Day 126 - Trekking and Night Diving

Druce and Will are signed up for the Open Water course, I went in to book a deep adventure dive, and ended up being signed up for a night dive tonight! Will, Druce and I went up to the top Viewpoint today, stupidly going around 1 0'clock, meaning we were drenched in sweat by the time we reached the top. We saw signs down to Runtee bay, and figuring we'd come this far, and hoping there would be a taxi boat on the other side, we headed down. It was a much longer walk, through almost Jungle, than we had been informed, but it was worth it - the first sign we sawe said "Mask + Fins, Taxi Boat, Thai Food", all of which we were in dire need of. The others went snorkelling while I did my theory for the night dive - boring but necessary. We got the last Taxi boat back at %:30, meaning that I was a little late back, and a little drunk after one beer due to all the sweating I did.

The night dive was incredible, if a little unnerving - we had a Czech instructor called Emilieauneaaa... or something like that, and the sea was incredibly rough on the way out - 2-3m swells, apparently. When we were sheltered in the bay off Phi Phi Lei it was ok though. We only went down to about 15m, and we saw *gets out logbook* a 2ft blue Spiny Lobster scaling the coral wall, a Spider Crab covered in anemones and coral who was almost invisible and only moved when wafted at, another Crown Of Thorns Starfish (more spectacular as we saw its real colours in our torchlight), various Puffer Fish, including an enormous Giant Puffer, nearly a metre long, a load of Durban Dancing and Banded Cleaner Shrimp, and a Sponge Crab, which was really bizarre. It had a sponge coral growing on its back in a perfect rectangle, and looked like a rock until light was shone on it, and it started scuttling away. Also we stopped on the bottom and turned our lights off, and waved our arms about, to see the Bioluminescence. It was really cool, but nowhere near as good as back on Koh Chang, probably because it's nearly a full moon, and there was a fair amount of light underwater. Upon our return about 10 o'clock, I went home to change and ended up collapsing in my bed and sleeping until 9 this morning. Fail.