Curacao Diving!

Well it’s my last day in Curacao and it has been nice and relaxing. Overall, I would say the weather has been hot with a hint of smolder…but the place I am staying is down on an inlet, out of the sun and gets a killer breeze which lowers the overall temp a lot. Got to love that!

I went downtown…or to the touristy part of Curacao today. It was sadly devoid of really trashy trinkets. Instead it was mostly clothing and what not. I guess Dutch tourists dig island garb or something. It was interesting walking around seeing all these red/pink Dutch people who had been in the sun way too long. Of course yesterday I baked a bit too much during the surface interval after the first dive (surface interval is a minimum required time that you stay out of the water to allow all the bad Nitrogen that has been collecting in your body to get out.) So I am a bit red and itchy myself.

The buildings in downtown Curacao are all painted bright pastel colors (sorry, didn’t have my camera with me…it was in the case drying out after the dive...but this picture shows what I am talking about a bit). It’s really pretty although a lot of the buildings are vacant and in disrepair. Crowley, the dive master I dove with, said the story is one of the governors (or whatever the overseer of the island is called…it’s a Dutch territory so it’s not a president or anything) had bad migraines and complained that all the white buildings brought them on so he ordered all the buildings painted pastel colors. Sounds good, anyway.

In the middle of Curacao (and I mean this literally, there is a waterway going through Willemstad to a bay in the center of the island), there is an oil refinery. Apparently, back in the day, Shell had a big operation here. Nowadays, Venezuela sends their crude up here to get refined, gets it back, and then sells it to Curacao with a little mark-up. Chavez is no dummy. Oh and Crowley said Curacao is the home port for the cruise ship Freewinds. Guess what that is…I’ll wait. No. Wrong. Guess again. That’s right, it is a cruise ship operated by Scientologists. According to Crowley Tom Cruise has been down to sail on it. It goes out to international waters and apparently that’s where the final “you are the king shit, high muckey muck” ceremony takes place and all your Thetans are clean...or gone…or whatever they are supposed to do.

The past three days I have done 2 dives a day with Crowley and various others who would come out for the day. Crowley…how do you like that one? First time I saw his name in one of my initial contact emails, I thought of Alistair Crowley and the Ozzy song Mr. Crowley….what went on in your head? He was a pretty cool British dude who came here after getting tired of being a dive master in Thailand…after being tired of being a Systems Expert for Nortel…go figure.

The first day (and I didn’t bring my camera cause…I dunno why) we dove the reef at the dive shop itself. The company I dove with is called the Dive Bus (check out their site...its pretty cool)…and they have a van they use to drive people around to the dive sites. Pretty cool idea. Apparently Bonaire is even more of a shore dive place and I didn’t see anything like this there. Anyway, the dive site there is called the car pile cause back in the early 70’s some dude thought it would be a great idea to create a reef out of old cars…which have now rusted away to where you can really only see their frames anymore. The reef where there are no cars was pretty nice. The sea life isn’t as abundant as the Caymans, but it isn’t bad. Saw tons of scorpion fish and eels and the reason I wish I had had the camera: a peacock flounder…which sounds odd and does lie flat with both eyes on one side, but was still really cool looking. I also played with how much weight I took. I was doing 18 pounds in the Caymans and did 16 on the first dive and then 14 on the second with no problems. I have no idea if it is related or if I am just getting the breathing down (5 seconds in and 5 seconds out…nice and slow), but the dives were 55 and 62 minutes long. Granted we were 60 feet going out and then around 20 feet coming back, but I was happy with my air consumption.

Yesterday we dove a place called Vaersenbaai (how would you like that as your wheel of fortune word? “I would like another freaking vowel, Pat”). These are all shore dives meaning you drive there, gear up, and then walk into the water and swim out a ways on the surface before going under (saves the air). Supposedly there had been eagle rays spotted there, but we didn’t see any on either dive. It was pretty cool, on the first dive we walked out on the beach, swam out and followed the reef to the left (and then came back) and on the second dive we followed it on the right. I did take my camera for this one and we saw a lot of good stuff…(see below).

A little (relatively speaking) turtle. Nice colors on its shell (once again, click on picture to see large sized version):

A group or herd or pride or flock or what-have-you of blue tang...also known as Dory after the character in Finding Nemo. I am sure all of them speak whale too:

Cool looking anemone (in my opinion anyway). Has these blue/purple tips:
Spotted Moray eel. They aren't chomping at you, they are smelling if you are edible:
Wouldn't yah barracuda!
I believe this is a golden moray eel.
Today we dove a site called Director’s Bay (named after the private beach the directors of Shell used to have) and a place called tug boat (for the tug boat that sank after the ship it was tugging (or pulling) dropped its anchor through the boat). On the way there, we passed the well to do portion of the island. Crowley pointed out this one huge house on a hills that apparently Andruw Jones owns (formerly a baseball player for the Braves…not sure where he plays now). Crowley said he is from here. Didn’t see a while ton of stuff today, but they were still nice dives. Not as good as Vaersenbaai, but still not a total waste of time.

