Hey Carla! I’m glad your back 🙂 Hope you’ll keep following along!

I think the same thing about the AOW course, that is so much fun! I did the same: deep diving, navigation, night diving and wreck

I’m sure it will! It takes a LOT of practice and experience to truly feel comfortable doing something so unnatural to the human body. Don’t give up 🙂

When I first go under on each dive, I still have that small mental lapse of “GO UP! I can’t breathe underwater!”. One day, I hope this will pass also!

Hey Richard! Good question. In my opinion, if you have the time, why rush? You might even want to use the AOW course as an excuse to do another holiday somewhere new next summer! I personally prefer when there is some time between the courses, but plenty of people do them one after another. Hope that helps…

My wife and I are novices, about to complete our OW on a referral, doing the 4 OW dives out in the Maldives. We were planning to do another two or three more days diving there after qualifying, but the instructor just suggested we consider going straight onto AOW. After reading your description of the course, this is tempting. But is it wise to go straight from OW to AOW, or is it perhaps better to be more relaxed and take at least a few non-course dives before going on to AOW? This perhaps would build confidence and be safer? Also I’m not sure if I want to spend the majority of our holiday doing courses, but then again, your desctiption does sound exciting…! I’d be grateful for any thoughts.

Hi Lily! Thank you so much for this sweet comment. I really appreciate it!

So, both Koh Tao and Gili are great options for the AOW. Koh Tao is great for courses because there are always lots of people doing them and I think it’s nice to meet other people on your travels, plus there are great dive sites like Chumphon with the (rare) chance of seeing whale sharks! However considering you are going to see them anyway and it seems more convenient travel wise, I might go for Gili with my recommendation. The water is consistently more clear (though currents can sometimes be strong) and there are always, always turtles around. I highly recommend my school there, Big Bubble. In fact if you go sometime soon I can recommend a great Danish instructor 🙂 Email me if you want more info! And best of luck!

There was something I was hoping to ask you, I am considering taking my advanced open water – and am thinking about either doing it on Koh Tao or on the Gilis. I did my open water on Gili Air (quite a few years ago) and really liked it there, I had a great father-like dive instructor who held my hand when needed… I’ve only ever snorkeled on Koh Tao, but was pretty impressed with what I saw. I’m not super confident with the whole diving thing, but I love, love, love seeing the underwater world (the reason I want to take my advance open water is because I want to dive with whale sharks in Indonesia and they only allow minimum advanced open water divers to do that).
Both locations could be equally convenient for me as I live in Bangkok and could “just” pop down to Koh Tao, or if I choose the Gilis I can stop by Bali on my way out east in Indonesia (Bali might be the cheapest place to fly to from Bkk anyway).

Okay – I’ll stop rambling; really I just wanted to your expert opinion: Koh Tao or the Gilis for an advanced open water? I like great visibility and a calm, patient dive instructor 🙂

Thanks so much in advance Alexandra – and congrats on your new Danish boyfriend (I’m Danish myself too) 🙂