Could I really be finished already? Time has a funny way of moving. The middle 6 weeks of the program really seemed to crawl at times, but the first and last two weeks positively zoomed by.
Currently I´m in an internet cafe in Playa Del Carmen. They packed us into a collectivo (bus-taxi) yesterday and sent us away from our home at Pez Maya. I´m seriously going to miss the beauty and isolation of that place. Relatively few cars on the ¨road¨, next to no tourists floating around--just the 25 of us, living on our own little stretch of mangrove beach. The lagoon to the left, the point to the right. The hammocks under the palm trees. (I´ve decided that hammocks need to be a permanent part of my life from now on.) The communal area, the kitting up area, the kitchen, the office, the volleyball court. The huts. These places were home to me. Tulum was the near by town that started to actually feel like a city to me by the end, with all it´s electricity and smattering of bars and clubs. (It´ll be interesting to return to Boston and recall what a real city is...)
All I can say is my return really is going to be a shock in so many ways. Friends and family tell me it´s 20 degrees F. at home, currently. That´s a solid 70 degrees lower than it is here, today. And public transportation! I´m terrified to return to the T. So many people, so squished! I suppose I may still hear Spanish spoken here and there in Boston, but certainly not like here. My comprehension has improved quite drastically! I´ll miss not hearing the quick cadence of the Spanish language every day. And diving... I have no idea when I will get the chance to dive again, and that makes me quite sad. Even the chance to swim! I was in the water every single day that I wasn´t sick or travelling, and to return north at the very start of winter will be rough. I´ll have to see if I can join a YMCA or something.
I suppose I should say a word or two about my actual last week at Pez Maya. It´s a little difficult, because I´m currently much more prone to musing about the trip as a whole, but I´ll do what I can!
I had a little case of Conjunctivitis at the end of week 9 that put a serious kink in my plans for divemaster. The number of possible dives left was rapidly decreasing as the days swept by, and I needed to have 60 before I went home in order to qualify for the certification, so it was going to be a tight fit if I was to make it. I also needed a certain number of training dives, such as assisting with an Open Water Advanced dive, assisting with O.W. students in confined water, leading certified divers on a dive, and demonstrating all 20 required O.W. skills. One of the last dives is a stress test, where they score you on your ability to stay calm under stressful dive situations. For us, that meant a complete equipment exchange, under water. While buddy breathing. For the layman, that means the BCD (tank, vest, and regulator) and fins and mask must be transferred between two people, while they are sharing only one regulator--one person takes two breaths, and gives it to the other diver, who takes two breaths, and so forth. It requires a high level of breath control, and coordination under water. It is certainly not easy, but I feel all five of us did rather well.
Divemaster certification also required timed, scored physical assessments, like an 800m snorkel swim, a 400m regular swim, a 100m tired diver tow, and 15 minutes of treading water, with hands out for the last 2 minutes. It also required demonstration quality rescue senarios involving unconscious, nonbreathing divers at the surface, and a mapping project, where we learn how to make an underwater map using a compass and a depth gauge.
All in all, it was more work than I was expecting, and thus, felt a lot more like an actual accomplishment when I finally finished it, with one dive to spare! I now have 61 logged dives, after 10 weeks in mexico starting from ground zero. It is strange to think I´m a divemaster when considering that. I would still like the experience of diving in a lot of other places and environments, though I certainly know what kind of environment I like the best--a warm one, with plenty of gorgeous coral and fish!
My diving certifications now include the following: Open Water, Open Water Advanced, Rescue Diver, O2 Provider Specialty, Coral Reef Researcher Specialty, and Divemaster. :-D
Now I just need to find a diveshop in Boston that is hiring...
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Week 9 update....I SWAM WITH DOLPHINS I SWAM WITH DOLPHINS I SWAM WITH DOLPHINS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
In case you didn´t know....I SWAM WITH DOLPHINS!!! In the wild! Not in a pool, not at a park, not with trained dolphins...completely wild and free!
Deep breath.
Okay. So. On December 1st, we were headed out to a monitoring site called SMDR20, which was about 30 minutes away by boat, when our lovely captain, Tristan, decided it was actually too rough to make it there without crawling the whole way, so we radioed to base, and decided to have a fun dive instead, at a closer location. No sooner did that transmission come through when a fellow diver on the boat squealed, ¨LOOK!¨ Other divers chimed in, and I was left wondering what all the fuss was about.
¨There!¨ followed by more squealing.
¨What is it?¨ I finally asked.
¨Dolphins!!¨
I launched off of my bench to the side of the boat (not the smartest of ideas in rough seas...) desperate for a glimpse. I couldn´t see one anywhere! I frantically scanned the waves, but every time someone pointed, it was gone before I could look. And then I saw it--a shiny, slippery gray dorsal fin slicing up and out of the water and cresting downward again out of sight. !!!!!!!!!!!!!! A dolphin! But wait! Two dolphins! Three! Four! I´ve lost track!
As the boat was moving through the rough seas as fast as it could (ie, crawling by boat standards) the dolphins were circling us and generally putting our speed to shame. They swam under the boat, then leapt out of the water on the other side in a dramatic show of their superior maneuvering skills. We radioed the other boat which quickly made its way to our location. We now have two boats, speeding along with a large pod of dolphins swimming between. We begged to dive right then and there, but they had to drop us off in a location that was pre programmed into the gps they had, so we picked out the nearest location--Lagrimas Negras it was called, which was about 1.2 km away--and did our best to get there as quickly as we could.
We kitted up in record time, definitely performing the fastest buddy check in history, and then backwards rolled off the boat, into the sea. As soon as we were gathered together, we decended, and saw......nothing. Where did they go?? We scanned the water all around us as we slowly sank to 10....20.....30 feet. We listened. We waited. And we looked some more. Minutes passed, and our racing heartbeats began to slow down, and I stopped using up my air at 10 bar a minute. And I waited. I began to accept the fact that they probably just kept on swimming when the boats stopped. Oh well. At least we had seen them from the boats. That in itself was a once in a lifetime----WAIT! Someone yelled through their regulator and pointed, and my gaze followed...Ten dolphins! Swimming right for us! So graceful, so beautiful, so playful!
They circled us twice and swam off, and my heart sank, but they were back 2 minutes later, teasing us by swimming close and then scooting away. They did that about seven times, returning in different sized groups, sometimes swimming upside down, sometimes swimming fast and leaping out of the water.
Our dive profile was 22 meters for 30 minutes, so we eventually had to surface. As we were holding at 5 meters for our safety stop, they came around us again, quite close, and when we reached the surface, they really had some fun, swimming as close as 5 feet away from us, making noises and doing laps! As we passed our gear up to the captain to load back into the boats we kept our masks on, still stealing glances underwater at these magnificent creatures. Once we were all back on the boat, they still followed us until we were only a kilometer from base. We all definitely squealed the entire way home like 12 year old girls at a Jonas Brothers concert. Smiles and goofy grins were pasted on our faces for the remainder of the day...and most of the week for that matter. They played with us for over 45 minutes! Tristan said he´s never seen a pod stay that interested for so long....especially not a pod this large!
I SWAM WITH DOLPHINS!!!
Oh and guess what? No one had a camera.
¨There!¨ followed by more squealing.
¨What is it?¨ I finally asked.
¨Dolphins!!¨
I launched off of my bench to the side of the boat (not the smartest of ideas in rough seas...) desperate for a glimpse. I couldn´t see one anywhere! I frantically scanned the waves, but every time someone pointed, it was gone before I could look. And then I saw it--a shiny, slippery gray dorsal fin slicing up and out of the water and cresting downward again out of sight. !!!!!!!!!!!!!! A dolphin! But wait! Two dolphins! Three! Four! I´ve lost track!
As the boat was moving through the rough seas as fast as it could (ie, crawling by boat standards) the dolphins were circling us and generally putting our speed to shame. They swam under the boat, then leapt out of the water on the other side in a dramatic show of their superior maneuvering skills. We radioed the other boat which quickly made its way to our location. We now have two boats, speeding along with a large pod of dolphins swimming between. We begged to dive right then and there, but they had to drop us off in a location that was pre programmed into the gps they had, so we picked out the nearest location--Lagrimas Negras it was called, which was about 1.2 km away--and did our best to get there as quickly as we could.
We kitted up in record time, definitely performing the fastest buddy check in history, and then backwards rolled off the boat, into the sea. As soon as we were gathered together, we decended, and saw......nothing. Where did they go?? We scanned the water all around us as we slowly sank to 10....20.....30 feet. We listened. We waited. And we looked some more. Minutes passed, and our racing heartbeats began to slow down, and I stopped using up my air at 10 bar a minute. And I waited. I began to accept the fact that they probably just kept on swimming when the boats stopped. Oh well. At least we had seen them from the boats. That in itself was a once in a lifetime----WAIT! Someone yelled through their regulator and pointed, and my gaze followed...Ten dolphins! Swimming right for us! So graceful, so beautiful, so playful!
