Diving at Hin Daeng and Hin Muang!
Well, I did the famous Hin Daeng (Red Rock) and Hin Muang (Purple Rock) dive sites today! These sites are over 3 hours away by boat and are said to be the best diving spots in the South Andaman Sea. They are pinacles of coral and rock out in the middle of the deep blue sea and consequently there are often a lot of big game fish, sharks, and occasionally manta rays and even whale sharks at this location. It is sometimes referred to as’Shark’s Point’.
The ratio of divers vs. instructors was perfect today – 7 divers and 6 dive masters! It doesn’t get much better than that! At the first site, Hin Duang, we went to a depth of 28 meters – that’s the deepest I’ve ever been ( about 95 feet). My partner was Tash, one of the instructors, from New Zealand. She was formerly a dive master and instructor in South Africa for 2 years so she has lots of experience. We saw a lot of cool stuff including 1 leopard shark, 1 manta shrimp, a school of barracuda, 7 lionfish, 2 giant moray eel, 2 scorpionfish, 1 trumpetfish, and 2 cube boxfish. The visibility was very good and the best thing was that we were the only boat of divers there so we really had the whole site to ourselves.
Hin Muang was good too – at a depth of 21 meters for this dive. We saw many black-tipped barracuda, batfish, butterflyfish, 1 Oriental sweetlip, lionfish, and many, many anemones. Overall the dives were great, but I have to say that I think I liked the diving at Ko Bida out of all the locations I went to. They say that the visibility at Ko Bida can often be poor, but when it’s good, it’s really good. Well I think I saw it on a really good day! But these sites I went to today are apparently more famous in the diving world. Well, I’m happy to have got some diving done in Thailand for sure, but it’s getting a bit costly at $50/day, so I think I will hold off on any more diving until I get to Malaysia.
That is, unless they go to the King Cruiser wreck in the next few days…that one sounds awfully tempting – a boat that sunk in 1997 and is very shallow at 12 meters so a great wreck to dive through. Well, we’ll see.
By the way, the dive shop I used was the Koh Lanta Diving Center in Ban Saladan. Their website is www.kolantadivingcenter.com. I would highly recommend this shop to anyone. I felt that their safety standards were very high, their equipment was good, they had a low diver to dive master ratio, and all the staff were really helpful and friendly.
Leaving the pier at Sala Dan
On the dive boat
This is a very large (real) gecko!!! (outside my bungalow)
Add comment April 9th, 2002