So......
The last couple of weeks have been diving, diving, and more diving. Well a few other things…
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| Captain Steph |
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| Sunset drinks.... |
We checked out the Iguana center, surprisingly, not much there but a lot of iguanas. There are three types of iguana on Utila. The endangered and slightly dumb swampy (i.e. they have nearly been hunted to extinction because when approached by anyone they just sit there..) and the clearly more well adapted highland and green iguanas. The swampys were quite funny looking.
We are now DIVE MASTERS…WOOHOO... The final test was a little messier and intoxicating - the Snorkel Test.... I was so drunk I was dancing, and that don't happen much. The snorkel test ended up being on "Tequila Tuesday" at one of the popular bars - 10 lempiras for a shot of tequila (50 cents) and an assured headache. It was the first night of Semana Santa (Easter Week) and the first night of the latest Danish Invasion (20 this time - 18 girls = quite a few happy young Divemasters)....We did the snorkel test with three others which took a bit of the pressure off as there was quite a big crowd. It ended up being a very messy night, we got really, really, really drunk – I don’t remember half the night. Which usually means it was a good night. After we did the snorkel test we had to perform one of the skills we learnt during the course – mask clearing….so they filled up our masks with ice cold beer and made us clear them – alcohol was everywhere….Steph smartly went for a nice swim off the dock, to de-beer.
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| BEFORE |
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| DURING |
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| AFTER |
We also had an excursion to the North side of the island to try and find the wreck of the “drug plane”. A couple years back a couple of cowboys were trying to out run the US military in a little plane with 1.5 tonne of cocaine on board - and you guessed it... they ran out of fuel and crashed into the jungle of Utila. We searched for about an hour (it doesn’t sound long, but on razor sharp coral skeletons, through thick vegetation and in high heat and humidity, it felt like a trek) before giving up - we could only find one small piece of the plane...Our sense of direction escaped us in the thick foliage and vegetation and we ended up doing a loop instead of heading north into the jungle...oh well.
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| Panel of drug plane..... |
GOODBYE UTILA!