They circled us twice and swam off, and my heart sank, but they were back 2 minutes later, teasing us by swimming close and then scooting away. They did that about seven times, returning in different sized groups, sometimes swimming upside down, sometimes swimming fast and leaping out of the water.
Our dive profile was 22 meters for 30 minutes, so we eventually had to surface. As we were holding at 5 meters for our safety stop, they came around us again, quite close, and when we reached the surface, they really had some fun, swimming as close as 5 feet away from us, making noises and doing laps! As we passed our gear up to the captain to load back into the boats we kept our masks on, still stealing glances underwater at these magnificent creatures. Once we were all back on the boat, they still followed us until we were only a kilometer from base. We all definitely squealed the entire way home like 12 year old girls at a Jonas Brothers concert. Smiles and goofy grins were pasted on our faces for the remainder of the day...and most of the week for that matter. They played with us for over 45 minutes! Tristan said he´s never seen a pod stay that interested for so long....especially not a pod this large!
I SWAM WITH DOLPHINS!!!
Oh and guess what? No one had a camera.
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Week 8....Happy Thanksgiving!
I can´t believe I went scuba diving on Thanksgiving. Talk about a surreal experience. The weather was absolutely gorgeous, warmer even, than it has been recently. The sun was shining, the breeze was perfect, the water was turquoise, and I had my very first successful monitor dive! It took me eight weeks, but I´ve finally contributed to the body of scientific data that we´ve been gathering here in Sian Ka´an!
How a monitor dive works: I´m a Point Intercept monitor, which means that at a particular given monitor site, I will decend with a weighted measuring tape, and lay a straight line of 30 meters down on the reef. My buddy behind me is a Coral Communities monitor. He swims behind me, making sure that the tape lays flat on the reef. We both swim back to the beginning of the line, and then I record on a slate the start time and depth, as well as the compass bearing of the line. Then I begin recording what lays beneath the tape every 25 cm. That´s a total of 120 items along 30 meters. Behind me, my buddy records on his slate every coral beneath the line that is 10 cm or larger, and it what condition (ie, diseased, bleached, healthy) it is in, plus a lot of other data like the dimentions and color and such. We can only be one arms length apart, so we need to work without bashing each other with our fins and such. We´re upside down for most of the time! Once we get to the end of the 30 meters, we record the end time and depth of the line, and reel the tape back up. By then, it´s just about 40 minutes, which is the limit of our dive, and we slowly head back to the surface, with a 3 minute decompression stop at 5 meters, just for safety´s sake.
Just after that dive completed however, I took the fastest bucket shower possible, and raced to the kitchen. Why? Because the Americans were cooking Thanksgiving dinner, that´s why! The British didn´t really understand what the fuss was all about, but they were certainly okay with allowing us to take over the kitchen (no one really loves kitchen duty). So we planned a menu, and slaved in the kitchen all day between dives, and VOILA! A magnificent feast was prepared! With 25 people on base, it was left to four of the Americans to prepare the meal....we had a fantastic spinach and cheddar dip for an appetizer. Then, there was a salad with gorgonzola cheese and avocados with a sesame ginger dressing. Mexico doesn´t have too many turkeys so we had to subsitute with roast chickens. I made the stuffing! Thanks Mom for the amazing recipe! People positively salivated when hearing there was bacon in it! We also had sweet potato mash with marshmallows and a green bean casserole. Finally, we had an apple-pear pie, and a pumpkin pie made from roasting an actual pumpkin...no canned pumpkin for us! The rest of the EMs were blown away by the effort we put in, (and we were also a bit amazed at how well it turned out!) and were very very Thankful! We arranged the tables into one very long table, and I asked that we go around the table and say one or two things for which each of us are thankful. Most mentioned the food, but also the amazing friends and experiences we´ve had, due to this expedition. We definitely all felt fairly blessed.
That was the end of the week, but the beginning definitely didn´t start off that well. For one, I was stung by either a bee or a scorpion on Monday. Yep. Monday was rather like one of those terrible horrible no good very bad days, except that I was in Mexico, so how can you really complain? I nearly got hit by the boat twice when getting in and out of it, I was absolutely exhausted from still having a bit of lingering illness, and on top of it all, when I came back to dive, I headed straight to the kitchen to help with dinner. I grabbed my tshirt, which was laying on the vegetable bin cabinet, and in the process of putting it on, got stung right over my heart by....something. I yelped, and struggled to untangle myself from the shirt, while trying not to rip my bathing suit top off as well. It HURT! Imagine a large booster shot-sized needle jabbing into your chest and being swished around a bit...that´s a little like what it felt like to me. Then it started to burn in growing ring around the sting, which eventually spread into the shoulder joint, making it difficult to lift my left arm without a fair bit of soreness. But we never saw what stung me! No one saw anything fly away, but they searched my shirt and didn´t find a scorpion either. It was a single sting, so it wasn´t a spider, but considering how much it hurt, and what the spot where I was stung looked like, (one of the staff is familiar with scorpion stings, and agrees with me) I´m considering it a scorpion sting (plus, it´s much cooler to say I got stung by a scorpion than a stupid little bee). I immediately informed the staff, who provided me with some cream for immediate pain relief, as well as hydrocortisone to help with the reaction. I also took a antihystamine pill to counteract anything that might affect me internally, and stayed in the company of others for at least an hour afterwards, to make sure it wasn´t the poisonous kind of scorpion. Success! No poison for me, just a world of pain for a short time. The real pain subsided within 20 minutes. After that, it was just really really sore, and after 3 hours, it was nearly gone, aside from a bit of stiffness in my shoulder. A lovely way to start the week!
Tuesday was windy, and they cancelled the diving after one rather unsuccessful morning dive. Wednesday brought a few mini monsoons, though we did our best to dive around them. This is why the amazing weather of Thursday was so magnificent! A very crappy week finally turned amazing, just in time for the most delicious holiday of the year.
Friday was super windy again, but they let one set of dives go out in the morning just to see how the conditions were. Visibility was about 2 to 3 meters...we were essentially diving in an underwater sandstorm. But the other divemaster candidates and I needed to rack up our dives, so they let a few of us have a second dive, and cancelled the rest, starting the weekend early. We don´t get an extra long weekend like all of you do, though. After half of Friday and all of Saturday off, we go back to work on Sunday! Hopefully I´ll finally get my Rescue Diver certification finished tomorrow, and then it´s on to Divemaster training! By the way, have I mentioned how much I´m in way over my head with this?? There are timed swims, with fins and without, along with timed tired diver tows, and physics and physiology tests, and a bunch more! Eek! But it´ll be fine. I hope.
See you all next week!
How a monitor dive works: I´m a Point Intercept monitor, which means that at a particular given monitor site, I will decend with a weighted measuring tape, and lay a straight line of 30 meters down on the reef. My buddy behind me is a Coral Communities monitor. He swims behind me, making sure that the tape lays flat on the reef. We both swim back to the beginning of the line, and then I record on a slate the start time and depth, as well as the compass bearing of the line. Then I begin recording what lays beneath the tape every 25 cm. That´s a total of 120 items along 30 meters. Behind me, my buddy records on his slate every coral beneath the line that is 10 cm or larger, and it what condition (ie, diseased, bleached, healthy) it is in, plus a lot of other data like the dimentions and color and such. We can only be one arms length apart, so we need to work without bashing each other with our fins and such. We´re upside down for most of the time! Once we get to the end of the 30 meters, we record the end time and depth of the line, and reel the tape back up. By then, it´s just about 40 minutes, which is the limit of our dive, and we slowly head back to the surface, with a 3 minute decompression stop at 5 meters, just for safety´s sake.
Just after that dive completed however, I took the fastest bucket shower possible, and raced to the kitchen. Why? Because the Americans were cooking Thanksgiving dinner, that´s why! The British didn´t really understand what the fuss was all about, but they were certainly okay with allowing us to take over the kitchen (no one really loves kitchen duty). So we planned a menu, and slaved in the kitchen all day between dives, and VOILA! A magnificent feast was prepared! With 25 people on base, it was left to four of the Americans to prepare the meal....we had a fantastic spinach and cheddar dip for an appetizer. Then, there was a salad with gorgonzola cheese and avocados with a sesame ginger dressing. Mexico doesn´t have too many turkeys so we had to subsitute with roast chickens. I made the stuffing! Thanks Mom for the amazing recipe! People positively salivated when hearing there was bacon in it! We also had sweet potato mash with marshmallows and a green bean casserole. Finally, we had an apple-pear pie, and a pumpkin pie made from roasting an actual pumpkin...no canned pumpkin for us! The rest of the EMs were blown away by the effort we put in, (and we were also a bit amazed at how well it turned out!) and were very very Thankful! We arranged the tables into one very long table, and I asked that we go around the table and say one or two things for which each of us are thankful. Most mentioned the food, but also the amazing friends and experiences we´ve had, due to this expedition. We definitely all felt fairly blessed.
