Turkoise again - take 5

Old habits, and old dive friends... Back to Turks with my original dive buddy who appears on this page, and our usual group of expert divers. Some wise and experienced friends said 'We told you so!' about my recent mishaps of this year, and our most senior excellent diver is back in the water at 70-some years of age, after having lost her husband last year. We all bow to her - she still beats me on air!!! And she can tell me of World War 2 stories still at supper!

The diving was cancelled twice this week because of the weather. But the good side is that we pulled in a few two-tanks at Northwest Point, which was great. I knew that it was doable, but I finally found out what it's like to be sick underwater! Hold your second stage!!! I also became the Bonamine pusher on the dive boat ;)

We were blessed by a humpback whale visiting us at Northwest Point. And bottlenose dolphins, twice, playing with the boat.

Got to dive with Fifi once and made it to French Cay. No Spotted Eagle Rays this year... but still great diving. Jojo the solitary Grace Bay dolphin was not around this time.

Oh, and I hate Suunto. I am going back to Oceanic. Those 10 minute deco stops are sooooooo annoying!

At the beginning of the week, the divemasters had mentioned that the big green moray eels were elusive this year... well we found this one 'Somewhere near Boneyard'... quite cooperative!

It was a great week again at Club Med Turkoise!

Kauai, the Garden Island

Kauai was an unexpected stop. We were supposed to spend all our time on the Big Island and it turned out different. And it was great. We got much spacier accommodations with full laundry facilities for a slightly higher price than our tight 1 bedroom (for 4) in Hilo. As soon as we landed in the evening in Lihue on Kauai, we got organized to be on a dive boat the next day... always the effective gung-ho travelers! We got to wet our dive gear and log two more dives than we thought we would do, bringing the total of this vacation to 19 dives in 7 days. Phew!

Kauai from the dive boat

Saw a site full of turtles and were honored to see a rare juvenile Hawai'ian Monk Seal from the boat, and then on the other dive site... tons of turtles - not far from Poipu beach and Spouting Horn. No tiger or reef whitetip sharks as promised, but hey, you can't have it all. The coral was different and covered in silt: since this island is pretty wet, it has lots of rivers pouring silt into the sea. The turtles were friendly and quite cooperative to photo and video. Overall though, I would say that Kauai is probably not worth the stop for the scuba diving, and it is expensive as there is not nearly as much shore diving as the Big Island. My dad got all worried because some Canadian guy got bitten by a shark off Maui... but scuba divers don't get bitten, of course - only surfers and spear fisherman do :). Speaking of sharks, we learned that during our stay on the Big Island there had been a juvenile whale who was attacked and killed and eaten by a bunch of sharks off the South Coast of Big Island. Maybe that's why we never saw sharks on this trip... they were all out there feasting in the Big Blue !!! :)

Turtle off Poipu, South Shore

Nice parrotfish hanging out at some lava tubes off Poipu, South Shore

We then hung out at the local beach called Nawiliwili, in front of our hotel. I'm not making that name up.

Then the next day we drove all the way (a very long, uh, hour!) from Lihue on the South Coast to Hanalei on North Coast. On the way we stopped at Opeaka'a falls.

Then we drove to the North Shore to the end of the highway and hiked the first 2 miles of the Kapalau trail from Ke'e Beach

with great views of the Na Pali Coast (scenery of Jurassic Park, Raiders of the lost Ark, George of the Jungle etc...)

to Hanakapi'ai Beach which boasts 82 drownings.

So this unexpected stop on Kauai punctuated by more scuba and more hiking concludes this long trip to Hawai'i. I am writing this blog from the Honolulu airport while burning S's photos onto CD's while waiting for our plane back home. My cough is still there, I am starting to wonder if it is whooping cough! But I've managed with it, including diving without any problems (aside from having friends laughing at me when I get a coughing fit underwater). There are other islands to visits, a return to Big Island with a stop at the observatory and driving up Saddle road, and more hikes to do, but that will be it for now.. and of course it was a great trip.

Let's get out of here!

After our memorable hike on lava at night in the rain, we went into Hilo to get some dinner. What a difference between Kailua-Kona and Hilo! Because of the tsunami 10 years ago, Hilo has not been rebuilt and the downtown looks like a ghost town. It scared us to bits, and that's without the L brothers mentioning the crackwhores that they had seen not far from our hotel. We had greasy Hawai'ian fare at a very odd Kitsch diner decorated with 1) plastic plants 2) plastic fish 3) Thanksgiving turkey posters and 4) benches from the fifties. We had some strange impressions of déjà vu - I felt like I was back in the deep Outback, with rednecks all around... Definitely a contrast from our laid-back and safe vacation diving in Kailua-Kona!

