Humidity exists here after all!

Woke up this morning and you could cut the air with a knife. Humidity has made itself known in Punta Cana. Luckily, we still have the nice breeze to keep the “ick” out, but you can still feel it a bit.

We went to Catalina Island off the southern coast yesterday. We got picked up by a bus around 7:15 or so even though we were told to show up at 6:30. Dominican time runs a little slow here. At least they admit it. You best not be expecting things to happen right when they say they will…but heck, you are on vacation so what do you care (except for the dude that went yesterday and was told we would be back around 3:30 so he made reservations at one of the dinner spots for 6:30…which was about the time we rolled back in to the resort….all nasty from a day of diving).

The roads here are…uhm…very religious? Let’s just say they are very holy (get it? Jim made a funny!). It wasn’t so bad going there (the hour and a half ride) cause we were up in the front, but on the way back, we were towards the last of the people on the bus and were in the back past the rear wheel. Roller coaster time!

On the ride there, one of the tour staff was giving us information about what we were seeing and things like that. We passed sugar cane fields (apparently introduced by Christopher Columbus in 1494) and went over a river that was used in Rambo II AND Apocalypse Now (which I would swear was filmed in the Philippines….but maybe not). Every time before he said anything he would drum his fingers on the microphone to make sure it was working properly (pidda pidda pidda) and then say “Okay buddies….”. That way you could zone out till the next “pidda pidda pidda” was heard and then try to decipher what was said through the accent. Always entertaining!

We made it to Hermana, where the tri-hull catamaran was docked and then proceeded to walk down 50 or so stairs to the dock. These stairs were easily a foot tall each and relatively steep. This is called foreshadowing because this comes into play later in the story. If you are a diver, one of the things you get to do is schlep your gear to the boat. I had my stuff (fins, mask, wetsuit) as well as the BCD and regulator supplied by the group we booked the tour through. We got on the boat and Kristen found a seat while I set up my gear in preparation for the dive.

The boat was pretty slow. For some reason, almost every time I have been on a dive boat it has been donkey slow. I see all these other dive boats zipping around and seemingly having a grand time while my boats putt putt out to the dive sites. We could see Catalina Island from the dock…it didn’t seem very far away, but it still took an easy 30 minutes to chug on over. At least they had really loud Latin music blaring from the speakers. I thought it would get on my nerves, but it was actually pretty fun to listen to and made you bounce to the beat.

There were probably 30 or so people on the boat. Maybe 12 of us were divers and the rest were going to snorkel where we were diving. The first dive was a wall dive (exactly what it sounds like…you dive down and swim along a wall looking at the cool coral and fish and other things like that). The boat anchored on the shelf above the wall so people could snorkel in water that was only around 10 or 15 feet deep. Kristen said she did a little snorkeling, but the masks she tried (2 total) leaked and water kept filling them up. Not conducive to seeing cool stuff.

The dive itself was actually pretty lame after it had been built up by the people here in the resort. It did not bode well for “Caribbean diving”. The wall was pretty devoid of life and the area where the boat anchored had a lot of plastic bottles and other trash on the seabed. Don’t litter, children! We did see a pretty cool rock fish….looks like a rock…but it’s a fish. But other than that, it was pretty disappointing.

The second dive had us getting in the water and then the boat taking all non-divers to the island shore where they could laze about (Kristen) or snorkel from the shore itself. The boat would then come back and pick us up and take us to the island for lunch. This dive was MUCH better. Lots of sea life to see and I even took the camera along to snap some photos. I will say that I blew through my air quicker than I wanted to….I think because I was busy trying to take pictures and not focusing on breathing slowly and stuff. So I didn’t get as long a “bottom time” as I would have wanted, but I did get a couple of cool pictures.

Catch of the day!

