big trouble in little thailand

april 12th

while on koh chang, we were really excited to go scuba diving. ryan had just gotten his license in monterey. caryn had gotten her license a few months back in dahab. i had gotten my advanced license as well. we were all itching to dive. on our last day on the island, we had scheduled two dives. afetr getting up all bright and early, we wandered down to the boat we needed to take.

it was low-tide at this point and the boat was floating several feet below the pier. now, if we had been in america, there would have been some nice solid stairs that you could climb down to the boat or at least some kind of railing to hold on to. not here. we were expected to just jump down onto the boat. it was only like 3 or 4 feet, so it didnt seem like it would be all that big a deal and caryn was one of the first passengers to make the jump. none of us are exactly sure what happened next. one second caryn was jumping swiftly towards the boat, and the next second she was hanging off the side. crap. she was already partially underwater, and there was no way for her to pull herself up so the staff just told her to drop the rest of the way in and swim around to the back of the boat where she could get in.

poor caryn. the tumble really looked like it must have hurt. but the worst part seemed to be that she had to actually be in the water by the pier. the water there is shallow and utterly disgusting. all of the trash, scraps, toilets, *everything* from the pier just empties out into the water. well.. at least we thought that was the worst part until she got out of the water… when we saw that her arm was gushing blood. i guess the pier is completely covered w/ clams, all of them razor sharp, and caryn had ended up dragging her arm against them on her way down. her arm was cut up to all hell, all the way down from her shoulder to her hand. the cuts looked really bad. the staff rushed around to put iodine on them. it was obvious that there would not be diving for caryn. in fact, it was obvious that a hospital visit was in her future.

i immediately decided to get off the boat and go w/ caryn, but she insisted that i stay and actually go diving. i was hesitant, but in the end agreed. the dive itself was pretty cool. nothing too crazy. we never got below 30 feet, but we still saw some cool fish. we also saw a yellow ray w/ blue spots which was pretty dope. my camera kept geting fogged, so i didnt get too many good photos though.

the mouth of a giant clam

weird blue sea anemone

even though caryn had said that it was just some cuts and shouldnt be a big deal, i had still been worrying about her all day. when the dive ended, i was very anxious to find out what happened. we found caryn in the internet cafe all bandaged up. after the nurse had cleaned up her cuts, it turned out that they were bad enough to get stitches. 3 separate cuts got 12 stitches total. to someone like me, who has never gotten stitches *ever*, this seems like a crazy hardcore injury, but caryn is insisting it’s not too bad and is looking forward to getting her stitches out in a week.

ouch!

*v