The weirdest thing here on Koh Tao is that time doesn’t really seem to exist for us. Sure, days pass, weekends come and go, a month slips by without anyone really noticing, but actual days, weeks and dates are supremely unimportant here. Time seems to blur into one continuous mass of activity, which for the majority of people on this island mainly consist of three things: diving, sleeping or drinking. The outside world with boring things like news only of bombings, financial collapses and elections doesn’t seem to matter at all here. As someone put it to me the other day, news is unimportant because even if the world itself was ending, where else would you rather be than here for it. So the actual process of trying to put what I’ve actually even been doing into some kind of linear order is proving impossibly hard, other than a for a few moments of time that stand out in my mind as distinct from the general state of being. This is also complicated by the fact it’s taken me nearly three weeks to find the time to write this, so consuming is just being here, everything just blurs into everything else.

So first and most important are the people I’ve met, most of who I now can’t remember how or when I actually met them for the first time but now seem like old friends in less than a month. There’s Mike from California, a marine biologist also doing the IDC with me, blond haired Zoe from Australia, Steve who literally rode his bicycle here from England and approaching 50 might just be the oldest DMT on the island. There’s Luc and Helene, tall québécois, Dustin the German who’s the spitting image of Sebastian Vettel, Baz, aussie to the bone complete with made in Australia tattoo. Neil, with wild hair and penchant for tech diving, Aileen the new Yorker, another Zoe but this time from Holland and so many others I can’t even begin to list them. Just in the last few weeks I’ve made a dozen more solid friends from the staff and candidates from the Instructor development course but I’ll get to them in a bit.

A place like this could easily feel remote or isolating, but instead people like these guys and girls make every day enjoyable, ending each evening with a drink or two at the Fishbowl bar, watching the tide come in, and the world pass by. It’s the community feeling you get here, from people like these that makes the place special.  Everyone loves diving and so it doesn’t matter where you’re from or what your background is you’re all united by that common link. Nowhere was that more obvious than when a good section of the islands dive community turned up one night to watch a short cave diving movie, made by some of the tech guy’s here, that was being screened in a disused little cinema at the top of Sairee Village, and just for an evening the rivalry between the dive shops here, strong enough that it sometimes borders on outright dislike, is forgotten in appreciation of a watching a group of supremely skilled divers at the top of the sport, hobby and lifestyle that everyone here loves. The film’s up on Youtube so please drop over there and take a look.

For me it’s these small moments that stand out.The ‘suicide wing’ challenge at Goodtime Adventures, where people competed to eat as many of the most spicy chicken wings in existence as possible, that because the sauce contains pepper spray and cooking enough for the challenge involved it’s liberal use, ended up emptying the whole bar onto the beach coughing, spluttering and wiping streaming eyes and noses. Or when twenty of us descended on Moon Burger just as it was closing and convinced them to stay open just for us, all lined up on beanbags on the darkened beach. It’s watching the sunsets behind the clouds and mountains far away on the mainland, where the sinking sun turns distant mushroom shaped thunderheads a neon pink against a golden sky or laughing at the antics of the pack of dogs that call Ban’s their home and run a fine line between spoilt and stray; utterly mercenary in their affections they gravitate to anyone willing to slip a chunk of chicken under the table to them. It’s even when just you’re sitting on the roof of the dive boat and watching the island drift past at the speed of the slow chugging boat engines taking you around it, and all you can see is green jungle, white sea washed limestone and the odd little huddle of wooden bungalows climbing the islands sides like creeper vines. Just little moments that make you stop and realise what a privilege it is just to be here and not in some dull office back in the UK.

And perhaps nothing sums that up feeling better than the whale sharks. It was a Friday, I can remember that date for once, and to be honest the weather that day was pretty horrible. Thick greasy storm clouds oozing across the gulf towards us from the mainland, the nasty sort of drizzle that is cold and unpleasant even when it’s thirty degrees. The sea, a chopped up sort of grey with 3 foot rollers that made getting back on the ladders tantamount to playing chicken with the 60 tonne boat. But who really cares because that afternoon there was talk of whale sharks, and once your 5 metres down the only sign of the oncoming storm heading towards you is the white foam visible from below, billowing about the dark silhouette of the dive boat’s bow as it breaks through each wave and the occasional strobe flash of distant lightning. But beneath the waves it’s calm and clear and there is a weird sense of expectancy in the water like static electricity but maybe that’s just the lightning, but all the same people are looking up for a dark shapes against the surface, rather than down at the reef for the big brown groupers or giant inflated pufferfish and schools of black and white batfish or whatever else on a normal dive would grab the attention.

And sure enough about 20 minutes into the dive, there’s the ring of tank bangers across the reef and 30 odd divers instantly sit up in the water like a band of aquatic meerkats scanning the horizon and there one is. Grey, ghostlike, five metres long and barely moving, a dappled torpedo of 400 million years of hydrodynamic evolutionary perfection, looming out of the blue like a wandering shade.

And there is chaos. The storm means we’re the only boat here but there are probably still a couple of dozen divers in the water and for a the next few minutes all thoughts of buddy pairs and no decompression times or air gauges are forgotten as divers try to chase the shark in ragged pack, like the remora fish that are the shark’s constant companions, all trying to get the perfect picture, or try to grab just a few moments swimming alongside a giant of the deep, almost impossible considering that the shark can outpace all of us effortlessly with a single sweep of it’s tail. But this time people don’t need to chase it because it seems as curious about us as we are about it, and it stays with us for what seems an age, gliding into the masses of bubbles drifting up from the divers below, perhaps enjoying the tickling sensation of them on its belly like a dog sticking it’s head out of a window of a moving car. In fact my air runs out on me before the shark does, the minimum surfacing requirement of 50 bar seeming horribly over cautious right now. But a quick tank change and a brief surface interval when all we can do is talk about the giant fish below us, occasionally even visible from the boat when it surfaces with a splash of dark fins and pale speckled body, and I’m back in the water just in time to spend a minute or so with it before it turns and gives a lazy flick of it’s tail and disappears for good. I would have been happy enough there but ten minutes later another one drifts over the pinnacle, smaller than the last but still a good three metres from blunt tip to tail. Shyer than the other it stays only for a few minutes, but just as we begin to haul ourselves up the heaving ladders at the end of the dive it’s right there again, practically within touching distance, almost unreal in its physical immediacy. People pay thousands upon thousands of dollars to swim with whale sharks, for example in western Australia they they use spotter planes to direct fast boats to the things for those willing to pay for the privilege, and here’s one just hanging out at the back of the boat.

It was amazing, awe inspiring, almost a little bit spiritual. A chance to few people get to have in their lives, and if they do have to pay the ends of the earth for. And yet here for the instructors and staff and all the people working here it was just another day at the office. Why would I want to be anywhere else, because when I complete my IDC this is going to be my office too.

And believe me, that beats being back in England any day of the week.

Incidentally, since I wrote this but haven’t had a chance to post it, I’ve not only passed my instructor exams and am now a certified PADI Open Water Instructor but have also been offered a place on an expedition to Indonesia in a few weeks! I’ll tell you all about next time. It won’t be three weeks till the next post I promise… or at least I hope.