Last Updated on October 8, 2026 by Jeff Tomas
I spent thirty-one years keeping pumps running at a water utility in Toledo, Ohio, and I’ve lived in Chiang Rai since 2019, in a rented house off the road to Mae Chan with a mango tree that drops fruit on the car every April. I learned to dive in the Florida Keys in 1988, when the rental regulators still came in dented steel boxes, and I’ve kept it up on and off ever since, mostly in the Similans.
My pension converts to baht every month, so every trip I take starts as a spreadsheet. My wife Nok doesn’t dive, and she spent the week with her sister in Phayao. Komodo had been on that spreadsheet for six years. In March I finally went.
Komodo National Park is in eastern Indonesia, past Bali, and the gateway is a harbor town on Flores called Labuan Bajo. From Chiang Rai, that’s three flights, the last one a short hop east from Bali.
The question I kept coming back to was where to sleep. Komodo rewards both fixed-base travel and nights spent moving through the archipelago, with Komodoresort.com offering a useful point of contrast to the Komodo Island liveaboard approach, where the route itself becomes part of the experience.
On a boat, you wake up at the dive site, and the boat moves while you eat dinner. From a hotel,l you get a real bed and a shower that stays still, though every morning starts with a ride out of the harbor that can take two hours. For a man of sixty-eight with a bad left knee, both of those have a cost. I tried both: four nights on a boat and three in a hotel.
The Baht Math
I’ll share the real numbers; I wanted to see them before I went and couldn’t find them. The boat cost ฿47,800 for four nights, with thirteen dives and every meal included. Ashore, the three hotel nights came to ฿8,040, and the dive shop charged ฿4,900 a day for two dives on a day boat.
Worked out per dive, which is how I think about it now.
- On the boat, it came to about ฿3,677 a dive.
- Ashore it came to a little over ฿4,800 a dive once I’d added the hotel and meals, because the room costs the same whether you dive that day or not.
- The flights, ฿21,350 return from Chiang Rai, were the same either way.
The Medical Form Mistake
Every dive boat in Komodo asks you to fill in a medical questionnaire, and if you tick yes to certain questions,s you need a doctor’s signature before they’ll let you in the water. I take one pill a day for blood pressure. I ticked yes, honestly, and then forgot about it, which is the part I’m not proud of.
At the briefing in the dive shop on the evening of Thursday 12 March, the trip leader read my form and told me I couldn’t board in the morning without a signed note. The boat was due to leave at eight. A clinic near the harbor opened at half past seven, and I was on its step at twenty past with my seven-day pill box in my shirt pocket, the plastic kind from a Chiang Rai pharmacy with the days printed in Thai.
The doctor took my blood pressure twice and asked how many dives I’d done in the last year. Then he signed, and I paid 350,000 rupiah. I reached the jetty at twenty-five past eight, and nine people on the deck watched me climb aboard.
I should have had the form signed at Overbrook Hospital before I left Chiang Rai. My doctor there has known about the pills for five years, and it would have taken him ten minutes.
I still don’t know whether they’d have been as strict with a diver of forty.
Four Nights on the Boat
The boat was a wooden phinisi with nine guests, and the youngest were a Dutch couple in their thirties who were very kind about my knee (they’d also brought ibuprofen, which I borrowed twice). A Komodo Island liveaboard suits an older diver better than I’d expected, mostly because there’s no commuting.
You get out of the bunk, and the site is right there. The crew lifted my tank onto my back every dive without being asked. And the first dive on the Saturday, at six in the morning at a site in the north of the park, had more fish on it than anything I’ve seen in thirty-eight years of diving.
What worked for a sixty-eight-year-old.
- No climbing onto day boats in a swell.
- Crew who carried the tanks.
- I’d asked for a lower bunk when I booked, and I was glad of it every night, since the upper one had a ladder like a fire escape.
- Afternoon naps.
- Thirteen dives without once standing on a jetty waiting for a ride.
Three Nights Ashore
After the boat, I moved into a hotel in Labuan Bajo. Most of the hotels Komodo Island Indonesia searches I ran from home turned up places in town, and one booking site sorted its list under a heading that read Komodo Island Hotels even though nearly all of them were on Flores. Mine had a pool and an elevator, which mattered more to my knee than the view did.
I did two days of diving from a day boat and booked the ranger walk to see the dragons at one of the Komodo Indonesia tour desks on the harbor road. The day boat left at quarter past seven and reached the first site after nine.
- The day boat had a steep metal ladder at the stern, which is fine at forty and harder at sixty-eight when the boat is rolling.
- Ground-floor room.
Short digression. Nok had packed two links of sai ua, the Chiang Rai pork sausage, in my bag without telling me, and the hotel kitchen agreed to grill them on my last night. The cook tried a piece and asked where he could buy it.
What I’d Tell Another Retiree in the North
On a pension, the boat looks pricier on the booking page and works out cheaper per dive, at least the way I dive. But it’s four nights you can’t leave, and if your knees or your stomach don’t like boats, that matters more than the arithmetic. I’m going back next March, and I haven’t decided which way to do it.
Get the dive medical form signed in Chiang Rai before you book the flights.
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