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Trip Report: Thailand & Myanmar 2002
I balked at the idea of going on this trip at first. It wasn't going to be logistically simple: Tulsa to Dallas to LAX to Hong Kong to Bangkok to Phuket...and then a 5-hour bus ride to Ranong where we'd catch our boat and sail into the country of Myanmar (formerly Burma) which would require a Burmese visitor visa, and who knows what else. It also wouldn't be cheap. For this kind of money I could pick one of many locations around the world. There were the good sides, of course. The seven days on the liveaboard would be shared with only nine divers, selected such that their experience level wouldn't limit us when we chose dive sites. This would be important given the intended itinerary through the Mergui Archipelago and the Burma Banks, an itinerary that was the real selling point of the trip. Mergui Archipelago is group of islands north of the popular Similan Islands and within the country of Myanmar. It boasts of hundreds of uninhabited islands scattered along the coast in the Andaman Sea. This area was largely unexplored except by local fishermen, and seldom if ever dived until the mid-1990s when Burmese authorities gave permission to let some Thai liveaboard dive boats visit the area. In the southwest part of the archipelago lies the Burma Banks. This was the first area in Myanmar that was dived by tourists and is the most well known. We ended up not going there on this trip.
We booked our liveaboard through Siam Dive & Sail in Phuket which is run by John Williams, coauthor of LonelyPlanet Diving & Snorkeling Thailand. John was helpful before the trip with matters related to the Burma/Mergui trip as well as other activities we hoped to plan. His services were also offered as dive guide while on the MV Faah Yai.
My travel to Thailand started Friday evening with a flight from Tulsa to LAX. I departed LAX at midnight on a flight to Hong Kong and then to Bangkok where I arrived at 10:45AM Sunday Morning. A short hop from Bangkok down to Phuket ended that section of my journey and by Sunday evening I was having dinner and drinks with John other members of our group. We unanimously agreed to let John (a 15-year resident of Phuket) order for us and we weren't sorry. The food was outstanding. The local beer, Singha, is a fairly strong and rich beer compared to other Asian-made beers. Most of the farongs (westerners) ordered Heineken which is available most places, but I preferred the local stuff. It seemed perfect with the spice and endlessly flavorful local foods.
The starting point for many men's troubles.
Phuket is a tourism oriented island on the south west coast of Thailand. I stayed in the town of Patong which is probably the most popular tourist stop on Phuket. It has a nice, if a little crowded, beach and plenty of hotels & resorts in most every budget range. It is also the center for nightlife on Phuket. Thailand is famous the world over for "entertainment for men" and this place didn't disprove that reputation. During the day it's just a nice beach by a small town with souvenir ships, restarants, and such but at sunset the bars open their doors and the girls arrive. Let me just say Dorthy, you'd best stay in Kansas.
I should point out that while the nightlife of Patong gets a lot of talk, this doesn't represent all of Phuket. There are many other locations on the island that are more family friendy and in fact, I saw many families in Patong. I'm pretty sure however, that the the ever-puritan Cleaver family from Idaho should probably find another beach.
Heading South
Monday morning four of us were picked up in a local version of a taxi which is more or less a pickup with a covered bed and benches to sit on. We headed down to Karon beach to meet up with Marina Divers for a two-tank trip to local sites. This was a choice dive boat. We were way less than capacity so there was lots of room. The boat had a nice indoor area with nice posh seating and a table in the center with fruit, water, coffee, tea and pastries for the duration of the trip. There was a nice sun deck upstairs with more posh seating. The diving on this trip was my first in Indo-Pacific waters so nearly everything was new. There were plenty of lionfish, bannerfish, and angels. The soft coral was beautiful but not too plentiful. This was a good precursor to the Burma trip to come.
Inside Marina Divers' Boat
As you may know, the MV Faah Yai is one of the only Burma-bound liveaboards that doesn't leave from Phuket. Instead, it leaves from Ranong, Thailand on the Thai/Burma boarder. The 5-hour van ride to Ranong started way too early on Tuesday morning when a shiny new Toyota van pulled up with a driver, his helper and John. Leaving from Ranong makes for a shorter boat ride to the dive destination, but the ride down can be long even in a fairly roomy, airconditioned van. If I did it again, I would consider departing from Phuket and enduring the longer boat ride to Burma or just planning to fly directly into Ranong.
