A Day of Boredom (Pictures) – Sunday, June 15, 2014

We had two days after scuba ended to just chill on the beach in Mozambique. This is because we way overestimated the “decompression time” required for our 10m dives. Also, while Googling in anticipation of the trip, we learned that the US Navy and the US Air Force have different decompression tables (not that we knew what one of those actually was before our video lessons), and we didn’t really know which to trust, so we just went conservative. Anyways, we had a lot of time on the beach on this particular day which just reinforced that I am a lakes and mountains girl and I don’t like long walks on the beach.

So rather than recount that boringness, here are some pictures!

Pool selfies!

This is from our story of paying Pedro to bring us beer on the beech. Note bracelet basket and beers in the background. We held the bracelet basket as ransom while Pedro went to buy beer with our $$.

Happier times with Pedro on the beach...note that I am still holding a closed beer bottle. Although we didn't want Pedro to open the beer bottle with his teeth, I bet he had something in his backpack that could have helped us get to our alcohol sooner. 

Cory, taking a first stab the the beer opening. 

Scuba diving.

Okay...pretty sweet scuba diving picture. Cory refused to take a disposable underwater camera scuba diving with him. He said it was "too touristy". I figured I was white, so I already looked like a tourist. Anyways, I got all pissy at Cory about this because I was like "but that means I won't have any pictures of ME scuba diving!" So then when we were underwater (and I guess the fear of being "too touristy" is less), Cory grabbed the camera from me and snapped this shot. Real happy about that because it's way better than the quality of any of the pictures I got of him. Thanks Cory!

Scuba diving was a whole lot of looking at things like this and being like "oohh...ahhh". But then really just being cold and bored and being like "can I go do backflips?" And then the assistant (who didn't get what "New" before "Hampshire" meant) would pull me back to the group thinking I was off getting lost somewhere.

Note the kid in the background. He was also getting his scuba certification. The last thing we had to do to pass our certification test was swim into shore. This was hilarious because I realized that our instructor literally never asked us if we could swim - it was just assumed. Which I guess is reasonable, expect that it seemed our Mozambican companion could not swim. I think he failed that part of the test when the assistant had to swim back out and help him get in. It turns out that many people in Tofo can't swim, despite growing up steps from the ocean. This makes a little sense though, if you think about how difficult it would be to LEARN to swim right where waves are breaking. Although all the hotels have pools, most of the locals don't have access to them. The Marine and Megafauna Foundation set of  a "Little Nemos" swim school for local kids to teach them to swim. Hotels in the area donate some pool time each week to the local kids so they can use it to learn to blow bubbles and float and then finally do some strokes. We saw them in an out of Casa Barry and it was awesome!

I'm actually probably crying in this goggles. Being like "oh my god...what do I have to do this again??"

This is just a great selfie.

OTHER FUN STORY.

Conversation with our English scuba assistant:

Her: Where are you from?

Me: New Hampshire

Her: Ah! There’s a Hampshire in England!

Me: ...