Thailand is gentle, lush, steamy and full of colour. The people are incredably warm and friendly. The beer is cheap and the food is fresh and delicious. It's paradise here and I am lucky to say that I am having a wonderful new experience every day.
After a day of acclimatising to the heat and new smells, I enrolled on my Open Water diving course. An intensive four-days of classroom and practical skills testing - I had to concentrate very hard in some parts of the teaching and had to overcome a fair bit of anxiety to get there - but boy oh boy was it worth it!
We were a small group of five. Jann, our French dive master led me and three others through the first few days of the course, but it was on our final day at the dive site called 'Chumphon Pinnacle' to the north-west of the island of Koh Tao, are that we came across this beauty:
Everyone on our boat leapt into the water to swim with this magnificent creature. Other dive masters told me that day, they had taken over 700-dives before they had even set eyes close to a Whale shark as such is their rarity. We had landed this experience with one on our third dive and most fortunately, shared our diving with someone with a camera:
Of all the creatures in the sea, one of the most majestic and mysterious is the whale shark. It's the biggest shark there is, reaching 30-feet or more in length and weighing in at about 10-tons. Ours was a juvenile at about 15-feet. Nevertheless, it's size was still awesome and it spent a good half an hour, slowly circling our boat and enjoying (apparently) the sensation that the bubbles we were creating gave off on it's giant belly.
A few dedicated scientists are currently trying to piece together these missing chapters, yet some of the most basic questions remain unanswered.
Whale sharks are highly mobile animals, capable of swimming thousands of miles but it is yet to be seen whether whale sharks are truly migratory?
Migratory animals move between particular areas on regular seasonal or annual schedules, but whale sharks appear to perform simple movements within more defined home ranges - or larger, seemingly random movements. Also, no one has ever witnessed whale shark courtship, mating, or birth. It is known from the study of a single female that whale sharks are ovoviviparous, that is, they have eggs which develop within the female - but give birth to live young.
Their skin is marked with a beautiful checkerboard of spots and stripes which function as camouflage by breaking up the outline of the body and mimicking the dappling of light at depth. The whale shark is in the order Orectolobiformes (carpet sharks) and is the only species in the family Rhincodontidae. Although it shares some features with other carpet sharks including the nurse shark and the zebra shark, it does not have any close relatives. There are only two other large filter feeding sharks; the basking shark and megamouth shark, but they are not closely related. 
Whale sharks are incredibly cryptic animals. What is known of their behaviour comes from observations of a tiny portion of their life where they are shallow enough and close enough to shore for people to see, or from data gathered by tags on a very few individuals. Thankfully though, the hunting of whale sharks is now banned in most countries.
Swimming at depth under water is an extraordinary experience. A whole other world of light, shade and splendor. There are fish that look like rocks, rocks that look like fish, coral masses the size of a house and of colours I could never have imagined. After overcoming my fears, I soon found that once totally immersed I could enjoy the sights and wonder that was there. I hope to continue now to my Advanced Open Water training - where I will be able to reach 30-metres underwater and do some wreck diving, night diving and also enrol on a fish identification course; but I've got to mend myself first. I was having great difficulty trying to equalise my ear pressure under water, then clearing them at all onshore - a swift visit to the medical centre on the island told me that my middle ears were damaged so I'm keeping out of the water for a week and concentrating on yoga classes instead.
Filefish!
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