Once in Ranong, we met the others and proceeded to the Thai Emmigration office where we officially left the country. The next stop was the boat where we would go through the process of getting through the Myanmar immigration. Overall the process was fairly efficient and we had time to go into the little port town and buy some Myanmar Rum (for about $1 a pint) and try some food being sold on the street...ok, only Ivan and I tried the food and we agreed that it wasn't worth crossing the Pacific for. Big Americans are sort of a spectacle here and some of our crowd fit the bill. It seemed to amuse the youngsters.
The MV Faah Yai
The MV Faah Yai is nice and has decent rooms, some with two twin beds, some with one twin one double bed. It's no Aggressor but all rooms are A/C and have private baths/showers. There was no evidence of fresh water limitations. The food was all Thai, all excellent (I love Thai food), and plentiful. There was unlimited chilled drinking water, softdrinks, fruit, nuts, etc available all the time. I ate mango, pineapple and cashews all day every day.
We did a minimum of 4 dives a day including the night dive and often got 5 in. The dive master, Alain, had a small case of Jekyl and Hyde. He gave the most thourough dive briefings I've ever had but bordered on worthless when leading dives. The 'boat boys' on the dive deck were super helpful and really on the ball with the pickup boat. The dive deck was small but workable for 10 divers. The camera table is way too small. If I were to dive Mergui/Burma Banks again, yes, I'd certainly consider using the MV Faah Yai again but I would also take a look at the boats that leave from Phuket.
The diving in Myanmar ranged from exceptional to "only" really good. I never came up from a dive wishing I had stayed on the boat but there were a few dives that had pretty poor visibility, maybe 10 feet, and one dive where we missed the submerged pinnacle and ended up fighting the current on a relatively boring dive site. Also, many dives came with currents that were quite strong and we were forced to stay on one side of an island or pinnacle for shelter. Other than the current itself, this isn't a problem since the sea life is so dense here you can enjoy a whole dive in a 100 square foot area.
We awoke the first morning at a dive site called Three Stooges, Three Islets, In Through the Out Door, and Shark Cave Island...depending on who you ask. The boat was stopped near the middle and largest of three big rocks sticking out of the water, the only one big enough to have trees and other greenery on it. The dive briefing was very, very thourough, describing how we would drop in on a vertical wall, descend to about 65' and proceed along to wall until we got to a 'canyon'. This canyon would cut back into the island and has nearly vertical sides that are maybe 25-30 feet apart on average. The canyon will end before it cuts the islet in half, but you will see a swimthrough that exits on the other side where you turn left onto a coral garden. The briefing was as accurate as it was thourough, including the description of the group of gray reef sharks that live here. As we entered the canyon, we stopped, settled in the sand close to the wall, and watched for a while as they circled from one end to the other. The biggest of these was probably 8 feet long and quite hefty in the body. What a spectacular way to begin the trip!
Banded Sea Snake
Bearded Scorpionfish
We did several dives at this site and only a few of them produced the sharks. The rest gave an opportunity to explore the rest of this outstanding dive site. As I dropped to the bottom on my first dive here, I immediately spotted a banded sea snake cruising the gravel & rock bottom. Bearded scorpionfish seemed to be as common as rocks (and in many cases were mistaken for them), crinoids, anemones and their resident anemonefish seem to be everywhere. Lionfish were around but not as common as in the Phuket area, other fishes, too numerous to list, were prolific.
Second only to the big predators, the highlight here were the mating cuttlefish. This was so "Discovery Channel"-like that it was almost surreal. Their tolerance for divers getting close was so surprising and conducive to photos that I couldn't resist:
Following is a brief description of the next few dive sites we stopped at. Any one of these sites could produce pages of descriptive text but there is simply too much to give in detail.
Fried Egg Nudibranch
Loughborough Pass -- Missed the submerged pinnacle and fought the current the whole dive. Got to see a fried egg nudibranch and some big sea stars. Certainly could have been a better dive but no complaints.
Rocky Island 1 & 2 -- These sites are blanketed with anemones working with clown, skunk and other anemonefish. Also got to see more cuttlefish. Once again, I came up stunned by the density of sea life.
