couldn’t get over the amount of sea life we were seeing, from large shoals of brightly coloured fish, sea cucumbers, a large moray eel, starfish, trumpet fish, clown fish and countless sea urchins (these ones I steered very clear of, they had viciously long spines and were apparently incredibly painful – all the divers had stories to tell about urchins, especially the dive shop owner who confessed to occasionally butchering them with his dive knife to watch the fish feed on them!). We went down to about 12m on this dive and it was about 40mins before we had to surface as we were running low on air. The whole experience felt like it lasted about 10mins and while I was swimming around I remember it all feeling very surreal.

The second dive was just as amazing, this time it was in a very different spot, a lot of the dive was much shallower, though we did eventually get down to about 15m. This time we did not have as great a visibility but we saw many more beautiful corals as we swan around a small island. It was an indescribable feeling of freedom while we were diving. It was wonderfully peaceful and I couldn’t believe how the sea life we were observing didn’t seem to be bothered by our presence at all so you could experience them so closely in such a natural way.
After two fantastic days in the water we were now qualified open water divers. This means we can dive to a depth of 18m, with a dive master. It is fair to say now that I can’t wait until my next experience, and I would recommend it to anyone who has the opportunity to try, if you can already swim it is actually very easy to learn and so very rewarding.