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Pizza! Pizza! Pizza!
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This is our last evening after two beautiful weeks on Koh Tao. This island is known for scuba diving, although most local dive sites are OK but not great, and are sometimes a bit crowded. However the island is easy to reach and part of a well developed backpackers circuit, and many of the foreigners who park here take up scuba diving, often going on to become diving instructors. So the island is famous not so much for its diving as for its dive training. There are something like 45 separate dive operators on Koh Tao.
Like so many others, we too decided to further our diving knowledge, in our case by becoming rescue divers. We now have all the prerequisites to start a couse to become dive masters - the entry level for dive professionals.
The course (actually two courses) consists of one full day of first aid and then three days of classroom study in the morning and open water exercises in the afternoon. We both passed, although we did forget a "novice" diver on the bottom while rescuing her injured buddy in one scenario. We had checked with her, and when she signalled she was OK it never occurred to us that she would not follow us to the surface. The instructor reminded us that we never take things for granted with beginners.
We practiced underwater searches, underwater rescues, techniques for approaching panicked divers, surface mouth-to-mouth breathing, and many other skills, even one person carrying an unconscious diver up a boat ladder. Several times after we had hauled ourselves out of the water and removed our gear the instructor would spring a surprise scenario on us and we would be rushing back into our gear and back into the water. We were pretty tired by the end of the course.
During one of our rescues, the victim, a young German woman (herself studying to become a dive master), was shouting pizza, pizza pizza with panicked eyes and a wide smile. Our instructor later told us that this had been the standard call for help during training until a few years so that bystanders would not mistake training for an actual emergency. The protocol was changed after a woman started screaming pizza, pizza, as she had been taught, during a real emergency.
Tomorrow we move on to Bangkok for a few days before heading back south and further west to the island of Phuket on the Andaman Coast.
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