So in the morning, to A's suggestion, we did some fast decision-making and booked a helicopter tour to see lava at a closer range, followed by a flight out of Big Island into Kauai! A went back home and now we were down to three.

In the 'copter

Lava from Pu'u seen from the air: hhhhot llllikwid mmmmagma....

A reminder that we are on the youngest island on the planet:

Watching the Big Man make real estate...

That is a quote from G when we approached the plume of Pu'u O'o, the active volcano of Big Island (and really an outgrowth of Mauna Kilauea), with its two lava flows going into the sea. Otherwise we all had the quote from Austin Powers in our head: 'hotttt llllikwid mmmagma'.

Today was another busy day thanks to the reappearance of the L clan (minus P the sister), back from their family wedding in Honolulu over the week-end. We left Kailua-Kona at noon after a morning of packing and drove the rental car to Hilo. Thanks to cell phone text messages (there is reception throughout the island!) we managed to meet the L brothers at the entrance of the National Volcano Park at 16h00. We changed into our hiking gear, logged some water and extra batteries and hiking sticks and proceeded down the Chain of Craters Road to the coast to find the places where the lava from Pu'u meets the sea.

Lava plume before dark

The end of the road!

Cold lava close-up

We started the hike around 16h40, walked on the lava rocks and the trail all through sunset, then continued at night with our head lamps and dive lamps put to good use. We were prepared for all sorts of weather, with long pants, gore-tex jackets, extra batteries, snacks and water, and a very complete first aid kit thanks to S the team pharmacist. Hiking on lava is treacherous; it is like walking on ground glass, and as my hands and left knee found out, when you trip, you cut yourself quite a bit. Thanks to G for his diving gloves! We saw the lava shining orange in the dark at the end of the marked trail and I was too tired to continue hiking in the dark and rain looking for little lava holes past the trail... it had started raining and we had hiked already a good 2 hours. We ended up being soaked to the bones, and I'm not sure that it wasn't rain tinted with some sulfuric acid from the lava plume! But it was worth seeing the lava at night entering the sea, with its red glow. Nature at work. Real estate being created on the Big Island.

Lava plume a lot closer at the end of the trail

On the way back, which was in full darkness, we kept on bumping into unprepared hikers and became the rescuing team of the evening. G first gave his extra D batteries to an elderly couple who seemed to know what they were doing but whose lamps was starting to fail. Then we bumped into a young Japanese couple who were walking very carefully with crappy lamps, with the lady looking terrified and with inadequate shoes. Then we bumped into the worst team of them all, a group of Canadian ladies here for a teacher's conference. They were wearing short skirts, no jackets, no water, one was in flip flops with socks, and they were barely 1/3 of the way in when it had started to rain and they thought that they would proceed; we discouraged them to. Shortly after, one of them fell and cut herself quite deeply on her knees and left fingernail. A, being the more extraverted emergency doc on the team, proceeded into doing his thing and borrowed some supplies from the team pharmacist. The lady was completely hysterical and kept on repeating in a little girl's voice 'Why does this always happen to me?!?!? I am soo unlucky!!!'... Phew, this reminded us why we need vacations from our jobs sometimes :). Then finally, when we got the the car, G sold his headlamp for twice what he paid for it to a young couple who was going to start doing the hike; they also looked unprepared but looked fit. We are betting that they turned back after the wet and difficult conditions, and the fact that all the people that they saw coming back looked freaked out...

Overall this was a tricky hike on treacherous terrain with nasty conditions at night... a good 5 hours... but it was well worth it! And we were a rescuing team, which seems to be a theme each time I travel with the L brothers :)

Kailua-Kona highlights

Seen and heard and done in Kona:

- A line-up of at least 10 police cars and SUV into the Kona McDonald's for drive-in breakfast at 7h50 am. A 2 lane drive-in at that...We were most likely in the safest area of town at that time of the day!

- Meeting GF from British Columbia on the boat dive day, and realizing that S and him had previously fought on E-Bay for the same camera. That was funny :) GF buddied up with us on the dolphin dive day off Honohokau Bay.

Entry of the shore dive at Honohokau Bay. Yes, we walked all that way into the water with our dive gear.

- A tumbling exit at the Kona Paradise shore dive onto a black pebble beach. We didn't realize that the pebbles were in such a slant that if we tried climbing back onto the beach from the surf, there were avalanches... so we all got stuck trying to climb out rolling pebbles with full dive gear! Yikes!