That was the end of the week, but the beginning definitely didn´t start off that well. For one, I was stung by either a bee or a scorpion on Monday. Yep. Monday was rather like one of those terrible horrible no good very bad days, except that I was in Mexico, so how can you really complain? I nearly got hit by the boat twice when getting in and out of it, I was absolutely exhausted from still having a bit of lingering illness, and on top of it all, when I came back to dive, I headed straight to the kitchen to help with dinner. I grabbed my tshirt, which was laying on the vegetable bin cabinet, and in the process of putting it on, got stung right over my heart by....something. I yelped, and struggled to untangle myself from the shirt, while trying not to rip my bathing suit top off as well. It HURT! Imagine a large booster shot-sized needle jabbing into your chest and being swished around a bit...that´s a little like what it felt like to me. Then it started to burn in growing ring around the sting, which eventually spread into the shoulder joint, making it difficult to lift my left arm without a fair bit of soreness. But we never saw what stung me! No one saw anything fly away, but they searched my shirt and didn´t find a scorpion either. It was a single sting, so it wasn´t a spider, but considering how much it hurt, and what the spot where I was stung looked like, (one of the staff is familiar with scorpion stings, and agrees with me) I´m considering it a scorpion sting (plus, it´s much cooler to say I got stung by a scorpion than a stupid little bee). I immediately informed the staff, who provided me with some cream for immediate pain relief, as well as hydrocortisone to help with the reaction. I also took a antihystamine pill to counteract anything that might affect me internally, and stayed in the company of others for at least an hour afterwards, to make sure it wasn´t the poisonous kind of scorpion. Success! No poison for me, just a world of pain for a short time. The real pain subsided within 20 minutes. After that, it was just really really sore, and after 3 hours, it was nearly gone, aside from a bit of stiffness in my shoulder. A lovely way to start the week!
Tuesday was windy, and they cancelled the diving after one rather unsuccessful morning dive. Wednesday brought a few mini monsoons, though we did our best to dive around them. This is why the amazing weather of Thursday was so magnificent! A very crappy week finally turned amazing, just in time for the most delicious holiday of the year.
Friday was super windy again, but they let one set of dives go out in the morning just to see how the conditions were. Visibility was about 2 to 3 meters...we were essentially diving in an underwater sandstorm. But the other divemaster candidates and I needed to rack up our dives, so they let a few of us have a second dive, and cancelled the rest, starting the weekend early. We don´t get an extra long weekend like all of you do, though. After half of Friday and all of Saturday off, we go back to work on Sunday! Hopefully I´ll finally get my Rescue Diver certification finished tomorrow, and then it´s on to Divemaster training! By the way, have I mentioned how much I´m in way over my head with this?? There are timed swims, with fins and without, along with timed tired diver tows, and physics and physiology tests, and a bunch more! Eek! But it´ll be fine. I hope.
See you all next week!
PICTURES!!
These our our boats! Vision, and Ka´ay. They´re fussy sometimes, but they´re all we got.
Mexico´s flag....and Pez Maya´s flag.
We enjoy playing the occasional game of volleyball. I´m on the winning team, (of course) on the left, but you can´t really see me because Liz is in the way.
We´ve been blessed with two beautiful full moons so far, and we still have one more to go!
The formation of coral here is called spur and groove, when they grow in long lines with sand in between. Sometimes the grooves can be 10 or more meters deep!
In the center, we have the very common, Agaricia agricites, with a soft coral, or gorgonian to the right, and a small Millepora alcicornis just above that, with the white tips...the last is commonly called fire coral, for good reason...it hurts to touch!
In the center of this picture is Eusimilia fastigiana, a flower coral. The yellow stuff to the right is some bleached Montastrea cavernosa.
This is some almost completely bleached Agaricia agricites in a blade formation (called danae) surrounded by some more gorgonians.
Our lovely beach rules! Fairly self explanitory.
A ray!
A sea turtle!
This is the start of the cenote dive...you jump in here, and then explore along a cable, but only along that line...your bubbles will eventually destroy the limestone, so they try to keep the errosion to a confined area.
This is Jax, one of our lovely scholars. She´s from the Isle of Man!
A hermit crab! There´s lots of these underfoot...
A small group shot, when we went kayaking in the lagoon system, next to our base.
When we went on a cenote dive, there were signs like this warning us not to wander too far...
This is our group shot...I´m fourth from the right, in front.
This is our napping area! We spend a lot of time here....
That´s it for now! I hope you enjoyed them! I´ll try to have a few more next week as well...
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Week 7...Stupid Sore Throat.
Monday morning I woke up feeling fairly terrible. I dove first thing, at 7:15, but I was feeling even worse by the end of it, and so passed on my second dive. The next day, I woke up even worse, rather like a zombie all day. I had chills and sweats on and off during the day, but felt better by the end, so I thought I might feel better the next day. Nope! Another day of no diving, so I went into town to see a doctor just in case it was the dreaded H1N1. It took me forever to see him, but when I did, he pretty much immediately said it was a throat infection and gave me a prescription for some antibiotics. Total cost for visit and medicine? Under $10. It´s not even worth the hassle to try to claim that from my travel insurance.
When I came back, I really did feel better, so the next day I dove. It was nice to get back in the swing of things. Friday however, ended up being too windy to dive, which I was grateful for, since I was still quite fatigued from being ill. When I dove Saturday, I got all of my creature spots correct! Finally. (The creatures we need to be able to identify are things like sponges, tunicates, crinoids, hydroids, anemones, urchins, many types of algae, and bryozoans) I had just passed my test the day before, so I should be doing some actual monitoring in no time. Hopefully.
Saturday afternoon, I decided I needed a break from base life, and went into town and booked a room for the night (only about $12). I had a lovely dinner, and a lovely shower, and a lovely long talk with people back home, and then went back to the hotel to READ! One of the new five weekers, Morgan, brought with him the latest Wheel of Time book, the 12th so far in the series. The original author, Robert Jordan, died 2 years ago from a rare blood disease, amyloidosis, so they turned the series over to Brian Sanderson, and it turns out he´s done a magnificent job! I wanted to wait to reread the entire series when I got back, and THEN read the latest, but I couldn´t help myself and dove right in as soon as Morgan finished. It was everything I was hoping for in a Wheel of Time book. No one can replace Robert Jordan, but Brian Sanderson did a masterful job taking over the plot, and finally things are happening! To anyone who read some of the series, and stopped due to the plot dragging on, have no fear! The plot is once again moving, and some crazy things start happening, and you definitely can´t put it down once you start.
So it´s been a relaxing weekend. We´ll be having our own little Thanksgiving dinner on base on Thursday which I hope to contribute to! My camera had another run in with a computer, and once again hid all the files on BOTH cards, so I can´t take pictures again. I managed just a couple pictures on this card before that happened, so I need to find out how to get it to let me take pictures again... In the meantime, here´s a few random photos! ....oooooor not! because this computer doesn´t want to upload them for some reason. Why?? Why is there some problem every time I try to do this?? Next week. There will be photos. Techinical difficulties be damned, I will have photos next week. Bah.
Til then, Happy Thanksgiving!!
When I came back, I really did feel better, so the next day I dove. It was nice to get back in the swing of things. Friday however, ended up being too windy to dive, which I was grateful for, since I was still quite fatigued from being ill. When I dove Saturday, I got all of my creature spots correct! Finally. (The creatures we need to be able to identify are things like sponges, tunicates, crinoids, hydroids, anemones, urchins, many types of algae, and bryozoans) I had just passed my test the day before, so I should be doing some actual monitoring in no time. Hopefully.
Saturday afternoon, I decided I needed a break from base life, and went into town and booked a room for the night (only about $12). I had a lovely dinner, and a lovely shower, and a lovely long talk with people back home, and then went back to the hotel to READ! One of the new five weekers, Morgan, brought with him the latest Wheel of Time book, the 12th so far in the series. The original author, Robert Jordan, died 2 years ago from a rare blood disease, amyloidosis, so they turned the series over to Brian Sanderson, and it turns out he´s done a magnificent job! I wanted to wait to reread the entire series when I got back, and THEN read the latest, but I couldn´t help myself and dove right in as soon as Morgan finished. It was everything I was hoping for in a Wheel of Time book. No one can replace Robert Jordan, but Brian Sanderson did a masterful job taking over the plot, and finally things are happening! To anyone who read some of the series, and stopped due to the plot dragging on, have no fear! The plot is once again moving, and some crazy things start happening, and you definitely can´t put it down once you start.
