Sting Rays and Exploding Lungs!

After the excesses that came with spending a week with the lads on Koh Samui we made our way over to the tiny island of Koh Tao to have our first ever go at scuba diving!

We decided that instead of just going on a fun dive we'd go all the way and complete our open water certification course - making us fully fledged divers.

After a few classroom based sessions on how your lungs can explode we put all the gear on and were thrown in the deep end (pardon the pun!!). Kneeling on the sea bed we had to practice taking our masks off and had our air tanks switched off to check we wouldn't panic! I found it quite scary which was a bit stupid really as we were just kneeling down in quite shallow sea - if I stood up I could breathe normally!

We had to sit an exam before we were actually allowed to dive properly - felt very random to be sitting an exam wearing my bikini (before we get any random e-mails about Adam wearing a bikini this is Ellie writing!)!. Got our marks back the next day and I got 2% more than Ad - wish we'd had some kind of bet on it now!

Diving is amazing - it's so surreal to sit at the bottom of the sea, 18metres below the surface, watching sting rays and baracuda swim past. We are both completely hooked and can't wait to go diving again.

In fact, we got so enthused that we headed off to the nearest Scuba shop and bought masks, snorkels and fins. Seemed like a good idea at the time but not quite sure how we're going to get them round the world!!