Cozumel dive trip, Post 5: Night dive and dinner plans

Thursday, May 28th, was the day Ken and Liesl flew home. After waving Peter and Marissa off on their last day of diving, I went into town with Ken and Liesl to look for souvenirs, while Ben stayed behind and worked on his assignment in the hotel lobby.

Contrasted souvenir shopping options...

The rest of the day was very relaxing... we farewelled Ken and Liesl, had our traditional sope and ice cream lunch with Peter and Marissa, wrote postcards, and lazed around until it was time for our night dive. We were back with Felipe for this dive, and Greg from BC (whom we'd met on the weekend) joined us too.

This was the beautiful sunset we saw as we waited on the boat at Paradise Reef for it to get dark enough to start our dive...

Then, as darkness quickly fell, it was time to descend to the murky depths of the reef... to witness a whole different world to what we'd seen so far in the daylight! Here are a few of the sights - photography aided by flashlight beams and the camera's flash:

An orange crab...

A sea cucumber...


Sleepy fish...

Spotted moray eel...

To give you an idea of how dark it was down there, here are a couple of shots taken without the flash. The first photo is of me, and the second is of Felipe...

This turned out to be our longest dive of the trip - 58 minutes - and we turned our flashlights off a few times to experience the enveloping darkness and see the bioluminescence. The latter is a mesmerising display of tiny green-glowing particles, visible in the water when there's movement. It was like little green fireflies darting away from our hands when we swished them through the water. Very pretty, and awesome to see!

I found that I spent much of this dive feeling somewhat disoriented - most likely due to receiving fewer subconscious cues than I am used to receiving from my senses regarding my position relative to everyone and everything else. For example, I knew where someone was if I could see their flashlight - but if I got turned about, it was hard to know where they were until I was directly facing them again. And you don't really want to go for long without knowing where your dive buddies are when you're 40 feet deep and it's pitch dark!

I also felt like I just couldn't see as well as I wanted to, or thought I should be able to, so maybe I am just overly dependent on light and sight! Suffice to say, I couldn't quite identify with all the raving the others had done about their night dive a few days earlier... but I was still happy to have experienced a night dive, and wouldn't have wanted to miss it!

The next morning - Friday, April 29th - we woke at the lovely hour of 4:45am to watch the royal wedding from the comfort of our bed. It was worth missing some sleep for!

Friday was another lazy day, with Ben working on his assignment, me reading my book, and Peter and Marissa doing some snorkelling.

At 4:30pm, we all took a taxi into town to meet up with an American couple from Virginia: Phil and Carmen. They were holidaying at Playa del Carmen - which is on the mainland, a 30 minute ferry ride from Cozumel - and had done a tour of Cozumel that day, so P&M had arranged to meet them for dinner. We found them at the Cozumel Palace Resort (a sister resort to theirs on the mainland), asked the staff for some dining recommendations, and then set off on foot to Restaurant La Choza.

It was a very nice restaurant, and we enjoyed getting to know Carmen and Phil a little while tucking in to our delicious meals and being serenaded by a trio of guitarists playing 'La Bamba'!

This is the avocado pie Ben and I shared for dessert. It had a smooth texture and still tasted like avocado, but it was surprisingly good!

P&M gave us a taste of their coconut ice cream (which had actual pieces of shredded coconut in it), and that was pretty much the most amazing thing ever. We were sorry we hadn't discovered it earlier so that we could have been eating it all week. I've even been trying to find it back in Canada!

A few poses after leaving the restaurant...

Back on the esplanade, we watched another beautiful sunset.

After Carmen and Phil left to catch their ferry to the mainland, the four of us walked to the Mega supermarket, bought some $2 pure vanilla extract as Ben's and my only real Mexican souvenir, and took a taxi the rest of the way back to Casa del Mar.

The next day, Saturday, would be the last full day of our trip (and the day P&M flew home). It was a good thing we'd had a couple of easy days, because we had big plans for Saturday!

To be continued...

Click here to see lots more photos from our Cozumel trip.

Cozumel dive trip, Post 4: Dive House and San Miguel

On Tuesday, April 26th, Ben and I didn't go diving, as Ben woke up feeling unwell. We swapped the dives we'd booked with Dive House to the following day, and took it easy at Casa del Mar while the others went diving.

In the evening, we crossed the road to CDM's beach to watch the sunset.








That night, Liesl, Ben and I took a taxi into town to find El Moro restaurant (the one Felipe had recommended, that the others had been unable to find on the previous attempt). It was not in the main tourist area, but hidden towards the back of town on a one-way street. We all enjoyed our meals very much... and the rather eclectic décor!!







