Last April we went to Thailand to attend the wedding of Jason and Shirley. As such things are not done on a wimp, we got the invitations about 10 months before the actual event which was to be held on the Anzac long weekend.
The initial thought of flying there just for the weekend was dropped quickly when we realised that Easter fell just on the weekend before. So with only three days annual leave we could take 10 days off.
The obvious answer to the question of what to do with those extra days in Thailand was of course scuba diving. And so after weeks of research we ended up booking two different liveaboards to both go up to the Similan Islands as well as east towards Phi Phi Islands and then up to Railay/Krabi for the wedding.

The first part of the trip we stayed on the MV Pawara and had our first Manta Ray encounter.
The second part of the trip we joined a French family on the MV Sai Mai where we saw more Mantas.
In between we spent a night in a quite luxurious apartment with private pool in Phuket followed by a 3-dive day trip from Phuket.

The visibility was not always perfect but we got to see a lot of amazing creatures like our first Mantas and Harlequin Shrimp.

The Sai Mai dropped us on Phi Phi Island from where we took the ferry to Railay beach. An adventure in itself, since we had to carry our luggage through the water onto the beach and then all the way to the other side of the Railay peninsula to our hotel where we arrived hot and sweaty and generally in a grumpy mood.

After a day of relaxing and hanging out with some of the other wedding guests, we did one last dive trip from Railay to some local islands.

The wedding took place on our second last day in Thailand. It was a very beautiful and memorable beach wedding and we were very happy to have been made part of it.

It was a great trip though we came home with food poisoning and where out dead for the next three days afterwards.

Below is a preview of some of the diving pictures that can be found in our Thailand 2014 image gallery.