I slept pretty well given the circumstances and made it to the airport early. This time, they were having nothing to do with me about the overweight baggage and charged me more than $50 to get to Labuan Bajo. And they wouldn’t take a credit card. WTF? This is a much bigger airport, I was sure they would. I submitted to the ATM. Grrrr… This time I took out much more money in Rupiah.
My flight landed in a weird place called Bajawa on the way and I thought. “Crap!?!?! Maybe I got on the wrong plane!” But no, it was just a little stop before we went on to Labuan Bajo. Luckily someone from the boat was there to meet me with a sign and drove me to the boat. I got on first and the big group came like two hours later.
They are from Malaysia and Singapore. Not necessarily part of a dive club, but just a group of friends. My roommate is a fast talking cute smiley girl named Eve (short for Evelyn) and one of the guys, Eric Goh, is a really good wide angle photographer. He is so good that the Philippines has paid for him to come there and take photos. He used to be a lawyer but doesn’t really practice much anymore. He spends about 9 months a year traveling but he founded his law firm so he is still officially the owner. Nice! All of these people are his friends but Eve is the one who coordinated the trip, so she kinda acts like she is in charge.
We had a delicious lunch around 2pm and then we are planning on a checkout dive at 5pm. Lunch and dinner is served outside on the dive deck. Sorta weird. There are tables inside that could probably fit everyone, but it would be a tight squeeze.
This old British guy named Garry is the cruise director. The crew calls him Opa (like Grandpa). He finds himself hilarious. I’m not sure what I think just yet. Eve is just infatuated with him, you can tell. She has been on this boat like five times before, so she fancies herself as part of the crew now. The rest of the crew is Indonesian except for one guy Diego (a Spanish 34 year old) who is a cruise director in training. I am on the “Red” boat and we will go first tonight for the checkout dive.
Gah! We arrived at where we needed to go and there was too much of a swell and it was too close to being dark, so we didn’t do the checkout dive today. It will have to be tomorrow morning. Oh well.
I did find out that the divemaster for my boat Tamrind, is good at spotting nudibranchs. Woo Hoo!
We got to talking and he asked me if I had seen the “new” nudi… Melibe colemani. I thought to myself… new? Is there a second kind of Melibe colemani? What is he talking about? I went to get the book and he showed me that it was only identified in 2012. Right! Ha. I didn’t really catch on to that, but good point. I just looked again and it was Teri Goslinger who identified it.
So then we had drinks up on the sundeck. I finished my book and chatted with the group here and there. Two of the guys have been friends since they were in grade school. Can you imagine? Two of the guys are doctors (surgeons actually) so I guess that’s good!
Then we had another meal. It seemed like we just ate!
Diego and I traded divemaster stories. He talked about a rescue he made for another divemaster’s operations’ guest and I shared one of the rescues in Belize. He speaks four languages.
Two of the guys in the group are Caucasian and grew up in the States but live in Asia now. We had an interesting conversation about the gun situation in the US over dinner as well as the current political situation. Most of us seemed to be on the same side, so there wasn’t much of a big debate, thank God.
I turned in earlier than the rest of the divers and tried to fall asleep to watching Ozark Season 2.
No comments:
Post a Comment