Lunch was a BBQ and we lazed on the beach for a couple hours before slowly chugging our way back to Hermana. The sea was really choppy on the way back and this one woman who was sitting on the side sunning herself kept getting drenched by waves that hit the boat. Fun times. Once we got back to the dock, all the divers were asked to carry a bag back to the bus (schlepping our gear again). Only they had all the bags mixed up and it didn’t really matter if you got your original bag or not…just that all the bags made it back to the bus. So I had my bag with my gear in it and also grabbed a random bag from the pile. I picked the wrong bag. This thing had to have weighed something close to 500 pounds and this is where me telling you about the stairs down to the boat comes into play. We had to go back up them. It sucked. Especially after being in the sun all day and doing 2 dives. Dives seem to take a little out of me (may be the Dramamine talking too) so carrying that bag up was not good times.

I survived and the ride back was nice and bumpy like we talked about earlier. We stopped once at a souvenir place where it was “safe” and we wouldn’t have to bargain for a good price. Of course this place is in league with the tour company for some kind of kick back because the prices weren’t all the great and the selection sort of sucked. On the plus side, though, the war against Pepsi won a small victory with that stop. Our resort has an exclusive with Pepsi so, other than water and alcohol, you only have Pepsi products to choose from. Well as everyone knows, Diet Coke is much better than Diet Pepsi and at this crappy souvenir place on the side of the road, they had the shiny silver love known as Coca Cola Light (close enough!). Mmmmm good.

Dinner was the buffet here. I am glad we are at a place that has different themed places to eat dinner on top of the buffet place. I mean the buffet has a huge selection, but it doesn’t change all that much. The breakfast and lunch buffets are pretty much the same every day and sure they have 100 things to choose from, but a lot of them don’t seem all that appetizing. So the GTJTTOTD would be: if you are doing an all inclusive deal, make sure they have more than just a buffet for dinner. Find some place that has different themed restaurants you can go to even if you DO have to dress up for them (which in this case means guys have to wear long pants and shirts with sleeves…no wife beater T’s, please. Women, of course, can wear whatever the hell they want to which is crap…or may mean they realize that women will dress up for these places without being told while the men need a little help. Sorry for the long parenthetical here).

Today I did a couple more dives out off the coast here. I think the first one was a repeat of one of the dives I did on Tuesday but it might have been a different location. It was swimming through little caverns and caves and stuff. I did much better today than I did Tuesday…barely hit the sides of the caves at all and actually had a good time. The caverns were cool looking when you aren’t feeling like crap and I didn’t get claustrophobia at all. I also didn’t tempt fate and took Dramamine before heading out on the boat. It could be that or maybe I was more into the groove this time, but I really enjoyed these dives. Saw some really awesome sea life including a really huge green eel. It had to be 6-8 inches in diameter and 4 or 5 feet long. And that, my friends, looks really big when you are in the water with it, but it was content to sit on the sea floor looking at us. Also saw this really cool white fish that had little greenish squares on it. Almost looked like a puffer fish (and might have been a variety of one). Unfortunately I didn’t take the camera this time because I thought it wouldn’t be worth it based off the first 2 dives Tuesday and I wanted to work on my breathing and bottom time.

My dive buddy, Chris, was a nice guy from Washington DC. We met him yesterday on the Catalina Island trip, but he was assigned to a different dive group than me on that trip. This morning we paired up and were buddies (you check on each other…make sure they don’t run out of air…don’t ignore them while going off and looking at rays [looking at you, Sophia!!]). Anyway, he didn’t take Dramamine and didn’t think it would be as choppy as it was. And he yakked on the second dive….as in took his regulator out of his mouth for a bit and fed the fish some of his breakfast. That’s right! Didn’t see that coming, did yah! I joked with him a bit afterwards about how the regulator (what you breath through) is supposed to be able to pass through chunks 2 inches big, but he said he didn’t really want to test that out. I don’t really blame him. On the plus side, he gave me some tips on breathing that seem to be helping out. I had more air in my tanks when the second dive ended than I had on the first dive, anyway.

Tonight we are going to hit the casino at the Riu Palace Macao and win some of the trip expenses back (at least that’s the plan).

Cya!