Travel Happy

If you want to learn to scuba dive when you visit Thailand, you should drop an email to my friends Ayesha and Wilco. They’re two extremely experienced instructors (one British, one Dutch) based on Koh Tao who will ensure you have a fantastic time entering the underwater world.

When I was working my way up to becoming a PADI scuba diving instructor four years ago on the island of Koh Tao here in Thailand, I made a lot of good friends. There’s something about diving that bonds people together strongly anyway, and those who pursue it professionally by going on to do their Divemaster and then Instructor courses get to share a lot of hard work, learning and fun together.

Two of my best friends from those Divemaster and Instructor courses are Ayesha and Wilco, a British-Dutch couple who have been teaching people to dive for the last four years in Thailand, Honduras, Egypt and the Maldives. Between them, they have certified hundreds of divers and having travelled the world working as scuba instructors, they’ve now returned to Koh Tao. They’ve had such a remarkable journey that Ayesha’s just been interviewed in the UK newspaper of her old hometown back in England. Follow the link to read the full interview – it’s inspiring stuff if you’ve ever dreamed of jacking it all in and going off travelling around the world. Wilco has been featured in a Dutch newspaper too – follow the link to see a scan of the article, although you’ll need to be able to read Dutch.

Ayesha And Wilco Newspaper Story

Ayesha and Wilco featured in UK newspaper

Koh Tao is a very popular place to learn to dive, but the amount of dive schools can be overwhelming and you won’t usually meet your instructor until you turn up to the dive shop. You might also be taught in a group of up to eight people. Ayesha and Wilco prefer to teach in small groups (maximum of four), and you can have private tuition too if you like. They have set up their own website LearnToDiveOnKohTao.com where they give you the full info on how the diving course works, what accommodation you can get and where you’ll be located on the island – plus also the location of all the best bars and restaurants! They’ll also organise a pickup from the pier as soon as you arrive on Koh Tao so there’s no hassle dealing with touts and taxi drivers. You can email them about any questions you have too before you get there. You can also look them up on CouchSurfing.com and on Facebook too. There’s also a Dutch version of their site LerenDuikenOpKohTao.com/

Ayesha and Wilco’s other big passion, besides teaching scuba, is technical diving – exploring the shipwrecks in the Gulf of Thailand that are located up to 80 metres below the surface. Technical diving is obviously far more complicated and dangerous than recreational diving, and requires intensive training – if you’re already a diver and interested in taking on the next challenge, or you want to dive one of Thailand’s many deep shipwrecks, check out their site ThailandTechnicalDiving.com Ayesha wrote about diving on the lost WWII submarine USS Lagarto for my other site Divehappy.com as well as trip reports about diving Coron in the Philippines and Palau Weh in Indonesia.