Tuesday, April 21, 2009

More about the diving trip!

Yesterday, I posted an entry about the awesomeness of the dives and the suckyness of the social side of the trip. Now I'm going to describe the epicness of the trip (well, it was for me, anyway!) Since I signed up on the trip, I had no idea how i was going to get from JHB to Sodwana and back - I had tried begging and pleading for lifts (obviously to the wrong people), but to no avail. Eventually I asked the trip organiser if anyone possibly had a space in their car, found a lift, then promptly changed my plans, so go down a day earlier, come back earlier, and do two of my dives on the Friday instead of the Sunday. Then I was put into a car with a manic driver, so I begged and pleaded with the trip organiser to come in his car, and luckily he agreed! After all of that, we left JHB at around 11pm on Thursday night, and drove through the night to get to Sodwana just before 7am the following morning, to dive at 8.30! I hardly got any sleep that night, which was why I was so surprised that I didn't develop narcoleptic tendencies on the weekend!

There were a few of us that day who hadn't done a sea dive yet, so we were paired up with more experienced divers. I was paired with Doug, and I think it made all the difference to the dive -I had such an amazing first dive, and was just blown away by everything. I did spend at least half of the dive with my hand on my power inflator/dump valve, just because I was paranoid about bumping into anything, but after I relaxed, the dive was just peachy! On my second dive I developed a headache, which was not so cool. Doug and I also managed to stressed our DM out by going exploring, and leaving the group! However, we did see some really cool fish and a snoozing turtle, which was just absolutely incredible! After the dive I really crashed, and my headache got super bad, which was not fun at all. So after we got back to triton, I had a bit to eat (which I didn't want), took painkillers, had a shower, and managed to pass out for just over an hour. After an hour, I was woken up by the level of noise present in the camp, from the rest of the 60 odd people coming from wits to dive...

The rest of the weekend went pretty well, except for fines meeting, which was just silly, and the fact that certain people thought I was going after a guy who is just way way too old for me (incidentally, I was not going after him, it was actually someone else!).The trip home was also quite epic - two cars broke down/had accidents, so we were phoning around, getting numbers and organising help/moral support! We left at 2pm, and only got home at around 11.30/12ish that night...The discussions in the car on the way home were mostly about us all turning into serial killers since we had all shared some personal info at some time or another... All in all, I have a lot of time for my car buddies :). I can't wait to see the people who I met this weekend again - I met some really fantastic people on the trip!

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