I think these are just sponges, but they are so green...prety cool against the reef:

Another scorpion fish for all you scorpion fish fans (look at the girder):

Red banded shrimp again. Two of them although only one really shows up:

This is a trumpet fish. Lots of them hanging about (litterally...they basically hang straight down for some reason...it's how they roll):

I was hoping this had a name like "white spotted death snake" or something equally scary, but its really just a sharptail eel. Name isn't quite as threatening.
I fly out of here at 7am tomorrow to Bonaire (all of 45 miles away). When I checked out today (or paid up) they were first telling me I needed to be at the airport 2 hours before the plane left, but when I said I was going to Bonaire, they changed that to only an hour before. I guess I don’t have to go through Customs maybe? We will see. I still have to leave here at 5:30 to get there in time.

So far I am having a great time diving. I haven’t really been out in the evenings or explored all that much, but the relaxation is pretty kick butt…and my fridge has been supplying plenty of cold Amstel so I am happy (need to drink the last 6 tonight so I don’t waste them). Actually I am drinking and Amstel Bright. For those of you who were wondering, it doesn't seem like its a light beer...as a matter of fact, I think the back of the bottle says it all: Amstel Bright is a thirst quenching premium quality beer brewed according to the original recipe from the Dutch Caribbean.

I need to get this posted and the pictures added…and then take some time to relax. Our time…the People’s time.

Next one coming from Bonaire!

Kicking it in Curacao!

Made it to Curacao after going through Montego Bay, Jamaica. I actually had to go through customs in Jamaica in order to catch my connection, but the lines were much shorter than they were in Miami when I was doing the Cayman’s connection and I got the cool Jamaican accent as an added bonus.

I had to walk outside from the arrival area to the check-in area so I actually set foot on Jamaican soil (or concrete) and breathed fresh Jamaican air. I usually get a magnet from any country I visit, but I figure the 20 minutes outside + the 2 hours in the airport don’t really count…so no Jamaican magnet. Gotta earn that $hit!

My brief taste of Jamaica walking from the "arrivals" area to the "departures"

I flew Cayman Airways from the Caymans to Montego Bay (all 45 minutes of the flight). Nice seats! Lots of leg room. It was still coach, but I can’t really complain. I flew Air Jamaica down to Curacao. You want to talk about grain of rice in the black bean soup, that was me. Not that there is anything wrong with that…its just I was for sure in the minority on that flight. In a counterpoint to Cayman Airways, there was no leg room, but I had the whole row to myself so I was able to stretch out a little bit. Plus they have Champagne service for their snack and beverage thingy. I didn’t have any champagne but there were a lot of bottles on their cart.

Customs in Curacao was a bit invasive. They actually pawed through my stuff a little bit. Of course the dude picked the suitcase with all my dirty clothes in it to check so I had some silent satisfaction when he was handling my dirty boxer briefs (and that answers that question). He had gloves on but still…

I am staying in the Limestone Holiday Apartments sort of south east of the main city, Willemstad. It has a little kitchenette and comes with a car rental (mine is a Suzuki hatchback).

MTV, pimp my ride! -or- cruisemobile Curacao style:

In my reservations communications (a bunch of emails back and forth) with the owner, Roel, he said there would be taxi 42 waiting for me when I got off the plane. I got off the plane, through customs, out the door and no taxi 42. As a side note, all taxis’ license plates start TX## so taxi 42 would be TX42…had it been there. I had printed out all the travel info for the entire trip (an excellent GTJTTOTD, btw…print out all your travel stuff especially if you did it all yourself…oh and Cammy was totally right! The Cayman’s GTJTTOTD shouldn’t have been walkling…it should have been look right, left and right when crossing the street since they drive on the wrong side of the road, the stuff coming from your right will be what hits you first) so I reread the ones dealing with here and it turns out the original flight was supposed to land at 3PM and it had since changed to 2PM. I was through customs by 2:30 so I leaned back to wait…relatively patiently, for TX42. I gave him until 3:30 and then found a taxi driver who knew where this place was (first lady had no clue), took the cab out here and was met by Roel’s dad (funny old dude…barely speaks English, but was making me laugh).

He led me to a 2 bedroom apartment (I had only booked a 1 bedroom), showed me around and told me Roel was running errands and would meet me shortly. When Roel finally showed up, he said he had me down as coming in the next day (even though my printed stuff said “23rd”) not that it was a problem, but the one bedroom apartment I had booked had someone in it. The one I was in was for some KLM (Dutch airliner I believe) people who might be coming in that night but were probably coming today. So I could use the 2 bedroom for a night and then move over to the 1 bedroom as long as the KLM people didn’t show up. Otherwise, there was this closet (okay not THAT bad, but pretty close) they could put me in for the evening. Hey, I am on vacation…so its all good. I slept in the 2 bedroom, got up and kept everything together today and then while I was out exploring the island, they moved my stuff over. No problems! Oh and it rains here. It’s a drive-by rain…pours for 10 minutes and then is clear, but it has been cloudy off and on all day.

