Travelling to robbery: Dive Safari

Scuba diving is well cool. It took me a while to get back into but once i remembered that the key rule is to be as calm as possible in every single moment then i managed not to cane through my air within seconds and saw some amazing things. the dive safari was a 3 day event, 3 days ona deserted beach in the middle of Tayrona National Park. We went on 8 dives of various degree of difficulty and depth. the two that most stand out are the night dive and the cave dive.

Diving at night is pretty strange, mainly because it's dark, but also because the fish seem o eb asleep until you shine a light on them and they swim off. we saw a rather large octopus which started off as rock coloured, then went bright pink, then swam off an turned the colour of sand but the most amazing thing was during the ascent back to the surface - everyone turned their lights out and the fluorescence caused by the plankton made it look like your body was covered in little disco lights.

And then the cave dive...first dive really where the dive master talked us through what we'd do, whilst looking a little worried. Apparently it was at the back of a big rock in the open sea, big waves, strong currents. We got there and were told that we had to jump off the boat and go straight down, no mucking around doing buddy checks in the water, as the currents would carry us off and dash us against the rock. So we all got out game faces on in the boat, jumped off whilst breathing out (intuitively un-obvious thing to do) and straight down we went. 30m to the cave, straight down, whilst swaying side to side from the current. Damned big cave that got narrower and darker, but looking from the back to the front you could see fish everywhere silhouetted against the blue of the open ocean. About 5 minutes in there and we looked up at the roof, all the oxygen that we'd exhaled had collected on the roof and made it look like a huge upside down puddle, kind of silver like a mirror that doesnt reflect. The Dive Master (the leader of the dive to those who haven't yet dived) started to indicate to swim up to the top of the cave. He released a fair bit of oxygen from his spare air, 25 metres under water, and we swam to a little ledge, poked our heads into the puddle of oxygen, took our respirators out and had a chat. As we left the cave we swam up above it and could see all the little bubbles escaping through the coral and rock making the surrounding area look like a huge aquarium.

Obviously cameras don't work all that well underwater so no photos of fish unfortunately, although there are some from another dive on a memory sick I destroyed in the jungle (another story), maybe i'll recover them somehow... but htis is the beach that was home for 3 days.

This was where most people slept...

I however, being a free thinker and a flashpacker with my own hammock, moved half way down the beach and slept between a couple of trees.

And this ain't no sunset like has been posted a million times before, this be a sunrise as seen from my hammock every morning.

Now you get a fair bit of time between dives so Scuba Steve and I decided to go and explore, three beaches along and about a 40 minute walk over teh hill there was a little town we headed too.

When we got there we found we'd forgot our money but managed to tick some beer of this man, Sixto, who ran the only restaurant in the tiny little village. We promised to return the next day on the boat to pay. Top man, been living there for 28 years and was pretty tranquilo. The town had a population of about 50, mainly fishermen.

There was a family of Pelicans living at the end of the beach. Their life seemed to mainly consist of sitting in tree or on rocks and then occasionally flying up into the air and dive bombing the water and catching fish. A very hypnotic sight.