Value added Thailand

Increasing numbers of British divers are heading off to Thailand and Burma as an alternative to the Red Sea. Simon Rogerson finds out why. Photographs by Mark Strickland...

Photo: Mark Strickland Photo: Mark Strickland Photo: Mark Strickland Photo: Mark Strickland Photo: Mark Strickland

Occasionally I indulge in a ridiculous game: naming the best dives in the world. I know it’s tacky and silly, but it can be an amusing way to while away a long journey. What I have learned is that ‘best’ is not in itself a meaningful term when it comes to diving. All those ‘best diving’ books are great fun, but the tag is just a subjective joke. ‘Best value’ is a sight more relevant for today’s travelling diver. For diving, I define ‘value’ as the diversity and breadth of the experience, relative to the amount of cash the punter has to shell out. From our recent reader survey, we know that a typical DIVE reader spends about £2,300 a year on travel. In order to illustrate what standard of diving can be had for your money,

I have chosen £1,800 as a benchmark figure, because it allows for a second holiday to be taken in the same year. The best value coral reef or warm water itineraries I have come across in this bracket are probably the liveaboard trips that depart from Thailand and chug up to Burmese waters via the Similan and Surin Islands. To put the region’s diving to the test, I booked a week’s diving on the liveaboard MY Genesis 1, which operates out of Phuket. It is basic, with small cabins, and meals served outdoors on the deck. But the air-conditioning works well (in Thailand, this is crucial), the food is excellent and the diving well organised. Genesis 1 accommodates 12 divers, who are taxied to dives on a small dinghy in three groups of four. The process could be streamlined by having two dinghies, but it works well enough.

Phuket is one of the world’s major diving meccas. Hundreds of boats and businesses vie to take holidaymakers on local dives around the island and its satellites. There are a few local gems, but for the superior diving you really have to head across to the Similans, an archipelago of nine picturesque granite islands about 55 miles northwest of Phuket. My first dive on this trip was off the southeast section of an island called Koh Pabu, along a stretch of reef named East of Eden. Here, the reef was lined by long swathes of pristine staghorn coral. Now, I’ve seen lots of dead staghorn coral, but the real, living stuff is a world apart from the semi-collapsed skeletal husks I’m used to. Vibrant and surprisingly colourful, its tangled passageways provided a home for seething groups of small fish.

There’s evidence that divers have been feeding fish in the Similans. I don’t profess to be an expert on fish behaviour but when a giant moray zips out of its lair and lollops towards a group of divers with the eagerness of an Andrex puppy, methinks something is amiss. Such unnatural encounters do not detract from the sheer beauty of the place, the crowning glory of which is a 20m-high coral head with an exceptionally high concentration of soft corals and pink gorgonian fans. The ensemble is topped by table coral and patrolled by small grouper.

North of Similan is the Surin Marine National Park, where the underwater scenery begins to change. It doesn’t have the immediate scenic beauty of the Similans, although pink and gold sea fans still dominate the scenery. On the pinnacle dives of Koh Bon (Koh being Thai for ‘island’), I saw the pharaoh cuttlefish for which this region is renowned. Lucky divers can sometimes observe this creature’s demonstrative mating rituals, which can be just as ‘come hither’ as the nightclub encounters taking place back in Phuket. Another regular stop-off is Koh Tachai, where three reefs at different depths can
be visited on a single dive. Here, the scenery is dominated by house-sized granite boulders, ledges and swim-throughs inhabited by glassy sweepers.

The best-known dive site in this vicinity is Richelieu Rock, about seven miles east of the Mu Koh Surin Marine National Park. It’s a wall dive, surrounded by a series of submerged pinnacles where schooling bannerfish, snappers and barracuda are common. Few people pay much attention to the shoals, however, for Richelieu Rock is one of the world’s most famous whale shark sites. Thanks to some fantastically greedy restaurateurs in Taiwan and Hong Kong, whale shark populations in the Indian Ocean have plummeted over the past decade. It’s still possible to see them at Richelieu Rock, but appearances during the season are few and near-impossible to predict. Everyone keeps an eye on the blue, and hopes. I was not one of the lucky ones.

Moving north from the Surin islands, it is unusual to see two liveaboards at the same site. Only a few vessels have the necessary permits to venture into Burma’s Mergui Archipelago, and the Moken sea gypsies who populate the islands obviously see westerners as a huge novelty. As we passed a group of sea gypsies in a small outrigger, the children collapsed in paroxysms of laughter, although that may have been something to do with my sun hat. Mergui is a genuinely wild place, where white-bellied sea eagles and brahminy kites soar from rock faces, scanning the sea for prey. Here, nature has not been subjugated by people.