On Wednesday, Marissa was feeling unwell, so she and Peter stayed behind while the rest of us went diving with Dive House. It was Ben's and my seventh and eighth dives of the trip, and our final daytime dives.

Our first dive site of the day was San Francisco Wall, another drift dive. On this dive I felt that I noticed more of the marine life than I had on previous dives - it was finally all coming together! Among other things, we saw a large lobster, parrotfish, queen angelfish, French angelfish, spotted trunkfish, barracuda, black durgon fish, four-eyed butterfly fish, squirrelfish, and a sea cucumber.

The lovely French angelfish...


Scrawled filefish...


Barracuda...


Lobster...


Sea cucumber (bottom left)...


During this dive, I remember noticing my that my right arm had accidentally brushed against a spiny purple coral, and right afterwards I felt a stinging sensation. Back on the boat, my arm showed what I described in my dive log as a "mild rash", and as this developed over the next two days, I told people it was caused by the purple coral. When Felipe saw it the following night, however, he said it was a hydroid sting - a relative of jellyfish and coral. Subsequent online research revealed that this was indeed what the rash looked like.

For the sake of relevancy, I'm going my break my rule of chronology to show you the development of my hydroid sting over the following days. :)

The rash on Wednesday, the day it happened...


The rash on Thursday...


And... the rash on Saturday!! By this time it had come out in blisters (making my "mild rash" description a bit of an understatement), and they seemed to become much redder when exposed to heat. This photo was taken after we'd been walking in the sun on a 30+ degree day. Saturday was definitely the peak of its attractiveness!!


And this is it on the mend, 11 days after it happened...


So that was my best diving "war wound"... quite the badge of honour!! And because you no doubt want to know how much it hurt... well, it stung for a couple of days, but I was far more preoccupied by what it looked like than by what it felt like. The truth is that the black coral sting pictured in the previous post - which looked nowhere near as bad - actually hurt more!

And now, back to diving! Wednesday's second dive was a drift dive at Chankanaab Reef. This time I had a problem with the left side of my mask constantly letting in a trickle of water, so I had to repeatedly clear my mask (i.e. by tilting my head up, holding the top of the mask in place, and blowing air out of my nose so that it pushed the water out the bottom of the mask). It was otherwise a great dive, but the constant mask-clearing meant that I didn't enjoy it as much as the previous dive (which was incidentally the only dive of the trip when I hadn't needed to clear my mask even once!).


Stoplight parrotfish (initial phase)...


Stoplight parrotfish (terminal phase) - this is the same species of fish, but at a different stage of life (thanks Wikipedia!). Awesome, eh?


Yellowfin grouper...


Black margate...


No idea what this one is...



Brittle stars (related to starfish) inside a coral...


Squirrelfish...


Ken and Liesl...


And that's it for our daytime dives! 100 foot visibility, water temperature around 26 degrees, and an incredible variety of large and colourful reef inhabitants... Cozumel is a FANTASTIC place to dive!

Towel dinosaur on our bed back at the hotel...


That afternoon, Ben and I went into town with Ken and Liesl and spent some time shopping. As usual, the souvenir shops in the tourist area had lots of persistent salespeople standing outside on the footpath, shouting enticing slogans at us as we walked past. Our favourites were "I have better junk for less money!" and "Cheap price today... almost free!"

Here are some of the sights of San Miguel...






At one point we sat for a while on a bench outside a Catholic church. Almost 83% of Mexicans identify as Catholics, and after watching the traffic driving past on the one-way street for awhile, we realised that many people were crossing themselves as they went past the church. This included taxi drivers, passengers, cyclists, pedestrians, etc. We counted 30 people crossing themselves in 10 minutes.

Some of the modes of transport on Cozumel...









As we started walking towards the back of town to find a restaurant that one of the Dive House guys had recommended, we left the touristy area and came across scenes that were rather more dilapidated than those seen in the streets closer to the ocean.






After quite a long walk, we found the restaurant, Le Perlita. One of the Divemasters had told us they serve lionfish there (ie. the pest species that our Divemaster killed), which is why we went... but none of us ended up ordering it!

While we waited for our food, we were amused (and a little grossed out) to observe one of the servers arrive on his scooter and start putting handfuls of corn chips into baskets and serving drinks without washing his hands. Perhaps this somewhat more lackadaisical attitude towards hygiene explains why four of the six of us experienced stomach upsets over the course of the week!


The grilled fish Ben and I shared...


Liesl's huge seafood paella that we ended up helping her consume...



Back at CDM, the locals were having a party behind the hotel. This was the view from our window!


To be continued...

Click here to see lots more photos from our Cozumel trip.