Rocky Island 1 at night -- Basket stars, some as big as a laundry basket, were out in droves. Rabbitfish were, for some reason, pouring over the wall like a water fall, then back up. They were so thick it would leave me just short of vertigo ridden having nothing stationary to reference on the wall. At one point I spotted a fimbriated moray just in time to see him strike one of the rabbit fish. The fish was consumed almost frantically in the spot of my light. When the fish was gone, the eel was quickly on his way out of the beam of my light.
Magnificent Anemone with Skunk Anemonefish
Black Rock
Black Rock was quite simply, a rock in the middle of nowhere...reeaaallly in the middle of nowhere. It's a common location for mantas, in fact, there supposedly had been sightings here on every recent trip. Sadly they were gone, but the diving here was great nonetheless. In general you can expect currents here strong enough to keep you on one side of the rock. This makes for a dive site on the smallish side but as I mentioned above, this wasn't much of a limit. The density of life here is almost indescribable. Scorpionfish were common enough to make you wave your hand over a rock you plan to grab (to fight the current), giant morays, fimbriated morays, and white-eyed eels were seen on almost every dive, octopi, anemone crabs, porcelain crabs, hermit crabs...if I knew all the names I could go on for pages.
On one mid-day dive, I followed Alain in hopes of finding a zebra shark to photograph. "Following" is a bit of a misnomer, I actually chased him at nearly my top finning speed. I not only found my self at 130' with decompression obligations, I got there at a full sprint...not good. We didn't see a zebra shark but we did get a glimpse of a good sized shark (some said white tip...I'm not sure). And the prize sighting, a bowmouth guitarfish, was circling about 4' over a sand patch. I truly had no idea what I was watching, it was about 5-6 feet long, looked sort of like a ray but swam with its tail like a shark...odd animal. No photos unfortunately.
Did I mention that Alain's briefings were detailed?
Another prize sighting on this site was a McCosker's dwarf wrasse (aka "McCosker's Flasher"). I kept catching a glimps of what looked to be a beautiful little wrasse, about 2" long but it would dart from one area to another acting like it was trying to defend each spot when it got there. I never got a decent photo of it but you can see images here.
More Photos from Black Rock
Giant Moray
Anemone Crab
Octopus Closeup
Vericose Wart Slug
The next morning we awoke back at Three Stooges. We dove this site one more time in pursuit of sharks or ghost pipefish (depending on where we went). Doc, Mark and I decided to go for the big guys but they weren't home. The dive was nonetheless beautiful and we got to see a school of young squid in the open water. As we proceded around the corner of the island, the current brought us to a screeming halt. It was likely the strongest of the trip. Quite fun to hang in it on the corner, but otherwise pretty limiting.
Soft Coral and Crinoid at North Twin
North Twin Island and a Burmese Fishing Boat
Next was a site called "North Twin Island". We did three dives here on the "normal" sites and one night dive on a fairly unexplored site. The day dives produced some nice scenery, much like the Similan islands with huge rocky structures that sloped down to sand in the deep. I saw a blue triggerfish which was cool and got my most successfull "scenic" type shot of the soft coral.
Hermit Crab at Night
Walking Crinoids
When we came up from our afternoon dive, there was a storm blowing in so the captain moved the boat into the shelter of the island. The others assumed there would be no more diving and started enjoying the beer. Mark and I were still holding out for a night dive. When the time came, the captain said we could do a dive but it would have to be on the sheltered side of the island where no one from the boat had dived before. Alain warned us that there might be virtually nothing to see but the two of us found that hard to believe and began to gear up.
The island's shore near our entry dropped very steeply into the water giving us the impression that it would get fairly deep quickly. I donned my mask and rolled back from the Zodiac. CLANG! I was in two feet of water with a solid rock bottom! I came up just in time to see Mark do the same. We checked that nothing and no one was hurt and told the Zodiac crew to us to deeper water. As we were dragged through the water we watched the bottom until we began to see elkhorn coral in amazing quantities. We let go of the boat in only about 7 feet of water and began our dive. The pristine coral continued down a long sloping bottom until we got to about 35' where it began to turn to sand and other types of coral. Turning our lights back to the embankment, we realized we were beside a stand of elkhorn that extended as far as we could see. We swam along where the sand met the coral for hundreds of feet and the health of the coral never diminished. I turned to see Mark stopped in the sand with his light off. When I approached, he signaled to turn my light off. I watched the bioluminescence for a few minutes and then I realized why he wanted the lights off...lightning! With every strike from the storm above, a hundred foot radius of pristine coral was lit just long enough to print it permenently in our minds. We then could see that the reef was also made up of huge multi-level mushroom corals, table corals, maze corals and others I couldn't begin to identify. As memorable as this dive was, it's almost sad to realize that I may never see a field of coral this healthy again...even if I come back to this site.