Black pebble beach at Kona Paradise

- An evening busy traumatized (S more than me) by a giant coackroach who had made its way into the apartment. Thank God for the can of Raid!!! It is true that the thing was at least 2 inches long, not counting the antennae, and it almost got into S's luggage before I eliminated it successfully with squeak-punctuated puffs of Raid.

- Being woken up the first night in our nice condo by what was most likely a rat! It woke me up by scurrying around and jumping off my bed at 4 am and then of course I couldn't get back to sleep, so I went to check e-mail. It was a good omen, since G had e-mailed me to meet them at the crazy hour of 6h15 am to go diving. So the mysterious rat was dubbed 'Dive Buddy' ; then he was never seen again and avoided all the rat traps in spite of the delicious bacon. Dive Buddy is definitely not a figment of my imagination even though everybody else seems to think so :)

- An interesting dive at Honaunau - Place of Refuge after our 'crepuscular' dive there. It had been a great dive, where the 'Aloha' written with cement blocks underwater was home to many sleeping pufferfish. But then when we walked back to our car we encountered a strange paranoid local. He kept on asking if we were with a group, who was our 'commando leader', and that we were not to disturb the sacred marine life at this time of the day. After we told him that we were on our own and I asked him 'What seems to be the problem, sir' more assertively, he calmed down and left with a 'Welcome to Hawai'i'. Creepy-o!

- Being freaked scared after a shore night dive on our own (2 girls) off Mile 4 beach. We had seen dodgy locals drinking at 7 am there and there were two people watching us load back our gear into our car trunk - a little dodgy. After a while we realized that they were a couple just hanging out at the beach and calmed down.

- Expensive boat diving where the divemasters want to sell you a 'crepuscular dive'. It's just an expensive way of saying sunset dive. Geeeez!

- Kailua-Kona, the only place in the world where I've done a surface interval in my wetsuit and booties shopping for ice-cream sandwiches for the group at Wal Mart!

- Speaking of which, Wal Mart!!!! Land of McD's ie safe food for S, cheap dive gear dohicky's like net bags, tankbangers, gloves, carabiners, dry bags, and cheap bikinis etc etc... We must have gone at least 4 times to Wal-Mart in Hawai'i!

- Delicious sushi at Kenichi's lost in the boonies in a shopping center. The delightful Uni was from... California. And yet when I was in California the delightful Uni was from... British Columbia. I don't get it.

Yummmm...sushi!

- Po'ke! and more Po'ke for breakfast! Po'ke is a sashimi tuna salad with sesame oil, spices and soy sauce... yum yum... Hawai'ian fare at its best. (much better than loco moco, which is ground beef on rice covered with a fried egg).

- Sunset at Hapuna Beach in the South Kohala Coast

Big Island Diving: to fit all tastes and budgets!

There was a bandwagon created by the first of our group arrived in Kailua-Kona. The first two L siblings who arrived the day before me got oriented and started diving right away. They got me to meet them the next day at the very reasonable hour of... 6h15 am. That day, we dove at 7h30 am, went to the airport to pick up the third L sibling, dove twice afterwards - once with dolphins, and then I went to pick up S in the evening at the airport again.

It continued like that for the rest of the week, almost like a liveaboard. Thankfully the weather turned out to be very cooperative and there were no more flash flood warnings like last week on Oahu. Since we are all diving fanatics (1 instructor, 2 divemasters and 1 to be, and 1 rescue) and there were 5 of us, it was quite easy logistically to get organized, and we were on a roll. 5 days of diving, 17 dives, 12 of which exhausting shore dives, 5 night dives. Scuba diving itself is not a sport, but shore diving is a completely different matter! Logging tanks and weights and hopping with dive gear on lava rocks, yay! I've learned that I'm a boat divemaster and not a shore one; that I tend to have very unclassy exits on shore dives; that bloopers is my specialty on videos, even when it's really the manta's fault; that one can have coughing fits underwater; and that I am definitely not gifted at underwater navigation, but then again, that's no news. Other things that I have discovered: tangs are surgeonfishes, sea urchin spines can go through my new 5 mm wetsuit (ayoye!), and dolphins can be heard cackling and whistling from very far underwater...

So diving in the Big Island can be either very cheap or very expensive. Try to guess which dive was expensive and which wasn't:

Hence:

1) Shore diving with unlimited tank filling and weight rental: 16 dollars for the day. We pulled 3 dives/day for a few days on that. We saw Hawaiian spinner dolphins, tons of moray eels, fish of the Pacific including moorish idols and yellow tangs (as opposed to the standard blue tangs of the Caribbean), turtles, and spotted eagle rays.