So it´s been a relaxing weekend. We´ll be having our own little Thanksgiving dinner on base on Thursday which I hope to contribute to! My camera had another run in with a computer, and once again hid all the files on BOTH cards, so I can´t take pictures again. I managed just a couple pictures on this card before that happened, so I need to find out how to get it to let me take pictures again... In the meantime, here´s a few random photos! ....oooooor not! because this computer doesn´t want to upload them for some reason. Why?? Why is there some problem every time I try to do this?? Next week. There will be photos. Techinical difficulties be damned, I will have photos next week. Bah.
Til then, Happy Thanksgiving!!
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Week....6? Time flies, and mosquitos are the devil.
It was great to see a bunch of you yesterday at my mom´s birthday party via the webcam! And lovely to hear of course, that you´re enjoying the blog! It´s always lovely to know people actually read this thing...
I can´t believe I´ve only got a month left! I´ll be home four weeks from tomorrow! Looking forward to seeing so many friends and family I´ve missed so much, and yet also looking forward to the remaining time I have here. It´s an odd yet wonderful combination to look at your past, present and future, and be happy about every part of it. I´ve had a wonderful time here, am enjoying every moment, and also can´t wait for what the next four weeks, and the next four months have in store for me. I choose it all! (Thanks JT, for helping me to realize what a gift it is to be able to recognize my choices, and actively choose my paths!)
This week has been particularly wonderful, due to the fact that every single day the weather has been such that I´ve gotten in both of my scheduled dives, bringing my total dive number up to 32! Only 28 more to go...
Speaking of diving, I saw a spotted eagle ray this week, a good 1.4 meters across! A rare and special sighting here at Pez Maya. On the same dive, we also saw a teeny seahorse! It´s absolutey a marvel to see something so....different!...swim around. It´s whole swimming mechanism and body shape is just so unique among the creatures I´ve seen. All in all it was one and a half inches of pure adorableness.
The hurricane left us largely untouched, except for one rather large thing....we have a lagoon system right next to our beach, that closed up nearly a year ago. When we first arrived, there was a sandbar straight across the lagoon exit, which wasn´t so great for the fish, because they often go into the lagoon to lay their eggs, because it´s a more sheltered area for the eggs to hatch. However, after the hurricane, (which highly affected the tide levels for a few days before and after) the lagoon exit opened up, sending tons and tons of freshwater gushing out, into our beach area. What was once crystaline and turquoise is now brackish and murky--a lovely ice tea colored stream that is also colder than seawater. It only takes 10 or 20 meters for the water to return to it´s lovely caribbean color, but it´s still made beach swimming slightly less enjoyable, which is unfortuantely for us, but probably a lot better for the fish. Ah well. Oh, another small thing the hurricane changed.....we are INUNDATED with mosquitos! It was highly manageable before, but now, you can´t take a shower without getting 30 more bites! I literally counted over 100 new bites in a single day. I´m hoping for a tiny increase in wind, and some continued drier and cooler weather to help ward them away again. Otherwise, I might go over the edge. 20 bites on my forehead alone is just not acceptable. The madness must end. Please? Sigh.
My camera is now working! But I haven´t had much of a chance to take more pictures yet, and the computer I´m on doesn´t have a working CD drive, so you´ll unfortunately have to wait one more week for any pictures, but I PROMISE! Next week will have a plethora of lovely pictures to make up for so many weeks without any. So please forgive me, and tune in next weekend for a much more colorful entry! Until then...buenas noches!
I can´t believe I´ve only got a month left! I´ll be home four weeks from tomorrow! Looking forward to seeing so many friends and family I´ve missed so much, and yet also looking forward to the remaining time I have here. It´s an odd yet wonderful combination to look at your past, present and future, and be happy about every part of it. I´ve had a wonderful time here, am enjoying every moment, and also can´t wait for what the next four weeks, and the next four months have in store for me. I choose it all! (Thanks JT, for helping me to realize what a gift it is to be able to recognize my choices, and actively choose my paths!)
This week has been particularly wonderful, due to the fact that every single day the weather has been such that I´ve gotten in both of my scheduled dives, bringing my total dive number up to 32! Only 28 more to go...
Speaking of diving, I saw a spotted eagle ray this week, a good 1.4 meters across! A rare and special sighting here at Pez Maya. On the same dive, we also saw a teeny seahorse! It´s absolutey a marvel to see something so....different!...swim around. It´s whole swimming mechanism and body shape is just so unique among the creatures I´ve seen. All in all it was one and a half inches of pure adorableness.
The hurricane left us largely untouched, except for one rather large thing....we have a lagoon system right next to our beach, that closed up nearly a year ago. When we first arrived, there was a sandbar straight across the lagoon exit, which wasn´t so great for the fish, because they often go into the lagoon to lay their eggs, because it´s a more sheltered area for the eggs to hatch. However, after the hurricane, (which highly affected the tide levels for a few days before and after) the lagoon exit opened up, sending tons and tons of freshwater gushing out, into our beach area. What was once crystaline and turquoise is now brackish and murky--a lovely ice tea colored stream that is also colder than seawater. It only takes 10 or 20 meters for the water to return to it´s lovely caribbean color, but it´s still made beach swimming slightly less enjoyable, which is unfortuantely for us, but probably a lot better for the fish. Ah well. Oh, another small thing the hurricane changed.....we are INUNDATED with mosquitos! It was highly manageable before, but now, you can´t take a shower without getting 30 more bites! I literally counted over 100 new bites in a single day. I´m hoping for a tiny increase in wind, and some continued drier and cooler weather to help ward them away again. Otherwise, I might go over the edge. 20 bites on my forehead alone is just not acceptable. The madness must end. Please? Sigh.
My camera is now working! But I haven´t had much of a chance to take more pictures yet, and the computer I´m on doesn´t have a working CD drive, so you´ll unfortunately have to wait one more week for any pictures, but I PROMISE! Next week will have a plethora of lovely pictures to make up for so many weeks without any. So please forgive me, and tune in next weekend for a much more colorful entry! Until then...buenas noches!
Sunday, November 8, 2009
5 weeks...half way!
I´ve reached the half way point!
There´s not much to say about diving this week. I only got 2 dives in, because the weather was so terrible. However, on one of those dives, I managed to see an 8 foot Green Moray Eel. Yipe! Instead of diving on Monday, a bunch of us went snorkeling about a kilometer from shore and I saw my first Barracuda, which circled me for a little bit curiously, before finding more interesting things to look at. I also saw my first Ray on that same trip. In addition, I got my second jellyfish sting. This time it was actually teeny jellyfish similar to what they call sea lice. I was repeatedly stung all over my right arm and a bit on my left, as well as my left shoulder, and my left knee. As soon as I finished swimming the kilometer back to shore, I poured vinegar all over myself, but the next day, my arm was on fire with itchiness! I couldn´t stop scratching, and was very nearly driven insane. It took three days and some prescription grade antihystamines to finally control my reaction.
Aside from that, the week was pretty uneventful. We decided to make this our long weekend, to say goodbye to our five weekers (not everyone stays here for 10 full weeks) so I´ve been in Playa Del Carmen since Friday night. I finally got to see my friend Andres´ fire show at the restaurant Fusion, which was great! (I´m not the only fire spinner on base). I also went to this fantastic Cuban restaurant that had a special from 1pm til 6pm, which included a reduction to 1967 prices...which meant my huge meal of three dishes came to about 3 dollars. Overall, it´s been a lovely weekend of souvenir shopping, and hurricane dodging.
Oh, did I mention I just dodged Hurricane Ida? She just passed a few hours ago, northwest of Playa del Carmen. Just a few sprinkles and a bit of breeze. The past few days of normal crappy weather have been much much worse than what this hurricane brought us.
Now I get to go back to base tomorrow to some hopefully more scuba-friendly weather and get more dives in. I´m up to 23 dives, but I need 60 to get my divemaster qualification. Pray to whatever you pray to for good weather for me, please!!
And I´m still trying to get my camera fixed. I promise I´ll have pictures for you as soon as I have a working camera, sigh.
Until next week!
There´s not much to say about diving this week. I only got 2 dives in, because the weather was so terrible. However, on one of those dives, I managed to see an 8 foot Green Moray Eel. Yipe! Instead of diving on Monday, a bunch of us went snorkeling about a kilometer from shore and I saw my first Barracuda, which circled me for a little bit curiously, before finding more interesting things to look at. I also saw my first Ray on that same trip. In addition, I got my second jellyfish sting. This time it was actually teeny jellyfish similar to what they call sea lice. I was repeatedly stung all over my right arm and a bit on my left, as well as my left shoulder, and my left knee. As soon as I finished swimming the kilometer back to shore, I poured vinegar all over myself, but the next day, my arm was on fire with itchiness! I couldn´t stop scratching, and was very nearly driven insane. It took three days and some prescription grade antihystamines to finally control my reaction.
