Koh Tao and beyond

OH MY GOSH!!! What a great country Thailand is! We have done many amazing things already and still have two weeks to go. We spent 5 days on Ko Panyang at Bottle Beach. A small beach with only 5 hotels and not a lot of people. It was so peaceful waking up to the sound of waves and the sun shinning of the calm ocean. Only had one day of rain. We had a brutal trek that raised about 1500 feet then all the way back down to sea level in 3 km. But the beaches were worth it and it was a great time. We arrive in Koh Tao 5 days ago as well. The plan was to all go diving! I had gotten a sinus infection a couple days before we arrive, so I was not in the best of shape. Everyone I asked said that I couldn't go diving. You can imagine how disappointed I was (but tried not to show it). BUT... we ended up waiting a couple of days before we started the sessions so by the first day of diving I got the doctors ok to go and signed up for the class as well.
The first dive we went to about 10 feet. Our teacher was awsome and the whole class were such fast learners that we ended early and got to go for a dive. My sinus and ears were fine the whole time. Beautiful stuff in the tropical oceans. The second dive we went to 30 feet. I had a hard time with this one trying to equalize all the way down. Lucky for me we had a assisstant teacher with us, trying to earn his teaching license named Robo. He was my personal equalizer the whole trip. It took about 20 minutes to get to the bottom but I made it. We lost JP and the group so we went on our own little dive then went right back to the surface. The third dive was great as well, we went to 15/20 feet and practiced our emergency moves. We had to practice throwing away our resperators and how to retreive them. Everything went great. We were called team America, but due to the fact that we had a person from India and one from South Africa we changed our name to Team SAIUSA, which also made your ears pop when you said it so it worked on so many levels. Our fourth dive we went to 18 meters (60 feet)to an old ship wreck! It was great fun, I got to stay with the group this time and we had a photogropher there taking video of us. Lots of fish! The fifth dive was the final and fun dive only about 10 meters. We played around for the video, did an airband and acted all silly. We also practiced taking our mask all the way and putting back on in 20 feet of water. Lots of huge coral here and different kinds of fishes. The whole thing was just amazing and I higly recommend to anyone who wants to try it.
Now we are maybe going to head across the mainland to the other islands, but we will see due to their rainy season just beginning.