bottom of the ocean

It's true, there is water at the bottom of the ocean, I was there. Today I ventured into a world completely unlike any place I have ever been. Even now, 10 hours after the experience I'm still dazed (no help from the four glasses of rum punch I've slurped). I've been living on an island where the primary industry is lobster fishing, so it's been loads of cheap, fresh lobster every night. During the day the sun is straight overhead. I calculated the time and date when the sun would pass directly overhead at this lattitude, and was sure to have my own private cereromy during the moment of no shadows.Now back to the bottom of the ocean. Today I met up with the Canadian girl from the bus and we went SCUBA diving at a place called the Great Blue Hole. A perfectly circular dark blue hole waits in the middle of the ocean to swallow curious tourists. We stuck tubes into our mouths and fell into the hole with a school of fifteen reef sharks, each about twelve feet long. They would stay just far enough away that I could barely make out their large grey bodies and angular shape. The Blue Hole is an opening to a gigantic cave that existed back in the days then there was no ocean here. It actually sinks down to a depth of over 400 feet, but it takes special gear and training to go beyond 130, so we stopped there, at a pressure of over five times greater than the design specs for a squishy human. Inside this part of the cave there were enormous stallegtites fifty feet long and ten feet in diameter. I drifted around them in a way that I still can't believe, below me was a black void that looked so overwhelmingly inviting. Even though I knew it would be a one way trip, it took all my will power to limit myself to 130 ft.

We did two more dives that afternoon at different locations. On the way to our second dive I saw a bunch of flying fish from the boat. I have seen fish that leap out of the water before, but these guys really flew. They were as large as a full grown trout, and would fly about 100 yards before splashing down again, flapping their little wings(?) as fast as a hummingbird. During that next dive I was checking out a little pencil sized fish near the bottom, and he got freaked out and disappeared in an instant. He had completely dug himself right into the sandy bottom.

The third dive was also unlike anything I have ever experienced. It's another world under the ocean. The amount of brightly colored exotic life is so overwhelming I can't even begin to comprehend where I am, or what is going on around me. I could spend an hour in each area the size of a fruit basket, but traveled over a distance of a few hundred meters. My puny little brain is overfull. At the end of the dive, one of the dive masters took out a water bottle from his pocket. The fish around here are pretty smart because they all knew what this was about. Instantly thousands of fish raced to the bottle. Inside it was some cooked rice, which must be a delicacy for fish. The guide would open the bottle and shake out a little rice and all the fish would explode into a whirlpool of activity. He squirted rice over my dive buddy and in an instant the fish surrounded her so completely that I could no longer see her at all, even though she was only an arms-reach away.

I now have one week remaining before I return home. To be honest I'm out of ideas. I tried moving my plane ticket up a few days so I could get home and be productive before school starts, but after spending a total of 3 hours talking to 7 clueless operators at four different companies I officially gave up. There is no way to change the ticket because nobody really knows who sold it to me. It's one of those deals like a Northwest flight operated by Continental, through American Airlines, sold by Orbitz. Plus it's international so that requires a "specialist" to deal with it. It's an intertaining story but I don't feel like ranting now so I'll hold my tongue.

So that's it. I'll formulate a plan tonight and go forth into my final week of adventure. I'm sure I'll think of some epic way to finish my three month tour.

Keep in touch.