View from my porch..not as good as Sunset House, but not too bad:
I went to the grocery store last night and barely got lost. All the streets are Dutchy and end in “weg” which I guess means street? To add to the confusion, maybe only half of them are marked and then the signs are facing the wrong way. It was an adventure getting out of town today (drove around the island) and I was totally going the wrong way before I finally found some street names, pulled over and poured over the map. Thank goodness for maps!

Anyway, grocery store…they have them here. They even have many of the same things we eat like Oscar Meyer products and Kraft cheeses. They also have a sliced meat section that had everything from salami to “tung” which, I think, is tongue. Sadly, there were no spaghettios so I am not sure I could make it here (kidding! Haven’t had those for a long time). They do have a beer aisle and we are back to Coca Cola Light (in 11oz cans instead of 12oz, but I don’t think that is why it is “light”). They do Amstel beer a lot here. Not Amstel light. That’s for wimps. They go full core Amstel in these 8.5oz bottles. I feel like a giant when I am drinking one. My hand wraps all the way around it. Funny thing is I didn’t see any Amstel Light. They have Amstel Bright, though so maybe that is the same thing? I thought that was a cool name no matter what the contents really were. The strangest thing I saw was canned hotdogs. They had a whole section of normally packaged hot dogs, but on the canned food aisle...canned hot dogs...yah know...for kids! I picked up some eggs, bread and sandwich stuff to try to keep my expenses down a bit while here. I mean why else do a kitchenette. Oh, the store doesn’t have bags for your groceries. You have to either bring your own, or they packed my stuff in a box that was available. The things you learn.

For those who care, the monetary unit here is the Gilder (same thing in the Netherlands, I believe) and it seems like the exchange rate is around 5 Gilders per $3 US…yep, just checked and its 1.66 Gilders per dollar. Most places so far accept Dollars and, once converted, it’s about the same price as what you can get in the US. The trick is they give you the change in gilders, though. Since Bonaire (my next stop) is also one of the Netherland Antilles, I went ahead and withdrew 200 gilders from an ATM…guess I need to check my bank account and make sure they only took out $120…if my calculations aren’t totally hosed. Its eastern time here, or at least I am 3 hours ahead of the west coast. Maybe they don’t do daylights savings. The locals speak Dutch (as do most visitors), a little English (thank goodness) and some patois of Dutch mixed with Spanish and maybe Portuguese? It's pretty lyrical whatever it is.

Today I took the advice of the place I am diving with (tomorrow I start 3 more days of diving) and drove around the island a bit. I got a little misoriented there at the beginning, but quickly got back on track. They drive on the right (correct) side of the road here and its my kind of driving. Out past the city, I didn’t see any speed limits…its more of a “what can your car handle on these crappy roads” kind of thing. Also, if someone is turning left and there is room to do so, pass them on the right even if there isn’t a real lane there. It’s the way driving ought to be…

I went to the National Park Shete Boka on the northwest point of the island. It’s a rocky coast kind of thing with big crashing waves and natural bridges carved by the ocean and things like that. It’s also a desert-like environment with lizards all over the place sunning themselves. Good times.

Dune....Arakis.....Curacao...Desert Planet...the worm is the spice...You shall be known as Mua'dib....okay enough Dune references...lots of cacti and lizards on Curacao:

Surf crashing against the rocky north shore of the island
I continued on to the poorly marked beach called Grote Knip (really…I sort of figured the turnoff was the right one based off the map and where I was…there was no sign…never was a sign…but one of the people at the beach said “Grota here” so I think I was in the right place). It’s on the southern coast of the island and the waters were glassy just 20 minutes after leaving Shete Boka on the north shore. The lesson here is: live on the south side of the island for calm waters. They said it was one of their most popular beaches and the turquoise water made me understand why. I really just stayed on the overlook above it, but looking down into the water, it was super duper clear. I think I am going to enjoy the diving tomorrow assuming there is sea life and/or good looking reefs…we will see.

The beach at Grote Knip...not bad...

Made it back into town around 2 and since I hadn’t eaten lunch, I broke down and ate at McDonalds…yeah, I know…how could I…well it actually took a u-turn and some creative driving and then saying “quarter pounder combo, please”…that’s how. It came with exactly one packet of ketchup and one packet of mayonnaise. I asked for additional ketchup…and got one more. Let’s not go overboard, okay? I figured what the heck, I would try the mayo since apparently that’s how the Dutch roll. It wasn’t too bad. Not as good, in my opinion, as the tomatoey goodness of ketchup, but I could see why it caught on. Oh, they did have…or do have…on the menu a curry chicken sandwich. Looks like their regular chicken sandwiches but I guess with curry flavoring. Seems like spices are a big thing here.

Speaking of spices, all the spices at the grocery store were labeled in Dutch! I think salt is “sel” but I could be wrong. Didn’t see anything resembling black pepper….

Anyway, this is already too long. I am sitting on my porch, drinking a real man’s mini Amstel, enjoying the nice late afternoon breeze remembering: it’s our time, the People’s time.

Marathon Cayman's post...with pictures!