The diving is a complete change from the postcard prettiness of the Similans. Coral growth is sporadic, though granite walls regularly blasted by currents are likely to be cloaked with the brilliant yellow cup corals known as tubastraea. The most immediate difference here is the fall in visibility, caused by the discharge of the Irawaddy River and the run-off from Mergui’s own island rainforests. There’s a pay-off for divers here – we lose a bit of visibility, but the nutrients and energy brought by the run-off support an exotic and varied environment. The rocky ledges and crevices are bristling with large communities of hinge-beak shrimps and other creepy-crawlies, and there seems to be a scorpionfish lurking on every other rock, camouflaged against the pink granite. Oddities such as the harlequin ghost pipefish and frogfish can also be seen.

An increasingly productive dive in Burmese waters is Shark Cave, which consists of three large rocky outcrops and a deep canyon from which the dive gets its name. The water was a little milky here, but I could still enjoy the sight of some heavily pregnant grey reef sharks circling in the current of the open tunnel. This is a problematic site for photographers because the sharks can come quite close, making wide-angle an appealing prospect. However, there are also some excellent macro subjects, including beautiful harlequin shrimps, ghost pipefish and a red-maned seahorse.

The trip’s key dive is probably Black Rock, a 50m-wide outcrop famed for its shark populations. It is a sufficient distance from the mainland’s river mouths for the visibility to be as good as 30m, though rainfall and tide can conspire to create severely murky conditions. The deeper waters are patrolled by grey reef sharks and bull sharks, while a monstrous stingray can be seen pretty much anywhere. In common with Richelieu Rock, Black Rock acts as a magnet for large animals such as manta rays and whale sharks at certain times of the year when the plankton blooms.

I had a more modest goal. The area is famed for its docile zebra sharks (the gold-coloured sedentary sharks mistakenly referred to as ‘leopard sharks’ by many dive guides) and I wanted to find one that would tolerate my presence at close quarters. During the day, they typically snooze on sand flats, preserving their energy for hunting at dusk. They feed mostly on clams and crabs, and are not drawn to the baited longlines which have killed so many sharks off Thailand and Burma. I’ve come across them previously in the Red Sea, Sipadan and in Madagascar’s Nosy Bé archipelago, but always found them to be frustratingly skittish. Get to within 3m, and they’d be off.

Swimming around the wall, I spotted the tell-tale silhouette of a fat zebra shark lazing on the sea bed. Almost as soon as I saw the shark, I knew it would flee if it saw half-a-dozen divers barrelling down towards it. So, I edged closer to the reef and pointed excitedly at a commensal shrimp that was cowering in a crevice. As my group crowded expectantly around this diversion, I descended quickly to the sandy bottom and crept SAS-style towards the shark. It seemed quite unperturbed and held its position, mouth open to the current as cleaner wrasse attended to its flanks.

I was also treated to the sight of a mating octopus. The amorous cephalopods were hanging on to the side of a granite boulder, and didn’t seem to notice me, though I was only a metre away. The male’s body was blushing a deep burgundy with small white ridges, as he passed sperm into the female’s gill cavity through a modified tentacle. Still feeling guilty after the zebra shark episode, I made a point of drawing the other divers’ attention to the scene. No one seemed particularly impressed – they probably thought I was pointing at the rock.

Heading further west out to the Burma Banks, the visibility picked up, leaving us with favourable conditions for a shark dive. The banks are a series of fully submerged reefs which rise from 400m to within about 20m of the surface. Silvertip Bank is the easternmost of the four diveable banks, and it is here that divers can reliably find silvertip sharks. I descended along the anchor-line, keeping an eye on the dark shapes moving across the flat reef. Silvertips are large, heavy-set sharks, yet possess a streamlined elegance which sets them apart from the grey reef and nurse sharks which also frequent the banks.

Some operators feed the sharks scraps of fish to keep them close to the divers, which may account for the close passes the sharks made for the first 20 minutes of the dive. I found the sharks would come closer to me because I put more distance between myself and the group of divers. And, as with a lot of other sharks, they tend to curtail an approach at the point when the diver exhales. Controlled breathing is essential for good shark encounters. In a strange display, one of the sharks turned three times in a tight circle just in front of me. I didn’t detect any signs of aggression, so I slowed my breathing as much as was possible and settled down to enjoy the spectacle.

Cocos has its sharks, Lembeh has its muck diving and Sipadan has its wall, but on a busy trip such as this you can have a taste of everything, from the tiniest harlequin shrimp to a 10m whale shark. Probably the only thing the trip lacks is a good wreck dive. But that’s another list for another day…