Catching Up

It's just going to be impossible to do all the days, so I'm not going to bother, alas.

I've been writing things down in the travel book, so observations will come as I get back and recount, along with photos. But really, unfortunately, it's just not possible. I'm sure you're devastated.

To sum up: Until Thursday, we were doing our diving course. We did open water dives - ulp! Absolutely amazing. Even though we had skills to do, and horrible tasks to perform (I'm terrible at mask replacement and clearing - always forget to blow out through my nose) it was wonderful. We saw so many fish, including glorious purple & yellow things, and gorgeous orange & white anemonefish, and even the tendrils of a lionfish. Wonderful.

It was a bit of a contrast to go diving yesterday - we knew it'd be weird not diving with the wonderful Inka and Sufi at Bahari, but it was. The guy didn't really seem to care that my BCD didn't work, and then acted surprised when I ran out of air quickly. We were also repeatedly kicked and barged by a large (in height and numbers) Dutch family. Still... we saw stingrays. Tons of blue-spotted stingrays. They were incredible - just shot out of the sand like rockets. Absolutely amazing. Plus lots of gorgeous, glorious fish. So even a bad dive is good - and it made me feel confident about the safety procedures, because I was using someone else's air for a long time, and ascended with someone else, so all good.

That was all in Jambiani - on the east coast of the island where the water is truly turquoise, the sand is extremely fine and white, and it's glorious. We had some privacy issues - my observations on which I'll mull over and save for later, but again, people couldn't quite get their heads around us and what we were doing there. We ate amazing food, met an awesome Ugandan guy who was really interesting, talking about Uganda and his family, and walked along the beach in the full moon which produced spectacular amounts of light.

So a pretty good weekend - plus much reading - finished Choke by Chuck Palahniuk, and will have finished Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, too, as well as The World According to Garp, since I've been here. We didn't get much done last week - so much reading for our PADI certification, but hopefully again, that'll change.