First off, I gotta brag a bit and say I ate Dolphin for dinner last night! A big juicy dolphin burger with fries. It had this sort of tangy sauce with it that made everything go down real good. F’ Flipper is all I gotta say about that! Of course dolphin is another name for Mahi Mahi so you can all put the phone down and stop the calls to ASPCA or Greenpeace or whatever. It WAS good though.

Second, in case you didn't know or try, the photos I am posting can be clicked upon and you will see the original (big) photo.
Geiko anyone? These guys were all over the place sunning themselves.

This is my last day in the Caymans. I head out to Curacao tomorrow morning for more fun and excitement. Actually I don’t dive again until…uhm…Saturday (had to think about what day it is today. It is pretty awesome when you don’t have to know or care about that stuff). On the plus side, I did take my camera out the past couple of days here and got some pretty good pictures so this blog should be chock full of them! The blog says it has an 8MB limit, but I think that is per picture. We will see how much we can stretch it out.

I am a little happy not to have to dive with the dude (Paul) I have been diving with anymore. He is a nice enough guy, but given what I know now, I wouldn’t have buddied up with him given a choice. He is, in my opinion, a selfish diver. He swims around to look at things that interest him and expects me to follow him and stay within his sight (which is what you want to do as a buddy diver [keeping your buddy in sight, that is], but generally the where to swim and what to look at is a mutual thing). If I got too far away from him (due to him swimming willy nilly) he would say something once we surfaced. Also he wants to cover some ground on the dives. I mean he paddles his fins constantly to cover as much area as he can…this causes him/us to blow through air much faster than if you are calm and more mellow. Yesterday, I was ending the dives with more air than he was…which is odd considering the discrepancy in the number of dives we have done. Finally, he is no scout. Dude had no idea where we would be in relation to the boat. On the plus side, I started paying more attention and my internal compass (or whatever) was pretty good with which direction the boat was at any given moment. For obvious reasons this is a good thing to know. I don't want to totally bag on the poor guy cause, again, he isn't THAT bad, but I think I want a more mellow "let's mosey around and see whats here" kind of dive buddy and he ain't that.

There was an older guy diving named Mike that was out all the days I was there. He owns a dive shop on Long Island (pronounced almost like LonGa Island if you are from there) and has been diving for probably longer than I have been alive. I have been asking people with more experience their suggestions on not blowing through air and his were:
1) Don’t carry too much weight. Sounds weird, but apparently the less weight that you carry (you have to carry some in order to sink down), the better. He said most people put too much weight in and that causes them to work harder and use more air in the BCD (the vest you wear). I think I will play with this a bit in Curacao.
2) Don’t use your arms at all. Doesn’t do any good (I already knew this part). Fins can get you wherever you want to go…it just takes practice. And if you look at people who have been diving for a long time, most of the time they are swimming with their arms crossed to just keep them out of the way.
3) Breath slowly. Which makes sense and is relatively obvious, but it’s sort of hard to do. I think it also matches up well with “remain calm” since that is conducive to breathing slowly.
He was down with a group of guys who were constantly making corny jokes and trying, not very successfully, to be funny. Nice bunch of guys even though. The one cool thing is Mike had a video camera the whole time including when we went to Stingray City (yes I did go). He took my address and said he would send me a DVD of at least that part. I said throw as much as you can on there…its all good, so we will see.

Speaking of diving, we had some good ones on Monday. We first went to this site called Big tunnels that was on the wall. At around 100 feet there are these swim through tunnels that we swam through as well as this pinnacle that rose up to around 40 feet or so. We saw some pretty big tarpon that were 3 feet long (at a guess). The camera survived a maximum depth of 105 feet (what my dive computer said I got down to at one point) which is good since the case says its good up to 130 feet (deeper than I plan on diving any time soon).

View looking up the wall from 100 feet down. Remember, you can click on the picture to get the larger version (or even shift+click on the picture to open in a new window...at least in Windows, you Mac people are on your own)
Tarpon swimming around. On the lower left side, you can see a fin one of the other divers was wearing. The fins are 1.5 to 2 feet long so you can get a little scale on these things...they were pretty big.

Yellow finned something-or-others....fish were everywhere

The next dive was at a place called the Devil’s Grotto or Eden Point. Not sure why its named that, but it basically is in around 40 feet of water and these rocks and reefs have all these pass throughs (tunnels that generally don’t have complete ceilings so some light comes down). Saw a turtle right off the bat and then one of the dive masters found a pretty awesome looking scorpion fish. We also saw a southern stingray swimming about. The grotto itself was pretty cool with some huge fish taking it easy in there. I would say this is my favorite spot out of all of them. It’s over near where the cruise ships come in to the harbor so apparently its only good if there are none in port (and there weren’t). For sure if you ever come here, this is a must see.

Look...a turtle!!

One of the pass throughs near the grotto. That's Paul right in front of me and one of the dive masters in front of him

Do you see the Scorpion fish? Pretty cool, huh? Poisonous too

In the Devil's Grotto itself:

Tons of fish all over the reef. The sea life here is unreal.