Aside from that, the week was pretty uneventful. We decided to make this our long weekend, to say goodbye to our five weekers (not everyone stays here for 10 full weeks) so I´ve been in Playa Del Carmen since Friday night. I finally got to see my friend Andres´ fire show at the restaurant Fusion, which was great! (I´m not the only fire spinner on base). I also went to this fantastic Cuban restaurant that had a special from 1pm til 6pm, which included a reduction to 1967 prices...which meant my huge meal of three dishes came to about 3 dollars. Overall, it´s been a lovely weekend of souvenir shopping, and hurricane dodging.
Oh, did I mention I just dodged Hurricane Ida? She just passed a few hours ago, northwest of Playa del Carmen. Just a few sprinkles and a bit of breeze. The past few days of normal crappy weather have been much much worse than what this hurricane brought us.
Now I get to go back to base tomorrow to some hopefully more scuba-friendly weather and get more dives in. I´m up to 23 dives, but I need 60 to get my divemaster qualification. Pray to whatever you pray to for good weather for me, please!!
And I´m still trying to get my camera fixed. I promise I´ll have pictures for you as soon as I have a working camera, sigh.
Until next week!
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Week 4....already??! what?
So I´ve officially been here a month. It seems like half that, at most. It´s just around the amount of time it takes to start feeling the rhythm of daily life here--the rotation of duties, the fickleness of the weather, the consistancy of the scenery. It´s a pretty good life.
This week was another bad diving week, unfortunately. It was also a bit of a bad luck week. Monday we didn´t dive until the afternoon due to some misplaced keys over the weekend (no emergency transport vehicle=no diving). Tuesday we got one morning dive in before deciding that the seas were getting too rough. Wednesday one of the keys to the boats snapped off, and that took a while to fix. Once that was done, the weather had once again taken a turn for the worse, and diving was cancelled for the rest of the day. Thursday´s waves were just terrible. Friday, the staff tried to appease us by scheduling one dive for each of us, but only my boat got to dive, because the other boat ended up with a bit of engine trouble, and because it was so difficult to tow it back to shore due to the surf, the rest of the dives were cancelled for that day too. Saturday was a torrential downpour like we´ve not yet seen the likes of in the entire four weeks we´ve been here. Thunder, lightning, wind and buckets. It was actually quite a lot of fun running around soaked to the skin, trying to gather as much water runoff from the roof to fill the well (which isn´t used for drinking, no worries...) because the buckets would fill up just about as fast as we could empty them. A lot of us also took advantage of the rain to get an extra shower in this week. It´s an interesting experience to shampoo your hair in the rain...I would recommend it to anyone that has the chance.
So Saturday was a dive washout as well, which means I got a total of 3 dives in this week. However, the week wasn´t entirely a loss despite the terrible wind. We went kayaking in the nearby lagoons, and saw a few splashes that might have been crocodiles. We also started a volleyball tournament, which I didn´t do too badly in, if I say so myself. My team won the first game 15-3). I also asked our resident fixer upper, Greg, if he might install a pullup bar for the girls, since the one for the guys is ridiculously high up, which he nicely did. So, in addition to heaving around air tanks, hauling myself out of the water into the boats, pushing the boats in and out of the water, and carrying other random scuba and boat supplies all the time, I can now also pull myself up and down a piece of driftwood during my free time. :)
That´s about it for this past week. Most EM´s left for Playa Del Carmen yesterday to party it up for the weekend. I gladly stayed here, to enjoy the calm of a base with only 9 people. The staff cooked dinner for us last night, as they do every Saturday night, and they definitely made my weekend by grilling bacon cheeseburgers with curried potatoes, coleslaw and guacamole. I´m fairly certain I was in ecstasy during the whole meal. I popped open a cheap bottle of champagne near midnight, and celebrated with the two EM´s still awake, the culmination of my 26th year on this lovely planet. Today, in about an hour, I get to go cavern diving in a nearby pair of cenotes called Dos Ojos, which promises to be fairly spectacular. I´ll give you a rundown of how that goes next week!
This week was another bad diving week, unfortunately. It was also a bit of a bad luck week. Monday we didn´t dive until the afternoon due to some misplaced keys over the weekend (no emergency transport vehicle=no diving). Tuesday we got one morning dive in before deciding that the seas were getting too rough. Wednesday one of the keys to the boats snapped off, and that took a while to fix. Once that was done, the weather had once again taken a turn for the worse, and diving was cancelled for the rest of the day. Thursday´s waves were just terrible. Friday, the staff tried to appease us by scheduling one dive for each of us, but only my boat got to dive, because the other boat ended up with a bit of engine trouble, and because it was so difficult to tow it back to shore due to the surf, the rest of the dives were cancelled for that day too. Saturday was a torrential downpour like we´ve not yet seen the likes of in the entire four weeks we´ve been here. Thunder, lightning, wind and buckets. It was actually quite a lot of fun running around soaked to the skin, trying to gather as much water runoff from the roof to fill the well (which isn´t used for drinking, no worries...) because the buckets would fill up just about as fast as we could empty them. A lot of us also took advantage of the rain to get an extra shower in this week. It´s an interesting experience to shampoo your hair in the rain...I would recommend it to anyone that has the chance.
So Saturday was a dive washout as well, which means I got a total of 3 dives in this week. However, the week wasn´t entirely a loss despite the terrible wind. We went kayaking in the nearby lagoons, and saw a few splashes that might have been crocodiles. We also started a volleyball tournament, which I didn´t do too badly in, if I say so myself. My team won the first game 15-3). I also asked our resident fixer upper, Greg, if he might install a pullup bar for the girls, since the one for the guys is ridiculously high up, which he nicely did. So, in addition to heaving around air tanks, hauling myself out of the water into the boats, pushing the boats in and out of the water, and carrying other random scuba and boat supplies all the time, I can now also pull myself up and down a piece of driftwood during my free time. :)
That´s about it for this past week. Most EM´s left for Playa Del Carmen yesterday to party it up for the weekend. I gladly stayed here, to enjoy the calm of a base with only 9 people. The staff cooked dinner for us last night, as they do every Saturday night, and they definitely made my weekend by grilling bacon cheeseburgers with curried potatoes, coleslaw and guacamole. I´m fairly certain I was in ecstasy during the whole meal. I popped open a cheap bottle of champagne near midnight, and celebrated with the two EM´s still awake, the culmination of my 26th year on this lovely planet. Today, in about an hour, I get to go cavern diving in a nearby pair of cenotes called Dos Ojos, which promises to be fairly spectacular. I´ll give you a rundown of how that goes next week!
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Week 3! (on time!!)
This week, all of the expedition members were happy to discover that the weather had cooled to livable, breathable, sleepable levels over the weekend while we were away at the turtle festival. I actually got to wear my sweatshirt for the first time that Sunday evening. Being able to sleep quite well for at least 2 nights in a row certainly did wonders for my health and mood. Sadly the increased wind which was helping to cool us all down also made it impossible to dive for three full days. This was quite unfortunate for my divemaster progress, but I am still assured by staff that I will be able to complete it within the 10 week period. Strangely enough, even though I was not able to dive for those three days, I was still in a much better mood than I had been all weekend. I think it largely has to do with having the right perspective, and consciously choosing my current situation, over and over again. I chose to be here 3 weeks ago, and now, this morning, as I wake up, I am still choosing it. I´ll choose to be here at dinner tonight, and when I wake up tomorrow. If I choose not to be here, I´ll leave. But til then, I just need to keep realizing that this is my choice, and make the most of my amazing time here. No more grumpy moods!
So, while we couldn´t dive, we managed to put up a volleyball net. We were inspired so much by beach volleyball that we just had to pick Top Gun as our weekly Sunday night movie this week. Also, I passed my coral exam! Took me about 5 tries, which I gather is just about average (some of those pictures are very very tricky!!). We also became certified in Emergency First Response (basically CPR and First Aid training). Lastly, we also had a special tutorial that qualified us to be certified O2 (Oxygen) Providers (often administered when divers show signs of decompression illness, after CPR, or for victims who have gone into shock, to name a few).
We finally got to dive again on Thursday, thought the waves were still quite choppy, and the visibility was absolutely terrible. Three meters away, you´d pretty muchg loose sight of your buddy. Coral spots were difficult, and to top it all off, I had some lingering effects from my cold that gave me some pain when descending, right across the top of my head in my sinuses. That made diving very frustrating, but each dive gets better as my cold disappears completely. Friday was much better for visibility and reminded me once again how amazing diving can be. We were at a site called Oasis which has a fairly steep dropoff, and I was given a bit of free time while the dive leader concentrated on spots for a different pair of divers. Just hanging there, suspended at the edge of a reef dropoff, perfectly neutrally buoyant...is an experience that just defies description. I floated, and somersaulted, and twisted in place. I saw fish darting in and out of coral, and then a large school swims right around me, and continues on as if I weren´t even there. I cannot adequately describe how truly magical it is.
