And then there were three...we said a tearful (only kidding) goodbye to our American travel buddy (Mike) this morning - he's staying on in Koh Tao to do his advanced diving before going to the full moon party on Koh Pha-Ngan, and then onto Samui/North Thailand. We are pretty certain to meet up with him again at some point.

As per previous edit we've completed our advanced course - thanks James for the tip about doing it pretty much straight away. It does open up a whole new world for you...the deep dive meant we got down to 30m (c.100 feet for all you imperialists...) and saw literally hundreds more fish and a myriad of different colours. The navigation dive meant we could navigate (d'uh) with a compass underwater and then the multi-level section gave us the info on how to do dives of differing levels and for how long for to minimise nitrogen narcosis (which incidently we were told we would get a mild form of at 30m but neither of us did...)

The result of all this was that we were able to plan, navigate and execute our own dive with just the two of us whilst the instructor stayed on the boat. This we did starting at 20m beofre 25 mins or so at 12m. We even successfully navigated back to the pinnacle from the cave area and back to the boat!! It was really useful to do this and our instructor (Claes from Copenhagen - who incidentally was excellent) was really chuffed for us when we got back to the boat without getting lost. I've even got the hang of breathing (!) and we managed a 50 min dive - our longest yet. We even did a free descent to 20m and a free (not holding onto anything) 5m safety stop...of course this'll mean nothing to you non-divers but James'll know what I'm on about...

Last night we went to a superb Mexican and ate and drank as a kind of farewell meal. The girls went back early(ish) and myself and Mike stayed behind to watch the end of the basketball and have another beer. One of the best things about Mike is that although he is American he understands irony and he hates basketball!!!

We endured a nerve-wracking 2 hours or so on a catamoran this morning, I think the driver (captain/pilot/boatswain?) thought he was in some sort of powerboat race as we were buffeted all over the shop...to make matters worse we had to endure some godawful dirge with Chris Rock and Anthony Hopkins in it, some music by The Eagles, and Thai Karaoke...at least the air-con worked.

So, onto Ko Samui, both our ears are still coming to from the diving so we can't fly for a day or two but we are going to go north - up to Chiang Mai within the week as we've had our fill of diving for now...not alot else to report...Vanessa will be with us for a few more days before she herself goes onto Bangkok and Vietnam.