Went to a site called Table top yesterday. It looks like a table top, I guess. It was okay….saw a turtle right off the boat as well as another scorpion fish. It was a fine site, but I guess a bit of a let down after the Grotto. We also did a place called Kent’s Caves that was just tons of pass throughs that have been worn out of the reefs/rock over time. It’s sort of funny, I went into a little cave in Thailand and was FREAKING out at the time. I blew through my air from hyperventilating. For some reason here it has been all cool. It’s actually sort of neat to swim under these shelves looking for stuff that might be hiding out.

Its turtle paparazzi! See the poor thing trying to get away in the middle of the crowd

Another Where's Waldo with a scorpion fish

Its a red banded rock (or maybe coral) shrimp hanging out

I think they said this was a boxfish...could be wrong, but it was cool looking

And finally, we went to Stingray City. Its in the north sound of Grand Cayman. The story goes that fishermen would come in from their day of fishing into this sound (one of the largest natural lagoons in the world) and pull onto the calm side of the barrier reef and clean their fish. The stingrays, not being stupid, would come in for the free food. Divers heard about this and came out to check it out. Over the last 20-30 years they have been getting the rays used to seeing people so they are actually pretty docile….in Theory.

My friends Tam and Sophia went when they were here, although they went to a shallow, snorkel/stand area. We went to a spot that had about 10 feet of water, sat around on the bottom in a circle and then the dive master would give us little chinks of calamari to hold in our fist. You rub your fist in the stingrays nose (pretty much the entire front of the ray) and he will then follow your fist around wherever it goes. It’s pretty cool although at one point I had 2 or 3 rays around me and I got a little nervous. Of course, this was after one of the little bastids bit me trying to get to the squid goodness inside my fist. They don’t have teeth but instead suck the food in and use bony plates to grind up their food…he bony plated me a bit. I got some video footage too and like I said above, Mike claims he will send me a DVD of it all. If you wanted to know, the top side has a little bit of grittiness to it, but the undersides are really smooth.

The dive master doing a "Stingray Sombrero" leading it around with a fist full of calimari

Here kitty kitty...

One of the little F'ers bit me! Or bony plated me, anyway

There is also this large green moray eel that lives out there. Apparently it’s so old it has cataracts (and it looked like it too). When most of the squid was gone the dive master led us over to a little rock reef area and out comes this 4 or 5 foot eel looking for some snacks. We were told in the boat before the dive (you always have pre-dive briefings to cover what the dive will be doing and safety stuff….its just the way good dive operations roll) that if he comes towards you to cross your arms and put your fingers under your arms (to avoid providing tempting wiggling bits). Of course, after the eel gets all the remaining goodies from the dive master, he starts making a beeline towards me. I was watching him approach thinking “oh shit” and then I remembered the briefing and all was well. He just sort of sniffed around me and swam away. As he was leaving, I did reach out and pet him. He was super smooth. Really a cool sensation. That’s right, people! I petted some stingrays AND a moray eel. I would say you can call me Steve Irwin Jr., but I didn’t try to stick my thumb up their butts (South Park joke).

The big green moray eel. The dive master right next to it shows how big it was

Walked into George Town this morning to see what was there. Unfortunately, there were also 4, count ‘em 4 cruise ships in port so me and 1000000000 of my closest friends were wandering around looking at the stuff there. I was sort of amazed about the number of jewelry/watch stores there were. I think they outnumber the souvenir shops…although I suppose they could be considered really expensive souvenirs.

Since this is a British colony or territory or whatever, they drive on the left (or wrong) side of the road here. I am sort of glad I didn’t get a rental car while I was here because I am sure I would have ended up in the wrong lane at some point. I didn’t really need it although I have had to eat all my meals here at My Bar (the name of the bar…lots of locals hanging out there too, btw). I suppose I could have walked into town, but I was usually pretty tired by the end of the day. Plus, they have had some really good food here (Indian food was the special Monday night. Really good).

Anyway, driving on the left side of the road. The GTJTTOTD could be: don’t go into town when there are 4 cruise ships docked unless you want to deal with a lot of clueless people, but I think that one should be fairly obvious. Instead, today’s GTJTTOTD is: when you are in a country that drives on the wrong side of the road, the locals tend to expect you to walk the same way too….at least here they do. For instance, in the States, it is generally accepted that when you are walking down a hall, sidewalk, or other walkway, and you see someone approaching you going the other way, you keep to the right so pedestrians flow smoothly. Here, you want to stay on the left side. I wasn’t thinking about this while happily walking down the right side of a sidewalk until someone going the other way was approaching me in “my” lane doing a super slow version of chicken. I was thinking “what is this fool doing?” when I realized I was the fool in this instance and got over. I have no idea if this is also the case in England or India (chime in if you have experience!), but it would make sense.

Finally while I was walking, I think I found my new catch phrase…or at least the standard answer when someone asks me what time it is:

That's right, friends, it's our time, the People's time!

Hope everyone is doing well! Love to all and remember:

It's our time, the People's time!

Made it to the Caymans!