Saturday we are allowed a fun dive, where we leave our dive leaders back on base, and dive on our own (but always in pairs!). It was fun to be able to choose our own sites, and swim where we wanted to go. My buddy and I didn´t see much in the way of rays or sharks or eels, which we were hoping for, but we did see some pretty massive schools of fish, including some gray angelfish that are apparently rarely seen in large groups. I wish I had pictures to show you, but most of the dives I´ve been on have been deeper than 10 meters and thus, I can´t bring my camera along. I also still don´t have any other pictures for you because I still haven´t managed to charge it. (I promise, I´ll have something for you next week!)
That´s about it so far! This coming week, we should be beginning our Rescue Diving course, as well as learning about survey techniques, so that hopefully sometime the week after, we´ll begin doing actual coral surveys. The standards for identification and techniques are quite high so that the data we retrieve can never be in question, thus it takes quite a while before we are all deemed ready to collect that data on our surveys. The project we´re involved in provides two sets of data: one from our sites, which are protected areas, as well as data from Mahahual, an area south of the Sian Kaán Biosphere, that is unprotected. This way, we can present data that hopefully shows the positive effects of protecting areas to the Mexican government, as well as try to get through to them what all of their highly destructive cruise ship and spring break tourism is doing to the coral reefs.
That´s all for this week! Stay tuned for my update on Week 4 (dear god, has it been 4 weeks already??) next week!
So, while we couldn´t dive, we managed to put up a volleyball net. We were inspired so much by beach volleyball that we just had to pick Top Gun as our weekly Sunday night movie this week. Also, I passed my coral exam! Took me about 5 tries, which I gather is just about average (some of those pictures are very very tricky!!). We also became certified in Emergency First Response (basically CPR and First Aid training). Lastly, we also had a special tutorial that qualified us to be certified O2 (Oxygen) Providers (often administered when divers show signs of decompression illness, after CPR, or for victims who have gone into shock, to name a few).
We finally got to dive again on Thursday, thought the waves were still quite choppy, and the visibility was absolutely terrible. Three meters away, you´d pretty muchg loose sight of your buddy. Coral spots were difficult, and to top it all off, I had some lingering effects from my cold that gave me some pain when descending, right across the top of my head in my sinuses. That made diving very frustrating, but each dive gets better as my cold disappears completely. Friday was much better for visibility and reminded me once again how amazing diving can be. We were at a site called Oasis which has a fairly steep dropoff, and I was given a bit of free time while the dive leader concentrated on spots for a different pair of divers. Just hanging there, suspended at the edge of a reef dropoff, perfectly neutrally buoyant...is an experience that just defies description. I floated, and somersaulted, and twisted in place. I saw fish darting in and out of coral, and then a large school swims right around me, and continues on as if I weren´t even there. I cannot adequately describe how truly magical it is.
Saturday we are allowed a fun dive, where we leave our dive leaders back on base, and dive on our own (but always in pairs!). It was fun to be able to choose our own sites, and swim where we wanted to go. My buddy and I didn´t see much in the way of rays or sharks or eels, which we were hoping for, but we did see some pretty massive schools of fish, including some gray angelfish that are apparently rarely seen in large groups. I wish I had pictures to show you, but most of the dives I´ve been on have been deeper than 10 meters and thus, I can´t bring my camera along. I also still don´t have any other pictures for you because I still haven´t managed to charge it. (I promise, I´ll have something for you next week!)
That´s about it so far! This coming week, we should be beginning our Rescue Diving course, as well as learning about survey techniques, so that hopefully sometime the week after, we´ll begin doing actual coral surveys. The standards for identification and techniques are quite high so that the data we retrieve can never be in question, thus it takes quite a while before we are all deemed ready to collect that data on our surveys. The project we´re involved in provides two sets of data: one from our sites, which are protected areas, as well as data from Mahahual, an area south of the Sian Kaán Biosphere, that is unprotected. This way, we can present data that hopefully shows the positive effects of protecting areas to the Mexican government, as well as try to get through to them what all of their highly destructive cruise ship and spring break tourism is doing to the coral reefs.
That´s all for this week! Stay tuned for my update on Week 4 (dear god, has it been 4 weeks already??) next week!
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Week 2 in Mexico! (sorry it´s a bit late!)
My apologies for not writing a blog last weekend. I was run down from lack of sleep (due to heat and humidity, not choice, I promise you!) and came down with a cold, which kept me from almost all activities for the whole weekend. Granted, this gave me more time to write, but I was in a fairly foul mood for being left out of so many things, that I realized I needed to step back from the blog, lest I write something I might regret later.
Happily I am well again aside from a tiny lingering cough, so I can return to once again regale you with tales from Pez Maya, Mexico. I hope you are enjoying the blog...please let me know if there is anything in particular you would like to hear more about!
My second week here in Mexico had me focusing primarily on completing my Advanced Open Water training. This requires 5 special dives beyond my Open Water training from last week. The first was a Boat Dive, which was truly no different than my previous dives. They simply make it a category of dive, since you could have been diving from docks or from the beach. The second was a Naturalist Dive that involved searching out and recording different species of fish and coral and algae and correctly identifying them later on--a bit of a precurser to my work later on during this expedition. My third dive was called Peak Performance Buoyancy. It required us to swim through smallish hoops without touching the side (right side up and up side down--much harder than you think, due to the tank on your back). We also had to race our fellow divers underwater, keeping a small floating ball under a spoon as we kicked along. Lastly for that dive, we took our fins off underwater, just to see what it was like. Suffice it to say, we got nowhere fast. The fourth dive was a Navigation Dive, where we learned how to follow bearings under water with a compass, as well as how to judge distances by counting steady fin kicks. The last dive however, was by far the best: the Deep Dive. This is the dive that certifies us to be able to dive down to 100 feet, or 30 meters. We went to a particularly deep site called ¨Special K¨ (don´t ask me why, even the staff doesn´t know). As we descended, I swear it felt like another world. You loose the ability to see the color red, the deeper you go, then orange, then yellow and so forth. At our depth, it was mostly just red and some orange that were totally off. Our instructor pulled out a tomato, and I swear the outside was purple and the inside was green. I´ve been told blood also looks like a very dark green that far underwater, but I promise, that´s not from personal experience! We only had a total of 16 minutes for this dive (as opposed to our normal 40 minutes), otherwise we would run the risk of having to perform a number of safety stops in order to ensure no chance of getting decompression sickness, otherwise known as the bends.
After this dive, I was officially Advanced Open Water certified, and would begin my coral spotting dives. These dives are designed to familiarize us with the way the coral actually looks under water, because many of the pictures in our books don´t do them justice. It´s often very difficult bordering on impossible to tell them apart from photos, so the spot dives become absolutely invaluable in learning to differenciate them, and eventually for passing our coral exams.
At the end of the week, starting on Friday, we had a Turtle Festival in the nearby town of Tulum which I mentioned in my last blog. Adults and children gathered in Tulum to celebrate the end of turtle hatching season. GVI provided a host of childrens´games designed to educate them on the local species of turtles as well as how to protect the them from beach pollution. Did you know that turtles lay between 60 and 120 eggs at a time? And that they´ve been around for over 120 million years? And that they can live over 100 years old? And that of the 4 species of marine turtles that live in the area, only 1 is an herbivore? (the Green Turtle! big surprise) And that of the 7 species of marine turtle in the world, that Mexico as a whole has 6 that visit her shores? Anyway...the games went over very well, and my Spanish got quite the kickstart as well. Trying to communicate was often frustrating and slow, but the children were patient, and by the end of the night, I was forgetting myself, and asking our base manager what we were going to eat for dinner in Spanish instead of English.
That about brings me to my falling ill and fairly foul mood. Most everyone in my expedition went out on Friday and Saturday nights, and I stayed in, hoping that some extra sleep would speed my recovery from my cold. Hopefully I´ll get to make up for it this weekend! I´ll try to finish up my second blog tomorrow, so you all can get fully caught up on the goings on here in Mexico. Another apology--my camera has been dead all week, so I haven´t been able to take, nor load any pictures. I´ll do my best to charge it for tomorrow though!
Hasta luego mis amigos! Check back tomorrow for (cross your fingers) another update!
Happily I am well again aside from a tiny lingering cough, so I can return to once again regale you with tales from Pez Maya, Mexico. I hope you are enjoying the blog...please let me know if there is anything in particular you would like to hear more about!
