Week 10....and that´s a wrap.

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...