Woke
up early, around 6 and had the same breakfast as yesterday and got a
taxi to go to the beach called Maria La Gorda to dive today. It was a
crazy ride. 2 ½ hours at a very rapid pace, dodging horses, people,
bikes, trucks, and anything else you can think of. The driver was
super ice and had a sweet little ride. It was a VW something with a
newer, pretty sweet Pioneer stereo and some aftermarket 6x9s. We
lovingly referred to it as the disco taxi as he played American dance
music the whole way there.
Watched
a beautiful sunrise from the taxi and listened to probably the whole
collection of Adele. On the way, we picked up his girlfriend, they
were cute, and made great time.
We
arrived at the beach about 1 ½ hours before the first dive,and we
checked in and paid for the excursion. I noticed they had a computer
with 2 USB inputs that should work for the file transfer I've
desperately needed for like 4 days now, so I bought a card to use the
computer. It had Windows XP on it and evidently this place, or Cuba
in general, restrict certain things on the computer, so I couldn't
pull up the file exchange window. When I plugged in my phone, it only
gave options to open Word and something else completely useless. I
finally figured out that I could open Windows Media Player, go to
File - Open, keyboard shortcut Copy, change drives, then keyboard
shortcut Paste. Whew! It worked though, just had to sit there for an
hour and move the mouse every 60 seconds so the card I used wouldn't
log me out.
Anyway,
got that done and we went to go on our first ever non-training dive.
SCUBA in CUBA! We got our gear and loaded onto a boat that drove us
to the selected dive site. We dropped in and swam the reef for the
usual 45 minutes, seeing some decent sea life. Nothing too crazy of
note, but a nice dive. We came back to shore and scheduled another
dive at 3pm, so we had a couple hours to kill. Got lunch, tuna
sandwich, and we were immediately swarmed by 6 hungry scavenger cats.
I fed them ¼ of my sandwich and we went down to the beach to relax.
Rachel built a sand castle for a bit and I laid in the sun until it
was time to dive again.
We
got our gear back on and got to the boat again. We drove to a
different dive site and did another 45 minute dive. This one was much
cooler. Better reef, several schools of brightly colored fish, about
8 lionfish, and an array of yellow, blue, and white fish all over.
Saw a barracuda in the distance. Huge. After our dive we headed back,
got our log books signed by the dive instructor and hurried out to
meet our driver.
Same
story on the way home, only it was a bit scarier since it was dark
most of the way, and most people/vehicles, etc. have no reflective
materials on them. Long drive, tried to sleep, but mostly was getting
tossed around in the backseat as we bobbed and weaved home.
Once
home, paid for our bill at the casa particulares and had dinner. Same
setup with beans, rice, tomatoes, cucumbers, and fruit, but instead
of fish, we had a ½ chicken each. Stuffed again! Too much. And we
couldn't even eat ½ of what was on the table. Rachel and I irritated
each other a little bit, so we had a talk and called it a night
instead of going out or anything. Everything is good, just a long
time to be with anyone for 24 hours a day without a couple of speed
bumps.
For photos from this trip click here.
For photos from this trip click here.
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