Khao Lak, dive course

Back in Phuket Airport, Thailand, feels like home to me now. This is in fact the place I have been to the most times over the last half year, 5 times.
It had been two months since I was back in Thailand last time, and I totally forgot how it is to negotiate about every single thing you do or want to buy. Getting a taxi for where I was going was of course impossible, except getting one of these pirate taxis... Oh well, the sweet sour price to pay as a tourist here

Once again I was heading up to Khao Lak, a small city 1 hour North of Phuket airport. Not much happens there, except a lot of dive shops cater for the Similian Islands and a few other dive spots on the West Coast of Thailand.
I was going to take a course at Wicked Diving, the company I went diving with late last year. I thought the guys there were great and had requested to be trained by some of the instructors I had met there. When I came to the dive shop to register and take care of some formalities, I was greeted by the people who I knew with hugs and big smiles. That was kind of nice feeling, it is not often I see people I know and are actually happy to see me, haha
Found a small hostel just on the other side of the street, reasonable price, 800B per night, around $12. The picture looked pretty good, but those small huts were not priced at 800B per night, what I got was an old garage kind of room. The place used to be a small shopping plaza, but the tsunami in 2005 first of all destroyed most of the city, but also business has been much slower since then.
It wasn't really a garage, but a former small shop of something that had been converted into hostel rooms.
Sweaty and tired from traveling, I wanted to take a shower. To my surprise though, there was no hot water. A neat little detail was the dual usage of the shower head, it could also be used to was the private parts when sitting on the toilet, haha

In the evening I went to a restaurant that I had been to with the other guys last time we were here. We had talked with the chef afterward and so I went back to see if she was still working there.

The waitress that greeted me was kind of funny, not a busy day so we came to talk. I was asking her if she could recognize where people were from, by their language. Yes, she said, and told me that I was from Denmark - in Danish! Mae had been working in Bangkok in a hotel owned by a Danish couple who taught her a lot of Danish.

She even went to Denmark a couple of times with them. I asked her if Oui was still the chef, she was and she came out to say hello. It took her a few seconds to remember, but eventually did. Turned out it was her birthday and I just got invited to join them and their friends at a bar down the street that their friends owned. Couldn't stay and part for too long, had some course material to read and prepare for tomorrows diving course

Next morning I got to meet Leigh, a young Australian guy from Perth who was going to take the course as well. We spent half of the day doing some theory and the rest in the pool doing some basic exercises. Not that exciting, so the important stuff must be coming the next morning. Agreed to go out with Leigh and some other guys, but didn't make it that far, fell asleep on the bed and woke up at 3 in the night.

Early in the morning we met at the beach for some exercises in the water. A lot of people were watching from shore, I guess it looked kind of interesting, haha. After 4 hours it was back to the class room for the written exam, which we both passed quite easily. That's when I discovered how sunburned I had gotten from laying on the surface for too long in the morning.
We were supposed to get up early next morning again for a dive trip, but I thought that a few beers would not harm anyone. It wasn't until I returned to my room at 4.30, that I realized what time it was. I had to pack my stuff, check out and remember everything for the dive at 7.30!
Not quite sure how, but I managed to get up on time, pack everything and be ready at 7.30 for departure.
We took a long tail boat out to an artificial reef they had built after the tsunami, hoping it would absorb some of the energy of the water should that ever happen again.
The dive itself was nothing special, the visibility was kind of poor, but it served our purpose pretty good. Search and recovery was one of the topics and that was perfect with only 2-3 meters visibility. There were quite a lot of nudibranches though, but I kind of didn't have too much time to take pictures since these dives were not fun dives, but part of the course too. We went through a lot of scenarios, people panicking, needing some sort of rescue, both under and above the water. The other people on the boat played along and would have lots of issues all the time to test our newly learned skills.
I did all this diving with the worst hangover in a long time, it was so bad that I felt like throwing up all the time, but that would look very unprofessional. The instructor Dani noted that I had not been feeling too well, and asked if it was seasickness, haha. I had to confess that I was beer poisoning of the worst kind
We used everything we had learned and Dani had to admit to us in the end that we actually had made it through his rigorous Rescue Diver training.