Diving in Langkawi

So we had a 3-day holiday in the middle of the week last week for Deepavali, and what better way to spend it than getting our PADI Open Water qualifications! Jo and I, with some friends, visited a place called Langkawi - an island off the west coast of Malaysia, right up near the border with Thailand. It was a pretty cool place (not quite Phi Phi but close!) with a really long stretch of beach and loads of little clothes and trinket shops behind it. We stayed in a place called 'Rumours', and to say it was basic is a bit of an understatement! Nevertheless, we weren't in Langkawi for the rooms, and soon enough we got to go out and do our first open water dives off an island called Palau Payar, about 45 minutes boat ride away. The water was quite clear - about 10m plus visibility in places - and there were loads of fish, although we still had to go through our skills like taking our masks off and replacing them, hovering in the water without paddling, among others. At one point someone was going through one of their tasks with a small school of curious, bright purple parrot fish swimming around their head! Our instructor got attacked by a fish whilst trying to remove some algae from a sign, and I came very close to sitting on a lion fish during my mask clearing test! We also saw a Moray eel, some pretty big (and ugly) groupers and a huge barracuda, as well as loads of small clown fish (a.k.a Nemo fish!) hiding in their anemones. Fortunately there were no injuries and everyone came through it without any problems. To add to it all, apparently Langkawi isn't even the best place for diving! The east coast and Thailand is where it's at, so the Christmas holidays may take us to one of those two places, and a waterproof housing for my camera has shot to the top of my wish list.
  To no great surprise, I've put some photos on flickr. Hope everyone is well and is enjoying life, whatever they're doing.