My second week here in Mexico had me focusing primarily on completing my Advanced Open Water training. This requires 5 special dives beyond my Open Water training from last week. The first was a Boat Dive, which was truly no different than my previous dives. They simply make it a category of dive, since you could have been diving from docks or from the beach. The second was a Naturalist Dive that involved searching out and recording different species of fish and coral and algae and correctly identifying them later on--a bit of a precurser to my work later on during this expedition. My third dive was called Peak Performance Buoyancy. It required us to swim through smallish hoops without touching the side (right side up and up side down--much harder than you think, due to the tank on your back). We also had to race our fellow divers underwater, keeping a small floating ball under a spoon as we kicked along. Lastly for that dive, we took our fins off underwater, just to see what it was like. Suffice it to say, we got nowhere fast. The fourth dive was a Navigation Dive, where we learned how to follow bearings under water with a compass, as well as how to judge distances by counting steady fin kicks. The last dive however, was by far the best: the Deep Dive. This is the dive that certifies us to be able to dive down to 100 feet, or 30 meters. We went to a particularly deep site called ¨Special K¨ (don´t ask me why, even the staff doesn´t know). As we descended, I swear it felt like another world. You loose the ability to see the color red, the deeper you go, then orange, then yellow and so forth. At our depth, it was mostly just red and some orange that were totally off. Our instructor pulled out a tomato, and I swear the outside was purple and the inside was green. I´ve been told blood also looks like a very dark green that far underwater, but I promise, that´s not from personal experience! We only had a total of 16 minutes for this dive (as opposed to our normal 40 minutes), otherwise we would run the risk of having to perform a number of safety stops in order to ensure no chance of getting decompression sickness, otherwise known as the bends.
After this dive, I was officially Advanced Open Water certified, and would begin my coral spotting dives. These dives are designed to familiarize us with the way the coral actually looks under water, because many of the pictures in our books don´t do them justice. It´s often very difficult bordering on impossible to tell them apart from photos, so the spot dives become absolutely invaluable in learning to differenciate them, and eventually for passing our coral exams.
At the end of the week, starting on Friday, we had a Turtle Festival in the nearby town of Tulum which I mentioned in my last blog. Adults and children gathered in Tulum to celebrate the end of turtle hatching season. GVI provided a host of childrens´games designed to educate them on the local species of turtles as well as how to protect the them from beach pollution. Did you know that turtles lay between 60 and 120 eggs at a time? And that they´ve been around for over 120 million years? And that they can live over 100 years old? And that of the 4 species of marine turtles that live in the area, only 1 is an herbivore? (the Green Turtle! big surprise) And that of the 7 species of marine turtle in the world, that Mexico as a whole has 6 that visit her shores? Anyway...the games went over very well, and my Spanish got quite the kickstart as well. Trying to communicate was often frustrating and slow, but the children were patient, and by the end of the night, I was forgetting myself, and asking our base manager what we were going to eat for dinner in Spanish instead of English.
That about brings me to my falling ill and fairly foul mood. Most everyone in my expedition went out on Friday and Saturday nights, and I stayed in, hoping that some extra sleep would speed my recovery from my cold. Hopefully I´ll get to make up for it this weekend! I´ll try to finish up my second blog tomorrow, so you all can get fully caught up on the goings on here in Mexico. Another apology--my camera has been dead all week, so I haven´t been able to take, nor load any pictures. I´ll do my best to charge it for tomorrow though!
Hasta luego mis amigos! Check back tomorrow for (cross your fingers) another update!
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Welcome to Pez Maya!
It´s amazing what a clear easterly ocean view can do to make one a morning person. For the past week I have been waking up at 5:30am and being ready to work by 6am. When I leave my ¨house¨I can still see the moon and the stars, but as the minutes pass, the sky begins to brighten and I witness the day being born across the sea. There is something empowering and sublime about it. For me, a sunrise is definitely better than any cup of coffee.
I´ll tell you about my first week in a moment but first a bit about my hosts, GVI. Global Vision International has the following little blurb on their website which is a good little summation of their company: ¨Global Vision International (GVI) runs responsible volunteering programs in over 40 countries around the world. We offer volunteers the chance for a hands-on experience by personally contributing to important conservation initiatives and community projects. Volunteer programs run from one week to 2 years.¨ You can read up more about them here: http://www.gviusa.com/. I did a decent amout of research on these kinds of volunteer travel companies, and GVI seemed the most organized and well run of the bunch, and so far my experiences with them have only supported my research.
A typical day with them starts, as I mentioned, at 5:30 with a ritual daily application of sunscreen and bug repellant. At 6am, we begin our duties, which include things like making breakfast, raking the sand to keep sandflies down, readying the boat supplies, sweeping the common areas and cleaning the bathrooms. At 6:30 we eat breakfast, which is usually oatmeal, or cereal, or pancakes. Then we often have a lecture about reef ecology, or about the reservation we live on, the Sian Ka´an Biosphere, or about the local coral or fish species. After that, we gather BCDs, regulators and air tanks for the first dive of the day. While we are learning how to dive, we´re only generally doing one dive a day, but once we´re all certified to do reef research we´ll be doing two 40 minute dives every day. Lunch is generally lentils or beans and rice, or pasta and vegetables. We never have meat because the base doesn´t have electricity except for a few hours at night, so refridgeration becomes impossible. More dives go out in the afternoon, and then we put away the equipment, push the boats back onto the beach, and eat dinner--once again, a meal of vegetables with beans, rice, pasta, lentils, or potatoes. After dinner we have a briefing covering the schedule of the following day, and any comments that staff or volunteers wish to make about the days activities. In between dives, there is always a bit of free time so we can read our diving manuals, study our coral and fish species, or just relax in a hammock. Sometimes, we can even, GASP! take a bucket shower, and remove the layers of sunscreen, repellant, and salt from our bodies (only to layer it on again nearly immediately of course).
You now know what a typical day for me is like down here. That said, schedules can change from week to week, and we often have special events to take part in. Next week, Tulum hosts the annual celebration of the end of the turtle hatching season with the Turtle Festival. There are games for kids and special baby turtle releases, as well as artistic performances and vendors from all over selling environmentally minded wares. GVI will be participating by creating some of those games for the children, as well as helping with crowd control during the turtle release. Hopefully I´ll have a lovely update for you all on that next week!
Til then, I´ll leave you with two pictures of some baby turtles on our own beach here at our base, Pez Maya. Enjoy!
Thursday, October 1, 2009
I am here!
I broke one of my cardinal travel rules yesterday. I packed more than I could comfortably carry by myself. That rule used to be shorter...it used to say, "Never pack more than you can carry" but I since learned yesterday that the human body can be pushed to some very uncomfortable limits, and I'd rather not go through that again any time soon....1 heavy tall backpack, 2 heavy smaller backpacks and a shoulderbag don't mix, especially in the sodden midafternoon heat, down four long blocks filled with mexican men offering me "alternative" places to stay the night..... ah well, lesson learned.
I'm here!! A crazy rainstorm visited later in the afternoon...I swear it must have poured about 2 inches of rain in a single hour. I wisely found some dinner during the storm and happily watched while the skies opened up on all the silly tourists who were still walking around. A beautiful cool breeze, the sound of the splashing rain, a table to myself, a beer, a dish called Pollo Mayan which included fried plantains (!! yum !!), and the incredibly amazing sound of lightning cracking less than a mile away. It wasn't the worst way to spend the evening, certainly. Though I imagine the solitude would get to me after a while.
I shall be meeting my fellow expedition members tomorrow morning at 10am at the Hotel Colorado. From there, we'll be heading off to the base in the Sian Ka'an Biosphere, so I don't imagine I'll have another chance to update until the weekend after next, most likely. So for now...bienvenidos, y hasta luego!
I'm here!! A crazy rainstorm visited later in the afternoon...I swear it must have poured about 2 inches of rain in a single hour. I wisely found some dinner during the storm and happily watched while the skies opened up on all the silly tourists who were still walking around. A beautiful cool breeze, the sound of the splashing rain, a table to myself, a beer, a dish called Pollo Mayan which included fried plantains (!! yum !!), and the incredibly amazing sound of lightning cracking less than a mile away. It wasn't the worst way to spend the evening, certainly. Though I imagine the solitude would get to me after a while.
I shall be meeting my fellow expedition members tomorrow morning at 10am at the Hotel Colorado. From there, we'll be heading off to the base in the Sian Ka'an Biosphere, so I don't imagine I'll have another chance to update until the weekend after next, most likely. So for now...bienvenidos, y hasta luego!
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
A Reflection on Burning Man 2009
Did you know that for one week, Black Rock City becomes the third largest city in Nevada? With diners and bars, spas, movie theaters and dance clubs, pyrotechnics and fireworks like you've never seen before, stages for all kinds of entertainment and even a roller skating rink, you'd generally wonder why the 50,000 residents of BRC end up leaving every year after just one week.