Hermit Crab with Attached Anemones (at night)
This dive wasn't without its critters. We were constantly in the company of crabs of various types, lobsters, shrimps, crinoids (walking about, no less), and the odd nocturnal fish. Two different hermit crabs had small anemones attached to their shells for camouflage.
The last dive at this site was another search for zebra (leapard) sharks. I ventured off on my own, sort of chasing Alain and ended up finding nothing of interest. When I got back to the surface, I was greeted by Doc's stories of not one but two zebra sharks. Note to self: stick with Doc.
Next up was Stewart Island, which I described in my log book as a "close contact" dive and in the visibility column, I entered "no". This was a whale shark and manta heaven given the plankton in the water but you'd have to be riding the damn things to see them. We spent our time studying the small stuff and checking around for our buddies. Doc found a rock mover wrasse which was a very cool little guy to watch. You can click here to see a very bad photo of it. When we came up, we discovered that everyone had aborted the dive but us. Oh well.
High Rock at Dusk
Tigertail Seahorse at High Rock
Now High Rock was another story. This was an excellent site that, not unlike Black Rock, was more or less a rock in mid-water. This one, however, was big enough to have one lone tree growing on it. Alain, in his characteristically enthusiastic way, gave a super detailed description of where to look for sea horses. I went directly there, found the described "cave-like opening", then the "white coral that looks like a small tree", then promptly found a sea horse. As dive briefings go, that's hard to beat!
On the second dive, I'd been asked to locate the seahorse tree again. I went straight there only to find that the seahorse had been replaced by an ornate ghost pipefish! To top that, the others managed to find the seahorse not 30 feet from where it was. I took a myriad of photos of the pipefish, in fact I was so intriqued by the subject that I forgot to check if there were other divers waiting to see it. This is what gives photographers a bad reputation...shame on me. This site, like many of the others, has great things to watch all the way to the surface so we did our typical 20 minute safety stop before we surfaced from our last dive in Burma.
Ornate Ghost Pipefish at High Rock
Clown Anemonefish at High Rock
Ghost Pipefish
Compared to the excitement and anticipation of the trip here, the ride home was filled more with pensive thought and the business of cleaning and packing the gear. Our way back out of Myanmar and into Thailand was uneventful and we found ourselves back at the hotel in Ranong where we had all assembled before the trip. After a few beers and many good-byes, those of us bound for Phuket packed into the van and headed south. Without question, the trip had been a resounding success.
The following day, I did one last day trip out of Phuket to the Similan Islands. This requires a few hours of boat travel each way which is, in my opinion, a little much for two dives. The diving was nice but not quite the caliber of the diving in Burma. We went to sites called Shark Fin Reef and Elephant Head Rock. Both are made up of huge boulders and pinnacles with some coral but not a lot. The fish were the attraction, and they were indeed here. There were some cool wide-angle and fish portrait photo opportunities and I took advantage where I could.
Emperor Angelfish at Elephant Head
Coral Head and Starfish at Elephant Head
My last day and a half in Phuket was spent seeing the island, visiting the beaches, and picking up some souvenirs. I had plenty of other things I wanted to do here but they would have to wait for another trip. If (when) I come back I will definitely spend some time in Bangkok and maybe visit some other Thai Islands. I would also like to make it over to Ankor Wat which many have raved about.
There are nearly an unlimited number of amazing places and things to see in the world and I've been very lucky to get to see a few of them. It is strikingly ironic that I and the others with me would spend so much money and effort to visit one of the poorest regions of the world and see something that was put there by nature. I spent what likely exceeds a Burmese fisherman's annual salary to come and look at what is, in effect, his back yard. Yet in the end, I felt like I got a bargain. It's not for everyone no doubt, but I consider it money well spent to visit a place where you can watch feeding crinoids, stare into the eyes of several different scorpionfish, photograph the worlds most venomous snake, see three different species of eels, watch gray reef sharks circle their territory, see magnificent anemones with resident skunk anemonefish, watch dozens of species of reef fish going about their daily routing, and see cuttlefish making cuttlefish babies...all before lunch on the first day.
