So I did it. I booked a flight from Dar es Salaam to Lusaka and I ditched my overland group! I was tired of the mud, putting up the tents in the dark & in the mud, the long drives, the grime and, quite frankly, being part of a large, albeit friendly & well organized group. The group is driving into Malawi and northern Zambia over the course of a week, and I'm going to fly the distance in an hour and fifteen minutes! Ha ha ha ha! Granted, they are stopping at Kande Beach on the shore of Lake Malawi for two days, but Malawi, I hear, is rainy this time of year. Rain + dirt = mud + misery!
I will rejoin them in Lusaka, drive down with them to Livingstone, and continue on with the group to Cape Town. The end of the trip, from Livingstone to Cape Town, sounds spectacular: the Okavango Delta, Chobe, Etosha and the deserts of Namibia. I also anticipate that southern Africa will be hotter and drier (and less muddy) than East Africa.
So here I am at Kendwa, Zanzibar for another week! The weather is perfect, I've negotiated a continued room rate at only 25 USD per night, and the seafood is delicious. Another girl from my overland group, Freddy, is here, and we've been enjoying candlelit dinners on the beach every night. I'm almost done with the PADI Open Water Diver course, which is quite frankly terrifying. I think some people are divers and others are snorkelers, and I may be in the latter group!
Books read: I re-read Paul Theroux's Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town and liked it even better the second time around. I'm also working on A Tale of Two Cities. One of my goals this trip is to finish it.
Silly things done: Underwater at 12 meters yesterday I had to perform the "out of air" drill, where I signal to my instructor that I'm out of air and I want to share his air. I signaled, let go of my regulator, grabbed his extra regulator upside down, and inhaled a lungful of sea water. Terrible! I thought I was going to drown. It's totally scary being so deep underwater and reliant on equipment that might or might not malfunction (or you may screw it up, as I did). And it's not like you can ascend quickly--you have to ascend very slowly to reduce the risk of decompression sickness. Tomorrow we are going down deeper and I have a whole array of terrifying "skills" that I have to perform underwater.
Monday, January 18, 2010
So Long, Suckers!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Well, I was going to advise against ditching the group, but I didn't get to it in time. Regardless, I'm glad you are enjoying yourself!
ReplyDeleteI know this sounds cliched, but when you do your dive, try to relax and just enjoy it. You can take your time with everything, so do! I actually had to breathe off my instructor's octopus for real, once. And when I did my open water test dives, I did them in 50F water where the visibility was ~5 ft. You can definitely handle Zanzibar!