Scuba Diving in Southeast Asia

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SCUBA DIVING IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

The Joke

“I have a friend who is looking for a dive buddy for a six to nine month dive trip in S.E. Asia…I thought of you and Skip.” There was an email address at the end of this cryptic message, with a name I didn’t recognize. The email was signed by a member of my dive club whom I had not heard from for years.

My first thought was, “Who has the money to go off diving for six to nine months? I sure don’t.” Then I thought, “I wonder what Skip thinks of this message just popping up on his screen, out of the blue?”

I went on clearing my in-box, checking for anything that needed a response. When I turned off the computer, as I waited for it to sign off, I glanced up at the motivational poster I have hanging above my work station. It shows a woman standing on a high peak gazing out at the encircling mountains. It says, “I am not an ordinary person.” Underneath is a saying that I posted there years ago.

“You need not do anything.

Remain seated at your table and listen

You need not even listen, just wait.

You need not even wait, just learn to be quiet,

still and solitary.

And the world will freely offer itself to you unmasked.

It has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”

Kafka

“By gosh, it’s true,” I thought, “the world really is offering itself freely to me.” I mentioned the strange message to my daughter who shares my house, and just kind of laughed.

Investigation

But I could not let go of the idea. I asked Skip about it and he just shrugged. I asked my oldest son what he thought about me taking a long dive trip in Asia. I thought he would say, “Are you crazy?” Instead, he said, “Don’t do what your mom did and wait until you are too old to travel.”

I continued to toss the idea around, ricocheting it off my friends, co-workers, and family members. I just worried it, like a dog with a bone. I started looking carefully at my finances, knowing that I could probably live as cheaply in SE Asia as I could in Washington, but diving and airline tickets would be expensive. Most of all I looked at the fact that if I traveled with my dive club to a major dive site once every year or two, I was looking at, maybe, two more dive trips before the door closes on my diving days. If I did this trip I would have the opportunity to dive “those faraway places with strange sounding names…” that I still wanted to see.

Indigestion

At last I opened up communications with Deb. I told her I had to keep it low cost and she assured me she felt the same. We had similar scuba diving histories and we both had done a fair amount of traveling abroad. She had lived in Mexico on her own for four or five years. I had served in Bulgaria for three years with the Peace Corps. We sent emails once a week for a month or two. Finally my stomach needed a break. I was tired of saying, “I may be going on a long dive trip.” I had to move from uncertainty to certainty, so in February I bought my ticket. We decided to start in the Philippines because we both had been there before and most people speak some English. We would decide the rest of the itinerary once we were face to face. Since we had to buy a round trip ticket, we just set a return date for after high season. It could always be changed later.

What a relief to have tickets, and to know I was really going to make this trip.

Trepidation

I exchanged my, “Should I do it?” for “What if…?” Well-meaning friends also voiced their fears about women traveling alone in strange countries, finances, natural disasters, and other concerns. My answer to these questions was, “I’ll wait until the problem arises, then I’ll deal with it. Why waste energy imagining all the things that might go wrong. Knowing my family was just an email away, and I did have a return ticket if things got too difficult was my security blanket. Having made the decision to go pushed me into action. It was no longer just a mental activity. Now I had to start moving in order to catch that plane.

Preparation

I knew from backpacking and previous dive trips that I needed to pack as lightly as I could. We were both taking our own dive gear because we are comfortable in our own stuff, but “travel light” has little meaning when you are lugging around a BC (buoyancy compensator) and regulator, and an underwater camera. The dive gear was a necessity; everything else must be examined…do I really need it? Is it the smallest most light weight version that I can find? I packed and re-packed. I bought new underwear, updated my immunizations, bought some new lightweight dive gear, and worked at putting my house in order. I shopped for luggage and travel books. I even phoned Deb.

Since she lives in California and I live in Washington, we would meet for the first time at the airport in Manila on April 4th.

Destination

Deb was using her air miles and flying out of California. I was leaving from Seattle. Not only were we on different flights, it turned out we arrived in two different terminals. We each searched our arrival area in vain. The people at the information desk asked, “What does she look like?” Our answers were the same, “Well…”

I finally checked Deb’s ticket on my computer and gave the flight number to the information desk. They explained that her plane had arrived at the other terminal, fifteen minutes away by taxi. When I still could not locate her there, I decided to go to the hotel she had booked for the first night. I asked for her at reception and they pointed to this red haired woman sitting with her back to me, using the hotel computer and writing an email to me, “Where are you?”

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