Perhaps it is because of the searing hot temperatures of well over 100 degrees during the day, or the approach of freezing temperatures at night. Perhaps it is the soil, with a PH of 11, that in combination with the extremely dry air, slowly dries up and cracks your skin. Perhaps it is the lack of running water and general indoor plumbing. Perhaps it is the white-out dust storms that roll in like clockwork during the hottest hours of the day, and can sometimes last all afternoon and into the night. No showers, no flushable toilets, and relatively little communication with the rest of the world.
The location is a pretty inhospitable one. Now that I mention it, why would anyone want to live there? Minus the pyrotechnics perhaps, most American cities have all the amenities I listed in the first paragraph. So why do those 50,000 people leave their homes to move to Black Rock City for that one week?
The answer for many is because no where in the world can you see this much creativity, ingenuity, and spontaneous kindness, all at once. I once described Wildfire, the firespinning retreat I attend every year as follows: "I saw a 15 foot tall man, and there were balls of flame flying through the mists at night, streaking around the bodies of half naked tribal folk, and club music pulsing in my ears in the middle of the woods, and hugs from complete strangers, and mead shared around a fire. Surely these are not things that happen in the reality of 21st century America? Or did I wander through the mists on Friday night and find my own Avalon, a place where magic and other such wonders still exist?"
Burning Man takes this idea of an alternate dreamworld to the next dimension. There were giant sized LED rubix cubes that required 3 people to solve, fossilized dragons to ride, pirate ships to come aboard, snowcones and massages freely given, a wooden temple of soaring grace, massive games of tetris to play, hugs from every new friend, smores every night, and pancakes every morning, lights that mezmorized, music that moved, rockets that launched, fire that danced in the hands of over 1500 firespinners, and a 40 foot tall man that raised his arms in salute, in joyous epiphany, like a conductor before his symphony, and he burned, brightly, exquisitely, radiently, before those 50,000 citizens his city. And this is all only one small slice of one person's experience of this magnificent city.
There is such a multitude of things to do all around the city, all around the clock, that it is inevitable that different people view the event in different ways. They also all come here expecting something slightly different, looking for something different, and by god, that is what they get. Every experience is unique. Seeing every piece of art created for the event helps to drive that home. Our outlets for creativity and our sources of inspiration are so varied that one find here a veritable rainbow of the human spirit reflected in these inventions.
There was one thing I experienced however, that drew every single citizen close to my heart. The Temple is a tradition started by a man who mourned for his son. Many people make pilgrimages out past the Man, into deep playa to the Temple, to inscribe a message, or to leave a memorial. There were messages to lost loves, to parents and grandparents that have passed on, to husbands and wives, to friends. I could not help but lose myself in the maze of these messages, with tears streaming down my face. Some proclaimed their freedom from fear, some begged for it. Some denounced those that had wronged them, and some forgave them. Some messages were long and heartbreakingly personal, dealing with divorce, cancer, rape, suicide, some asking for understanding or acceptance, or forgiveness. And everywhere I looked I saw another human spirit just like mine, that loves and fears, that gets mad, and confused, and cries, and laughs and celebrates their life. Oh the paradox, that all of our experiences in life are so varied and complex and different, and yet...and yet how similar we all are.
The day after the Man burns, the Temple burns as well. For the burning of the Man there was a cacophanous noise raised by the people, a raucuous celebration of life and destruction, the cycle of our existence. For the Temple's burn, there was relative silence. There was reverence. There was awe. Just before it lit, there were shooting stars in the form of skydivers with streaming flares spiraling down from the heavens. It was a wonder to behold.
One of the ultimate messages Burning Man has to teach is that of impermanence. Once the Man and the Temple burn, they are gone. Once the water runs out, there's none left. The desert cannot sustain us. We have to leave after that week, because our supplies are gone, and our skin is suffering. We also have pledged to make the event one that leaves no trace of our occupation of the land. This means that every piece of matter that did not originally come from the desert gets removed, and the city turns back into a dry lake bed once again.
And so we leave the desert, trying to hold on to every vestige of the spirit we encounter here, and bring it back to the "default" world to which we're forced to return. It's hard. The default world is colder than Black Rock City, in more ways than temperature. Strangers don't hug, they avoid eye contact. If strangers tried to offer free food, they would be mistrusted. Spinning fire on the streets is highly illegal in most cities. But nevertheless, we each do what we can to make the world burn a bit brighter, til the next year when we can blaze in the desert once more.
Perhaps it is because of the searing hot temperatures of well over 100 degrees during the day, or the approach of freezing temperatures at night. Perhaps it is the soil, with a PH of 11, that in combination with the extremely dry air, slowly dries up and cracks your skin. Perhaps it is the lack of running water and general indoor plumbing. Perhaps it is the white-out dust storms that roll in like clockwork during the hottest hours of the day, and can sometimes last all afternoon and into the night. No showers, no flushable toilets, and relatively little communication with the rest of the world.
The location is a pretty inhospitable one. Now that I mention it, why would anyone want to live there? Minus the pyrotechnics perhaps, most American cities have all the amenities I listed in the first paragraph. So why do those 50,000 people leave their homes to move to Black Rock City for that one week?
The answer for many is because no where in the world can you see this much creativity, ingenuity, and spontaneous kindness, all at once. I once described Wildfire, the firespinning retreat I attend every year as follows: "I saw a 15 foot tall man, and there were balls of flame flying through the mists at night, streaking around the bodies of half naked tribal folk, and club music pulsing in my ears in the middle of the woods, and hugs from complete strangers, and mead shared around a fire. Surely these are not things that happen in the reality of 21st century America? Or did I wander through the mists on Friday night and find my own Avalon, a place where magic and other such wonders still exist?"
Burning Man takes this idea of an alternate dreamworld to the next dimension. There were giant sized LED rubix cubes that required 3 people to solve, fossilized dragons to ride, pirate ships to come aboard, snowcones and massages freely given, a wooden temple of soaring grace, massive games of tetris to play, hugs from every new friend, smores every night, and pancakes every morning, lights that mezmorized, music that moved, rockets that launched, fire that danced in the hands of over 1500 firespinners, and a 40 foot tall man that raised his arms in salute, in joyous epiphany, like a conductor before his symphony, and he burned, brightly, exquisitely, radiently, before those 50,000 citizens his city. And this is all only one small slice of one person's experience of this magnificent city.
There is such a multitude of things to do all around the city, all around the clock, that it is inevitable that different people view the event in different ways. They also all come here expecting something slightly different, looking for something different, and by god, that is what they get. Every experience is unique. Seeing every piece of art created for the event helps to drive that home. Our outlets for creativity and our sources of inspiration are so varied that one find here a veritable rainbow of the human spirit reflected in these inventions.
There was one thing I experienced however, that drew every single citizen close to my heart. The Temple is a tradition started by a man who mourned for his son. Many people make pilgrimages out past the Man, into deep playa to the Temple, to inscribe a message, or to leave a memorial. There were messages to lost loves, to parents and grandparents that have passed on, to husbands and wives, to friends. I could not help but lose myself in the maze of these messages, with tears streaming down my face. Some proclaimed their freedom from fear, some begged for it. Some denounced those that had wronged them, and some forgave them. Some messages were long and heartbreakingly personal, dealing with divorce, cancer, rape, suicide, some asking for understanding or acceptance, or forgiveness. And everywhere I looked I saw another human spirit just like mine, that loves and fears, that gets mad, and confused, and cries, and laughs and celebrates their life. Oh the paradox, that all of our experiences in life are so varied and complex and different, and yet...and yet how similar we all are.
The day after the Man burns, the Temple burns as well. For the burning of the Man there was a cacophanous noise raised by the people, a raucuous celebration of life and destruction, the cycle of our existence. For the Temple's burn, there was relative silence. There was reverence. There was awe. Just before it lit, there were shooting stars in the form of skydivers with streaming flares spiraling down from the heavens. It was a wonder to behold.
One of the ultimate messages Burning Man has to teach is that of impermanence. Once the Man and the Temple burn, they are gone. Once the water runs out, there's none left. The desert cannot sustain us. We have to leave after that week, because our supplies are gone, and our skin is suffering. We also have pledged to make the event one that leaves no trace of our occupation of the land. This means that every piece of matter that did not originally come from the desert gets removed, and the city turns back into a dry lake bed once again.
And so we leave the desert, trying to hold on to every vestige of the spirit we encounter here, and bring it back to the "default" world to which we're forced to return. It's hard. The default world is colder than Black Rock City, in more ways than temperature. Strangers don't hug, they avoid eye contact. If strangers tried to offer free food, they would be mistrusted. Spinning fire on the streets is highly illegal in most cities. But nevertheless, we each do what we can to make the world burn a bit brighter, til the next year when we can blaze in the desert once more.
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