Surin Islands  

The Surin Islands archipelago offers a excellent snorkeling and scuba diving environment. If you are out for scuba diving book a live aboard tour in Phuket. The Surin Islands are somehow similar to Similan Islands Thailand are a prime area for scuba diving. If you are interested on a scuba diving tour go to a bigger travel agent in Phuket and book a Surin Island diving tour.

If you go on your own, go to the Surin Islands pier - Surin Islands and stay in the bungalows - very basic - you can only snorkel. The Surin Island park headquarter at the islands has snorkeling gear for rent but no scuba gear. If you want a scuba dive trip contact one of the local dive operators.

The most interesting scuba diving site is around Richelieu rock. This site on Surin Islands is one of the top diving sites on this planet.

You can also hire a long tail boat at Surin Islands headquarter and move around. At the Surin Islands park headquarter and restaurant and bathrooms are available, also for campers.

Tsunami Disaster on Surin Island:

Scuba divers clung to rocks as the sea turned. Adrian Kaye, 29, a British scuba diving instructor in the Surin Islands off the coast of Thailand, helped a group of 14 divers hang on to rocks under the sea as the tsunami passed over their heads at a dive at Richelieu Rock off the Surin Islands in the Andaman Sea.

"It was the scariest thing I have ever experienced. My life flashed before my eyes. We had been under the water for a while and the conditions were perfect when the fish went crazy. They must have sensed it was coming and were swimming in all directions. Then it all went dark suddenly and that's when it hit us. The sea turned into a washing machine. We were being thrown around and it was pitch black. I didn't know what was happening. I just knew that we had to grab on to some rocks or the group were going to be swept away.  "People's hands were getting cut and they were slipping off the rocks so the only thing I could think of was to hold on to each other, which we did, and we survived. We were trying to cling on to the rocks but we got torn off them and smashed against other rocks.

We were being banged up towards the surface, which is very dangerous while you are diving. "I tried to rock-climb down to find some of the others. I found Naomi, who is deaf, and the guy who was paralysed from the waist down. We tried to climb together but we couldn't. So we just tried to cling to each other. Eventually we managed to get to the surface and get to the boat. They all got on the boat, headed to shore and just sat it out in the ocean overnight because they were worried about aftershocks."

Sea gypsies at Surin Archipelago

Thai "Sea gypsies" or Moken, on the Myanmar side in the Mergui Archipelago their name is Salone, living on Surin Island have developed extraordinarily acute underwater vision, research has revealed.

Ethnic Moken children were found to be able to see twice as well underwater as the children of European tourists, who were given similar tests at three coral island resorts nearby.

A team of biologists and opthamologists from Sweden's Lund University compared groups of youngsters, aged between seven and 14, to learn how the Moken youngsters can spot tiny shells, clams and sea cucumbers four metres beneath the surface of the crystal-clear Andaman Sea without resorting to goggles.

Normally, human eyesight becomes blurry under water because the eye is structured to see through air. But the Moken nomads, who tie stones to their waists so they submerge long enough to forage for seafood, can constrict their pupils to pin-prick size and spot pearls measuring only 1.5mm in diameter. They also squint in order to squeeze the lenses of their eyes, which temporarily thickens them and improves focus under water.

"They use the optics of the eye to the limits of what is humanly possible," said Anna Gislen, a Swedish biologist who led the study. At best, the sharpest-eyed children could distinguish objects that measured 3mm across.

Young smokelers volunteered to toss aside their masks and be tested at the tourist islands of Ko Samui, Ko Phi Phi and Ko Poda. None of them could constrict their pupils at will, as the Moken did routinely on every dive.

The Swedes speculated that the Moken sea gypsies must learn these skills, although after generations of scavenging the sea floor, "the ability to see well underwater could have become a genetic trait."

An estimated 5,000 Moken nomads roam the archipelago between western Thailand and Myanmar or Burma on houseboats, gathering edible sea slugs and fish while competing with crab-eating macaques for delicacies in tidal pools.

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