below the surface

May 5 -- 6:42pm

A storm rages outside. I stay dry in the covered multi-purpose space, watching instructional DVDs (one of which is delayed an hour after the power goes out halfway through) and taking little quizzes. Yep, flew across the Bay of Bengal to take little quizzes. Missy, the hippie chick, teaches an Austrian couple around my age and I the fine art of not dying while scuba diving. The main focus: preventing your lungs from exploding.

Local food options are limited (there’s only the outdoor restaurant at the “resort”), so after class I take a walk into town to buy necessities: bottled water and cookies. And some chocolate since they happen to sell it.

Then it’s back to my duplex hut. The hut itself is elevated. The bathroom is at the bottom of the outdoor steps, next to where six vagabond dogs have made their home. The shower has no hot water, but at least it’s a shower...in the loosest sense of the word. The drain is just a hole cut into the corner tile where the floor meets the walls. The floor slopes slightly so the water drains through the hole.

My hut upstairs has a couple fans, a couple lights and a bed. A door leads to a balcony, but even with the door closed, there’s still a two foot space between the top of the wall and the ceiling. Thus, many strange and unusual creatures make their way inside my hut. The bamboo-framed bed has mosquito netting atop the canopy. You have to pull it down and tuck the bottom edges underneath the mattress. I do this, but still find many a little critter chilling next to me in bed. And even with the bugs that the netting keeps out, it’s still rather unsettling to see half inch black beetles directly above your head, separated from you by only the thin mesh fabric they rest on.


May 6 -- 6:18pm

Today we dive. Missy, the Austrians (Mike and Sigy) and I take a 45 minute boat ride to the shallow practice site. The boat is called a dunghi. It’s nothing fancy -- a narrow wooden ride with peeling paint and a ripped tarp hanging over the center. The motor is loud and repetitive. Bat! Bat! Bat! Bat! Bat! But any unpleasantness is made up for by the pleasing stench of burning fuel wafting through the air. Ahhhhhh...

We arrive at small, mostly secluded, Elephant Beach. Some uprooted trees lay sideways in the water, ferns growing on top of their now sideways trunks. Apparently after the tsunami a few years ago, the whole island sloped to one side, causing the seawater to drift toward the trees. The saltwater poisoned the roots and the trees toppled over.

Wearing our wetsuits, flippers, BCDs (the scuba vest that has hoses and other stuff on it), masks and big canisters of air, we go shoulder deep in the water. As Missy explains the “skills” we have to practice so that we don’t die, it starts raining -- first light, then hard. We ignore the loud blasts of thunder and continue our lesson, though apparently if there was lightning, we’d have stopped.

We put the breathing devices in our mouths and go underwater, kneeling on the sandy floor a few feet below the surface. One of the very first skills we must do is clear water out of our masks while underwater. It’s very basic -- you tilt your head down, lift the bottom of the mask off your face, then blow out through your nose while tilting your head up. The Austrians have no problems with this but I just can’t get it. I struggle. I swallow water. I repeatedly panic and rise up to the surface. I didn’t expect this to be so hard.

Missy has to spend extra time helping me. I feel dumb, like the slow kid in class. I get frustrated. And nervous. If I can’t master this simple skill (without panicking), how could I possibly do a real dive? I’m totally not a quitter, but I think about quitting. It doesn’t sound so bad. I could just spend the next three days relaxing in this tropical island paradise, playing with stray dogs and dodging torrential downpours.

But I know I’ll forever regret it if I don’t keep trying. Finally I sort of get it, clearing at least some of the water from my mask. We move on to the other skills, which I’m decent at. Not as good as the Austrians, but at least acceptable.

We do skills for a while, then take a short break, then more skills -- this time a few meters below the surface. I’m feeling better now, a little more confident. I’m still the slow kid in class, but even slow kids pick things up eventually.

And then, we dive. For 25 minutes, we explore the warm water of the Andaman Sea, swimming by colorful fish, blue sea stars, a huge and oddly beautiful sea cucumber. It’s very cool, the feeling of floating underwater. I’m glad I didn’t quit.

We take the dunghi back to Café Del Mar and log our dive. 25 minutes, 11.6 meters deep (at our deepest point), who we dove with, what animal life we saw. And then the four of us talk for a few hours over tea and coffee and a couple baskets of French fries. I knew I’d have a lot of time to myself on this trip, so I enjoy this bit of group interaction.

After the sun goes down, I walk along the beach, leaving my footprints in the slightly moist white sand. On one side of me lies a forest of mangrove and palm trees. On the other side, tied off dunghis bob gently in the low tide water among poking sprags of coral. The faint sound of water rolling in, the smell of sea salt in the air. I’m glad I came to the Andaman Islands.


May 6 -- 7:28pm

The power just went out during the middle of my (cold) shower. In the dark, I let the water continue to stream out, washing the soap off my body. Reaching blindly, I managed to get outside and back up the stairs to my hut. I write this by the light of my flashlight. I’m glad I remembered to bring a flashlight.


May 7 -- 4:29pm

Two big dives today. We start the first one by sitting in our gear on the edge of the boat, backs to the water. Then with one hand on the mask and the other on the weight belt, we roll in backwards. I’m nervous as I watch the others do this, but I do it anyway. It’s not so bad.

The first dive is breathtaking. We go as deep as 18 meters and see many exotic fish, a freaky moray eel, many sea cucumbers and sea slugs, which are actually cool and brightly colored.

