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i can’t remember exactly where our friends A&G went for their honeymoon, but i do know that it was a tropical island where they planned to snorkel and swim in the clear blue ocean and enjoy the sunshine on white sand beaches. as it turns out, they had maybe one day of sunshine their whole honeymoon? (A&G, feel free to correct my hazy details…) A&G got married one year ahead of us to the day (first saturday in june – the 4th for them, the 3rd for us). june is the most popular month of the year for weddings in the u.s. and happens to coincide with the rainy monsoon season in most of the tropical world, which means i imagine that A&G’s rainy honeymoon in their tropical paradise was not unusual and is probably the story for lots o’ newlyweds.

being a one-year anniversary treat, our trip to thailand fell on the may/june cusp. our friends jordan & frannie who lived in bangkok for 6 years prior to moving to kampala cautioned that we chose the exact wrong time to visit thailand. june is hot in the north and rainy in the south. we couldn’t do anything about our timing since we’d already bought the tickets, but we knew that like a&g rain couldn’t ruin the trip, because rain or no we were going to be on a tropical island in the middle of the gulf of thailand.

some of the more popular thai beach destinations – koh chang, phuket, krabi, phi phi – are no-nos in may/june and are definitely not recommended for scuba diving because of the murky waters and rough seas that time of year. that was okay with us since the more popular the place, the more tourists. we did some looking around in lonely planet and on the internet and found what seemed to be the ideal island in the gulf of thailand. when frannie independently recommended the same place, i knew it was a go. that’s how we ended up learning to scuba dive at nangyuan island.

we took a multi-island 4-hour ferry from surat thani to koh samui (formerly unknown tropical paradise that has since been overtaken by tourism; the setting for the beach) to koh pha-ngan (site of raucous full-moon beach parties) to koh tao (the least touristy of the trio but still not a refuge from the throngs). from koh tao it’s a 10-minute long-tail boat taxi ride to nangyuan.

nangyuan is an island unto itself. where the other islands have large resorts, night clubs, and hordes of 20somethings ready to party, nangyuan has none of that. nangyuan is a small tripartite island with each of its three parts connected by sandbars that are overtaken by the high tide each night. there is only one place to stay on the entire island – nangyuan island dive resort, and only one dive center – koh nangyuan divers (managed by easy divers). that’s where we stayed and that’s where we dove. go figure.

the resort and dive center have a sweet deal where if you’re doing an open-water diving course (3 days) you have 4 nights free accommodation in one of the divers bungalows plus free breakfast. if you just want to dive and do 2 dives in a day you get the bungalow discounted for 400 baht ($12) per night. the bungalows are far from posh – definitely more “utilitarian” – but they are clean and functional, and they have fantastic views (ocean, bay, boats, islands). no reception for the tvs in the rooms, but the resort has a supply of 100+ dvds that you can borrow for free to use on the dvd players provided in the bungalows. in our four nights we watched hotel rwanda, sahara, the forty-year-old virgin, and (i can’t remember).

i was really impressed by the design of the resort. pre-tsunami phuket is an example of all that can go wrong with islands and tourism in thailand. nangyuan could have easily been likewise marred, but it wasn’t. our bungalow is one of many bungalows on the hillside, but from the ocean you don’t have a clue that an extensive network of bungalows crawls up the hill thru the thick trees. all you see is a hill and trees. we even knew where our bungalow was and all we could find was a gap in the tree coverage that could’ve maybe been the opening off our porch.

during the day boatloads of tourists flock to nangyuan, mainly asians and europeans on package tours (although we did see a couple with him wearing a doublewide jersey and her wearing a centex vc jersey), so the island isn’t an undiscovered sanctuary in the middle of the ocean (we actually saw posters of nangyuan island all over thailand). but if you’re diving you don’t notice them really because you’re out all morning diving then by the time you’ve recuperated from your dive in the afternoon they’re all loading back onto the boat to go to wherever next. they leave and the island is left with a handful of divers and the staff – non-guests are restricted from landing at the pier after 6pm – and no one else.

nangyuan truly was the island paradise we were hoping for. it’s coral beaches and huge rock formations were unexpected and dramatic. the one tropical rainstorm we had caught us during our 10-minute walk to dinner (the dive bungalows are a l-o-n-g way from the restaurant) and sufficiently drenched us but it was expected and fun. and it turned out to be the perfect place to learn to open-water scuba dive.