Jake Gordon

Scuba Diving and Motorcycling on Koh Pha-Ngan

27 March 2001

Left the island of Samui this morning - it sucked. However, I did bring with me a weird rash all over my arms. This kinda’ worried me, but I asked a guy at a scuba diving place here today what it was, and they assure me it’s just hundreds of mosquito bites - oops! There’s me thinking they don’t like the taste of my blood.

Well, arrived on Pha-Ngan this morning and went to some resort along the south coast. It too sucked big time, and so I left straight away and met an American girl on the truck. She was going back to the mainland, and I was thinking of doing the same. Luckily though, over a lunch of vegetable fried rice (I have this every day) I changed my mind and decided to try the island for at least one night. Just to make it more fun, I hired a motorbike/moped (very cheap). Never used one before and extremely jumpy at first - the bike just kept hopping along and it was hard to figure out how to stop! Well, eventually I got the hang of it, but at one point I went over a pot-hole and my bag fell off the basket at the front and so I had to stop and get off to get it back. Then I lost the keys by dropping them in the sand on a secluded beach, but all seems well now.

In my search for accommodation I bumped into a scuba diving centre where I was, as I often am, entirely spontaneous and splashed out on an advanced open water diving course which’ll start in two days time and includes five dives, including one up to 30m deep, one night dive and a wall dive. All sounds very fun!

So, this morning I was feeling like hell not knowing what to do, whilst now I’m feeling far better and exhilerated by the motorcycling. I’ll be staying on the island for about four or five days.

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by Jake Gordon, some rights reserved