I am sitting in my room basking in the glow of the lamb korma (with garlic naan) I just had down at the restaurant/bar that is a part of the hotel where I am staying. For the Cayman leg of the trip, I am staying at the Sunset House which is south of 7 mile beach (a beach that is…come on…guess…that’s right…7 miles long). Sort of isolated as far as other stuff to do, but if the rest of the menu is as good as the korma I had tonight, I will be set for the trip!
View from the room:

View of the room:

Travel yesterday sucked. I wrote 2 different versions of a fairly long rant about it yesterday while I was sitting in Miami on a 7 hour layover (that should have been 1) but I can summarize: American Airlines sucks, they left Dominican republic 40 minutes late, we didn’t get through customs until my connecting flight was 30 minutes from leaving and they wouldn’t let me “OJ” it through the airport and made me rebook. I would have to say American Airlines is second only in worst airline award to America Worst (West aka US Air…the single worst airline I have ever had the misfortune to deal with). Anyway, I made it a little later than I wanted to yesterday, but make it I did!

What I did keep from yesterday’s ranting (trust me…it was MUCH longer):
Which brings up GTJTTOTD (that’s Glob Trottin’ Jim’s Traveling Tip O’ the Day for those of you who need reminding): if you were wondering if you would have to go through customs when flying into the US only to catch a connection right back out, the answer is: YES. The reason this is relevant is when I initially started planning this trip, I contacted a travel agent and the flight itinerary she had set up for me involved me going down to the Caribbean and then back to the US then down to the Caribbean and back to the US, etc. I never had a direct flight, or one that didn’t involve coming back to the US. I (okay really Sophia Lee, researcher extraordinaire, during her really short breaks at work [in case her boss sees this]) did research on the smaller island airlines looking for connections and after today, I don’t come back to the US until the trip is over. I will be going from the Caymans through Jamaica to Curacao (no idea if I have to do customs in Jamaica) and then go from Curacao to Bonaire and only leaving Bonaire do I hit the US. So unless you like going through US customs (and you won’t…if you haven’t done them before its all lines and waiting and not fun) try to plan your international trip without layovers in the US…and avoid American Airlines.

Oh a final Riu resort bit that I keep forgetting to talk about. The resort where we stayed had 5 properties (all of them Riu hotels of one kind or another) and ours was the farthest away from the entrance to the resort area. To keep the speeding drivers to a slower pace, they didn’t do speed bumps. That’s so old school. No, they did speed indentations! There were spots in the road where the road would drop down about a brick width and then be flat for a foot or two and then go back up. The major speed indentations had two of these dips so it looked like a 1 and a half cycle square wave for all you geeks out there cough*Nate*cough. It could have been the shocks on every vehicle we were ever in, but they certainly seemed effective. To add to the fun, they had these things about every 100 yards so on the trip from the entrance to where our hotel’s front doors were we had to go over (or down into) 10 or 12 of these things. Fun times!

Back to the Caymans:
Made it in too late yesterday to hit the grocery store to stock up my 4 cubic foot mini fridge and today is Sunday and the grocery store is closed (yeah I couldn’t believe it either). So last night, I bought some Diet Cokes (we are back to “Diet Coke” here as compared to DR’s Coca Cola Light for those of you scoring at home) from the hotel store. They were a dollar apiece…a Cayman Island dollar…which is really $1.25 US. Which brings us to today’s GTJTTOTD (yes it’s a 2fer!): beware the exchange rate! It feels natural and easy to just pay a buck or two for something, but when the exchange rate is 1.25:1 that means every time you spend $4, you are really blowing $5 from your bank account at home. Conversely, its always fun to travel somewhere that has a worse exchange rate. Thailand, for instance, was 40 baht to a dollar. We would be trying to bargain some dude from 60 baht to 40 baht and getting offended about it all when we are really quibbling about 50 cents…but it’s the principal. Anyway, watch out for the exchange rate!

Dove this morning on 2 boat dives. I have a dive computer with my gear here and it said the water temperature was 81 degrees…that’s what I’m talking about! We went down to 90 feet on the first dive and then only around 50 feet on the second one. Saw some really pretty fish including some barracuda and the largest puffer fish I have seen. It wasn’t puffed up but was easily a foot long. I met a dude from Canada, Paul, who was also diving alone so we buddied up. He has done like 200 dives (as compared to my 25), but we actually ended up blowing through air at about the same rate so it worked out pretty well. I didn’t take my camera out today mainly so I could get used to everything here as well as establish with whoever I got paired with that I was reasonably reliable. The visibility here is awesome and I plane to take it out tomorrow.

Did a shore dive in the afternoon with Paul and a dude named Peter (I know…I thought the same thing…Peter…Paul…). Peter is a Bulgarian who in perfect, although accented, English claimed his English was not so good. I told him it was better than my Bulgarian…but he had heard that one before. We went out from the hotel to where there is a little wreck. Saw a turtle and a moray eel there. That was cool. Then, just past the wreck, we dove along the wall (there is a wall that drops off to the Cayman Trench so it goes down really deep. Lots of life on the wall. Makes for good dives). The fish were all over the place. Really vibrant blues are going on here. I hope I can get some good pics!