And then comes what I’ve really been dreading. We have to do another skill to earn the official PADI (Professional Association of Diving Instructors) open water scuba certification -- we have to swim 200 meters, then float for ten minutes. To do the 200 meters, we have to circle the boat ten times. Now I’m okay with swimming underwater. But on the surface, I totally suck. I can swim for a (very) short distance, but that’s about it. So after I swim around the boat once, I am completely spent. I do my remaining nine laps floating on my back, kicking. Sure it’s cheesy, but Missy says it still counts. I’m just happy to get it over with, even if it seems to take forever.

After our second dive, we take the dunghi back to Café Del Mar, eating our typical dive lunch along the way: a hard boiled egg and rice with a few veggies, wrapped in plastic wrapped in newspaper. We eat it all with our hands. We also drink hot tea, which normally I don’t care for. But coming out of the water, it rocks.

Back on dry land, we are wiped out. I nod off repeatedly as we watch the last section of the instructional DVD. We take a final exam and I pass. Hizzah! It’ll be cool to get the certification, I guess (and the card will make a nice souvenir), but I doubt I’ll be scuba-ing again anytime soon.


May 9 -- 2:09am

My knees are sunburned. From just above the kneecap to just below, they are bright red, the result of the sun shining for the first time in days. It was between dives, for maybe half an hour. I was still wearing my wetsuit (which, coincidentally enough, extends to just above the kneecap), at least on my waist. I had pulled out of the upper part to let my chest breathe a little bit, to ease the tight wetsuit-created restriction. We sat in the rare sunlight while waiting for our nitrogen levels to go down, which you must do when doing multiple dives in a single day. After 15 minutes, I pulled back into the shade, which was a good decision as I now look at my sunburned face, neck, arms and chest. But they’re not as bad as my knees, which still poked into the sunlight and got some extra baking.

The dives are awesome. For the first time, we have almost no skills to work on. Just a few minutes playing with oversized compasses strapped to our wrists. We do a couple more “fun dives.” As seems to be my M.O., I get a little nervous just before the first one. Not sure why, since I’d already done it a few times before. But after we’ve been underwater for a while and we have to swim back up to the surface, I don’t want to get out.

We swim to a depth of 18 meters, checking out the picturesque corals and sea anemones and such. I see a puffer fish (non-puffed up), a lobster, a lionfish -- even a big octopus hiding in a hole in the wall. Even if I didn’t see these creatures, it was still neat just seeing all the fish and floating around in their element. Though I wouldn’t have complained if I got to see a sea turtle either.

A few times it hits me – at that exact moment, my co-workers are staring at a computer screen, eyes glazing over. And here I am in the middle of the Andaman Sea, a school of yellow striped fusilier swimming through me. I like my situation better.

Sigy takes a few pictures (including a few of me) with a disposable underwater camera. I hope the pictures come out. It would be so awesome to see pictures of me underwater, though who knows how recognizable I’d be under my mask and all that gear. It’s great that Sigy has a camera, but it distracts me a bit from just enjoying the below-the-surface scenery, embracing the serenity. I’d occasionally find myself subtlely posing when she’d be snapping a pic in my general direction. Oh well. They’ll email me the pictures later, presuming they came out. [7/16/07: it’s two months later and I have not received any pictures…dagnabbit]

It’s pouring rain by the time we get back to “dry” land. Seems like it’s always raining here. It makes sense since the monsoon season is about to start (my group is Barefoot Scuba’s very last group of the season). As we fill out our dive logs (and Missy gives us PADI stamps for legitimacy and fish stickers for fun), the rain still hits me, despite being eight feet in from the edge of the roof in the open-air restaurant.

Nobody else seems to care, but I watch 15, then 20, then 30 mosquitoes congregate on our table. Balancing on the edges of our glasses, exchanging pleasantries with each other, climbing into the cup of ketchup. It’s really gross. Though thankfully I don’t eat ketchup.

I look forward to my next hotel not having mosquitoes everywhere. And my bed not having fleas. Let’s hope it is completely critter free. My legs are covered with bug bites and I have little cuts all over my hands and feet (I’m not sure if saltwater is good or bad for those). Not sure how I got them all, probably from climbing in and out of the dunghi. But I know I got the nasty little cut on my finger when my folding chair abruptly folded and it caught my skin.

Pretty much everywhere I walk at the “resort,” I do it barefoot. Seems appropriate since Barefoot is the name of the place. And I might as well be barefoot since all the walking paths are covered with thick mud. I don’t want to completely ruin my shoes. And I just like being barefoot anyway.

When the rain takes a break, I go for a nice aimless walk down the one lane street, passing little farms and palm trees on my right, the entrances to small, ramshackle huts-on-the-beach resorts on the left. I exchange hellos with a few locals as we cross paths. A little girl asks me to take her picture, which I do. She smiles when she sees it. It’s a nice walk. I just hope it doesn’t start raining again.

I have dinner back at the outdoor restaurant -- an omelet along with chicken and noodles – the walk made me hungry. I give small pieces of chicken to my tiny kitten friend, who is visiting me again. The tiny kitten must have been starving because she even eats a noodle that fell on the ground. So I give her a bunch more. I’ve never seen a cat eat noodles before.

I go back to Port Blair tomorrow (technically today), then Calcutta the next day and Kathmandu the day after that. I’m tired, I feel ready to go back home now. But I already planned and paid for this long vacation after nearly six months abroad. Guess now I should actually finish it.

pictures from Havelock: CLICK HERE