TBD: July 2012

Best Dive Ever

Each Wednesday we go on turtle dives, which means we are paired up in buddy teams of 2, dropped in somewhere in the bay and told to swim left or right. The boat takes off leaving us on our own and we descend to our appropriate depth and start swimming 30 meters in one direction, turning left or right, swimming for 10 meters, turning and swimming back the other way and so on looking for turtles the entire time. If we see a turtle, we abandon our back and forth pattern and follow the turtle observing it the entire time. This past Wednesday was the last dive day for the 4 weekers and I was paired up with another American, Sage, who is leaving this weekend. Not only did we see a turtle, but we saw an eel, clownfish, lobster, nudibrand and a whole series of awesome fish. I took lots of video of the dive and have made a nice little compilation video, but the internet is too slow to upload it right now! In the meantime, pictures will have to suffice. So far, it was my best dive here, but I have over 100 left so I'm sure I'll top it soon.

Can you find the eel?

My hair always looks awesome underwater and on land

Can you find the lobster?

Lobster Tail

Sage and I

TURTLE!

La Digue

We went to La Digue last weekend, which was pretty much one of the most amazing weekends ever. La Digue is the island where "the" beach is - you know the one that you always see photos of in calendars with the big granite rocks, white sand and palm trees? Yeah, we went there. It is about an hour ferry ride from Mahe, a group of 17 of us went there last weekend and spent two nights there. The weekend was full of all of my favorite activities - hiking, biking, walking, swimming, drinking coconut water straight from the actual coconut, cold beers overlooking the incredible sunset, etc. Words can't do it justice, so just look at the pretty pictures instead, which still don't quite capture how amazing it really is.

Holding a postcard of that exact same picture on Anse d'Argent, maybe I'll get around to mailing it soon

Anse Cocos beach

Attempting to leap into the air

Anse Cocos

Biking to Anse D'Argent

Local boys, walking to school

Cemetary

View halfway through the hardest hike/scramble I've ever done

Our hiking "path" - over all those rocks to that sandy patch in the distance

Where we came from - that chunk of rocks way off in the distance.

Ferry port in La Digue

Panorama from La Digue, looking at Praslin

The big rock we hiked to

Seychelles flag, on the ferry to La Digue

"The" beach

Which way?

Tortoise!

Renting bikes

Sunset from the second highest point on the island

view to both sides of the island from the very highest spot - 333 meters above sea level

Highest spot on the island

One Month In

I have officially been here in Seychelles for one month now. Hard to believe! We have made it through our first four week period – 19 people (the “four weekers”) are leaving this weekend and 10 “newbies” are arriving on Saturday. Only 7 of us are staying , so we will have a smaller group of for this next 4 week period, which means more dives for us!

Here are a few things I’ve learned over the past 4 weeks:

· How to be a better diver, I’m up to 24 dives now and just over 16 hours underwater, though I am still learning and improving on every dive
· How NOT to navigate underwater (blog post to follow)
· How to husk a coconut with a pick ax and how to crack open a coconut with a machete
· How to pick a young coconut from the tree and cut a nice hole in it for fresh coconut water straight from the source (so much better than that canned crap in the States!)
· What it feels like to step on a very large snail with bare feet (not good)
· How to make different kinds of bread from scratch – flatbread, pizza dough, rolls, focaccia bread, etc. No, I have never attempted this before. Why would I? I live in America, we are too lazy to do anything ourselves when we can just buy it at the supermarket.
· How to estimate distances and depths in meters , not feet and yards and how to estimate temperature in Celsius, not Fahrenheit
· How to tell time the British way: 1:30 is “half past one,” not “one thirty”
· 30+ people can survive on a diet based on rice, potatoes, pasta, bread and porridge
· How to say “let’s go!” in Arabic – “Yala! Yala!”
· How to run the air compressor to fill the air tanks for all the dives
· How to correctly identify 50 different coral types found here in Seychelles
· Walking distances are all relative to the number of hills – the bus stop may only be a mile up the road but there are 4 major hills to climb to get there = 30-40 minute walk.
· Bus drivers here are some of the bravest (or craziest) people I know, as there are some insane hairpin turns and very narrow two way roads that they speed down, honking their horn to warn oncoming traffic
· Brits and Americans, while sharing a common language, do use different words for things. For instance, a “rubber” in Britain is an eraser, and someone will often turn to me on the boat and ask for a rubber for their slate, which always makes me smirk just a little bit.
· Fruit bats are possibly the loudest and most annoying animals I know, though I can now sleep through most of their squawking at night
· Life without a cell phone is so freeing and awesome, sorry to anyone who has tried to get hold of me in the past month and failed. I’ll call you back in December. Turn your phone off for a bit, or better yet, leave it at home and actually pay attention to your surroundings and the people you are with. It’s way better.
· Life without daily access to the internet is possible and actually really nice – I have no idea what is going on the world, but I have never been more present to anything that I’ve been doing in my life as I am here. Again, sorry to those of you emailing me and waiting patiently for days (or weeks) for a response – I’ll get back to you eventually; it’ll just be in Seychelles time…

More Underwater Fun & Local Day trips

A couple weekends ago we hiked up to a nearby waterfall for a little swim - you can jump into the water from the rocks about 15 feet above - below are a few shots of the jump........

Jumping in

More jumping

The waterfall

Here are some underwater shots from the past few weeks - both from snorkel trips and from diving. I started actually editing them to make the colors more realistic and not so blue, since my GoPro doesn't have too many settings other than "on" or "off."