If you must have a picture of some sea life, here is a little crab that was on the rocks this morning. Hard to get a close in picture cause they would bail when the big bad man approached, but zoom in on the center rock and you will see it:


So far I think the Caymans are giving Thailand a run for the money as far as diving is concerned. I think the reefs in Thailand were more colorful with anemones and what not, but the sea life here is awesome. To be fair, we dove Thailand a little late in the season and they were no longer doing charters to what they said was the best diving (due to rough seas and weather related reasons) so I may just have to end up giving this a tie…we will see.

Well, not a lot else to report. Going to rest up, hydrate and get ready for the dives tomorrow. Then after the dives, I am going to try to hit the grocery so I can get some Diet Cokes for less than $1 CI (that’s how they roll with telling you the price: CI for Cayman Islands dollar as compared to $1 US). I am also going to try to get some sandwich fixin’s so I am not blowing a lot of money on lunches too.

For your closing shot, here is the view of the sunset from the bar where I had dinner:

Cya!

So long Dominican Republic...

Well, we leave tomorrow morning, Kristen back to Portland and the fun of work and me to George Town (go Hoyas!), Grand Cayman for more diving. So this will be the last blog from the Dominican Republic. I think I have internet access of one sort or another at all the other places I will be so I should be able to continue to thrill you with my tales.

One quick update on fruit in various parts of the world. Kristen reminded me of this after I had the other blog all put together and, let’s face it, that one was long enough already. So all of you keeping score, here is the Dominican Republic fruit review:
Mango – good to go! I would still rate the Thailand mango as tops, but the stuff here is good…and the mango juice is muy bien as well.
Papaya – still a$$. I have now officially tried this crap 2 times and it has sucked both times. Papaya = yuck. As back-up, Kristen says its the worst thing she has ever put in her mouth. So that’s 2-0 that papaya sucks.
Pineapple – really fresh and not bad. Given more time, I might be able to get into it.
Cantaloupe – It was pretty good. To be honest, I thought it was chunks of mango so the tasting was on accident, but it still was refreshing and all that.
And finally, one that I have NEVER liked…mushy…yucky…yes, it’s the Banana. I tell you what, wrap that sucker in bacon and then give it a nice char all the way around like the Brazilian meat place did and I am a convert. That’s right, mom, I liked banana! Of course, bacon makes everything taste better so we have to give credit where credit is due, but banana in Punta Cana gets a thumbs up.

Well the casino last night had maybe 8 tables: 2 roulette, 3 or 4 blackjack and a couple 3 card poker. There were a few people playing roulette (also known as “give the casino your money fast”) but otherwise the place was D E A D.

We were greeted at the door by a woman and led to a game that involved 8 red marbles, a circular plate with holes the marbles could land in with numbers associated with them and a table that had different “prizes” depending on what number your eight marbles’ numbers added up to. For instance, if your marbles happened to luckily all land in holes marked 1, your total would be 8 and you would automatically win $10,000! The first thing I asked was “are there 8 holes with 1 next to them?” They claimed there were 12 or so, but I didn’t take the time to verify. We were both given free rolls of the marbles and depending on what they added up to we could win the $200 jackpot (assuming the total number of points we could accumulate was more than 100. I am telling you this game was confusing as heck and just chock full of rules that didn’t get explained until your hit the appropriate number). Anyway, Kristen “the wrist” Graham rolled a set that got us 4 MORE rolls. Long story short (too late, I know), we got our point total up to 75 of the 100 needed for the now $400 jackpot, but if we wanted to roll any more, we would need to pay $10 per roll. Guess what we did? That’s right: kept rolling!...nah just messing with you, we said “later days” to that game.

I played a little bit of blackjack, but I was the only one at the table. Added to that, the cards were older than some of the super old ones at my parent’s house and the dealer’s nickname had to have been “speedy” based off how fast he was dealing hands. I tried to slow him down by making my “hit me” sign take a while, but he was hitting my hand if it was less than 12 no matter what I did. Added to that was the fact the pit boss didn’t have anything else to do so was hovering around staring at my play and that didn’t seem all that friendly. Quite frankly they seemed like money vampires waiting for me to lose so they could celebrate together. So I went up a bit, lost it and then cashed out with exactly what I bought in for. Take THAT, money vampire!

Kristen and I bailed out on that muy pronto and ended up walking back to our hotel along the beach. Beautiful night to do it and the stars were shining and it was very nice.

Today we got up, ate, and went down the beach to a place they call tent city. It is basically a bunch of little shops all set up to sell you crap for more than you want to pay. We got some souvenirs there and that is where I learned Kristen is a mean bargainer. She would put Bill “priceline negotiator” Shatner to shame!! They would come out with extremely high prices, I would get them down to something I thought wasn’t too bad a rip off for us and then Kristen would pull out $10-15 less than what I was going to settle for and say “this is all I have”. Man, were they not happy. They actually pulled attitude like we were ripping THEM off. Whatever. We were looking at T-shirts and the guy said one shirt is $7. Well if you buy more than 1, you should get a discount, no? We were trying to get 4 shirts and whittle him down from his crazy $28 stance. Some random woman almost screwed the gig when she came up and said $7 was cheaper than what she was able to get yesterday. I asked her if she worked there since it seemed like she was trying to make the shops point for them (also as a “get away from us while we are negotiating, lady!”). Turns out she paid $10 at a different stall for a t-shirt (sucker). We ended up paying $20 for the 4. I am sure we overpaid even then.

