Travel Story «Swimming with the fishes....»

Thailand | 0 Comments 20 March 2006 - Last Update 20 March 2006

I am pleased to announce that Lorna and mysef (Emily) are alive and well and have survived the shark escapade unscathed.
We rose at 6am to meet our snorkelling guides and a few other randomers (whose names we did not catch given the early hour of our meeting and our inability to utter more than grunts) and headed down to the beach and our destination Shark Point where the snorkelling would begin.
When I first head about this trip I thought ( in my naivety) that we would be looking down at the sharks from a lovely boat (I let my imagination run wild and pictured a yacht, well a girl can dream...) and the notion of entering shark infested waters had not occured to me. Lorna (who says i am a fool) apparently knew exactly what the trip would entail and was still eager to do it. With the cliff jumping adventure under my belt I felt I could take on new challenges, of which endangering my life has become a new one (just kidding mum - I am hyping it up for the readers lest they become bored with us and our tales) and that is exactly how I found myself in the water with sharks. Thank God I had Lorna.
The group was divided in two and lucky for us OUR guide had the under water video camera - this meant that not only were we looking... (well dishevelled is a word that springs to mind) - not opur best shall I say, I was beginning to feel there was a high probability I was going to be caught crying on camera.
Luckily for us, the sharks had no interest in eating us so the whole experience turned out to be a pleasant one. Well, amazing actually. We saw loads of sharks approximately 1.5 meters in length (albeit they were small ones but hey a shark is shark) and more amazing fish - even ones like Nemo from Finding Nemo (Clown Fish Grainne informs me is their correct name) which I found almost as exciting as the sharks themselves. We also saw lepoard print fish ( some one should tell her that is sooo last season - - get a new look) and a school of fish that was so long Lorna thought there was a pedestrian crossing in the sea that we were not aware of - the line of fish literally swam past us for a full two minutes with no visible end in sight.
Thankfully, I did not see (and was not told about until we had left the water) the snake fish or eels that were present when we first jumped in - despite having done a 180 on the whole snorkelling experience (in that I now love it and want my own snorkel, mask and flippers) I still hate eels and thank God I did not see them that day.
Tomorrow we leave the island to head to its larger neightbour Phuket and then on to Cambodia.
Hope you are all well! Emily