We are resting up before getting ready for dinner. Then tomorrow we get picked up at the hotel at 6:15 for the 45 minute bumpy ride to the airport. Our plane leaves at 9 with Kristen living the high life in 1st class and me sitting in coach. I did check and she gets at least a continental breakfast while I am sure I will be offered an apple for $10. We split up in Miami where she will continue on back to Portland while I will head to the Cayman Islands (one of them, anyway).

More to come from the Caymans!!!

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!

The diving has begun

Current Status: Meat Coma

First some administrative details. Since we don’t have internet in the rooms, I have been writing the blog snippets on word and then, once we are in the plush lobby, loading them to the blog page. For some reason it doesn’t recognize the double spacing I have at the end of each sentence and instead only has single spacing. I am too lazy to fix it this time (took me a while to get it looking good last time…and I have better things to do) so I know the spacing is incorrect…no need to let me know.

It’s Tuesday and things are going well! I set up some diving for the week and a trip to Catalina Island tomorrow for Kristen and I. Already had a refresher dive in the pool here at the hotel. It was 5 or 6 tasks that you have to do when you get certified: take the regulator out of your mouth, find it and put it back in, fill up mask and clear it, take off mask, put it back on, clear it, and good old fin pivot (you get neutrally buoyant and then as you breath in and out you rise and fall on your fins. Shows you have a handle on your buoyancy. Oh and let me tell you, the pool is NASTY! Never wear a scuba mask in a public pool unless you want to see bits and things that you really don’t care to see.

Did my first dive trip today. It was out in the Atlantic (really about a mile off shore). I thought “I don’t need the Dramamine” and was wrong. I narrowly avoided blowing chunks after the second dive, but it was a really close thing. No more acting the tough guy: Dramamine is your friend.

The dives themselves were okay. Not a whole lot of fish to see. Did see a puffer fish (non-puffed) and a lot of single colorful fish during the dives, but no big schools of fish nor were the areas we were diving very colorful. We did do one dive that was sort of diving along these narrow canyons and through little caverns (or cavernitas). Thought I would be wigged out a bit (fears of getting stuck and all) but it went okay. The dive master was this smaller German woman who fit in openings that were sort of tight for me and I got a few scrapes, but overall it was a fun time.

I didn’t take the camera with me because it was the first dive in a while and the dudes at the shop said that tomorrow’s dives are going to be the ones to see. So hopefully I will have some colorful shots for everyone!

Oh yeah, I forgot about Globe Trottin’ Jim’s Traveling Tip o’ the Day (GTJTTOTD)…or whatever I called it the last time. Here you go: I have seen the master of the all inclusive vacation and she had a Tervis Tumbler (the really larger one) in her hand. We were at one of the MANY bars here and she was directing the bartender in making her drink with words like “more” and “a little more”. I just blurted out “Tervis tumbler!!!” and she said it was perfect for taking onto the beach cause it helped keep it cold and didn’t have the condensation problem. So, next time you go to an all inclusive place and want to drink, bring a Tervis Tumbler.

So far the days have been awesome. A little toasty in the sun, but the shade, paired with the light breezes make it very comfortable. We have been doing breakfast and then I had dives yesterday and today, then lunch and then a stroll to the chairs on the beach for some relaxation and warm water action.

They have a couple of areas roped (buoyed) off where you can swim without the fear of being run over by the many speed boats that are doing parasailing for tourists or dragging them behind on the big yellow floaty things. No fish swimming through your legs or anything, but it does take the edge off the heat. I am a little surprised with the number of topless women here. Unfortunately they are all much older woman with leather skin and that sort of takes the fun out of it.

Hmm…there is not a ton to report otherwise. Relaxing and lying around don’t make for interesting reporting.

Oh yeah, one last bit before we go. There are 5 dinner places here on top of the buffet. So far we have gone to the fusion place, the Italian place and tonight, a Brazilian meat thingy (hence the meat coma). The fusion place was really good. All the food was just insane good. The Italian place…not so much. Apparently the idea of “tomato sauce” is catsup…which I would normally love…but on pasta? The Brazilian place was about like any Brazilian meat place I have been to: there are 1 or 2 really good cuts/pieces of meat the serve and the rest is just okay. The problem is by the time you work through all the cuts and choices, you are usually too full to go back and get seconds on what you thought was good the first time through.

Kristen and I before dinner one night...apparently the person taking the photo doesn't "do" zoom.

So there we are….all caught up. Should have some good stuff from tomorrow (probably updated on Thurs cause it will be a LONG day tomorrow).

Peace,
Jim