2) Boat diving all the way to Au-Au Canyon, blackwater diving in the great (black) big blue looking for pelagic jellyish spaceship-shaped things, and night manta dive: somewhere between 70 to 120$ a dive. Ouch!!! But it was definitely worth it. On our manta night dive in front of the Sheraton Hotel, it was a young female named Wing Ray who came to visit us, still awkward and tumbling around and hitting people with a wing here and there. Apparently she is less than 2 years old and 'only' has a wingspan of 6-8 feet. Notice the big-eyed diver on the manta picture above - that's me :). On our video I actually get hit by Wing Ray, and on my footage you can hear my onomatopeia when I have to dodge her.

S and Wing Ray

My footage of Wing Ray

So that manta curse that I was carrying around - not having seen any mantas in spite of having spent some significant time underwater in South East Asia... well that curse is broken now!

Waikiki: did and didn't

What I didn't do in Waikiki:

- learn how to surf, or even boogie board

- bake to a crisp out in the sun on the beach

What I did do:

- enjoy some retail therapy at the Billabong store to be a diver who wants to look like a surfer but who doesn't surf at all :)

- see a Japanese tea ceremony (which I never saw in Kyoto)

- eat good sushi

- watch hula

- hike a little and run a little

- sleep a lot

- cough some

etc, etc...

Halloween in Waikiki

Waikiki Beach from the rooftop pool of my hotel

Waikiki Beach from the short hike up Diamond Head

L'Halloween à Waikiki!

Me voici par hasard et coup de tête impulsif, pour un petit 2 semaines et demi dans les îles Hawaiiennes. Je passe un petit 5 jours seule à Waikiki et les potes de plongée me rejoignent à Kona la semaine suivante.

Waikiki... selon la dame au kiosque d'activités de l'hôtel, il y a plus d'argent ici dans ce petit 2 km carrés que dans tous les USA excepté la Californie et New York. Faut le faire. Au moins je suis ici en saison basse, on a réservé mon hôtel à Waikiki avant de partir, et les gens de la réception, parce que j'avais l'air Filipino comme eux, m'ont 'upgradé' d'un studio à une suite avec cuisine complète et chambre séparée avec lit king. Il n'y a pas de quoi se plaindre, surtout à penser que la majorité des hôtels de Waikiki chargent bien au delà de 50% de plus que je ne paie par nuit!

Quoi faire à Waikiki? Je file plutôt végétative. En fait je cuve ma grippe chisasibienne qui a trainé depuis 2 semaines avec une sale toux. Donc pas de plongée, un peu de jogging, beaucoup d'internet (taux fixe pour mon séjour dans ma chambre!), un peu de hiking sur Diamond Head, un peu de shopping. Waikiki est ultra-touristique mais ça vaut la peine de regarder le monde sur la plage - les surfers et surfettes tout comme les touristes japonaises qui se cachent du soleil derrière leurs grands chapeaux et leurs blouses. J'ai vu l'aquarium de Waikiki, le Chinatown vide de nuit, je compte aller voir une cérémonie de thé et passer les économies qu'Iris m'a faites sur l'hôtel dans une demi-journée de spa hyper-luxueux - une première pour moi, pourquoi pas! Je ne me précipite pas à faire le tour d'Oahu - ce sont plutôt des vacances vegges, à relaxer, profiter de la chaleur et se reposer.

Hier, soirée de l'Halloween. Je ne suis pas sortie longtemps, et seulement pour des commissions, mais ça valait la peine. Sur Kalakaua Avenue qui longe la plage de Waikiki, c'était bourré de monde, et tout le monde déguisé. 'Hap-py Halloween' à qui mieux mieux, sur le même ton exactement que les 'Hap-py Mardi Gras' lancés à New Orleans et à Key West (qui invitaient les dames à montrer leurs, euh, poumons). Beaucoup de gens déguisés en diablotins et en French Maids .

Hawai'i is interesting, or at least what I've seen of it so far. It is truly the gateway to Asia, there is so much reminding that Asia isn't far. The number of Japanese tourists in Waikiki is staggering; I guess that the urban comfort mixed with the beach setting is just appropriate for the average Japanese. The Chinatown isn't impressive compared to say, San Francisco or New York, but that's because every other restaurant in town outside of Chinatown is Asian. Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino - name it, they're around. People around really look very mixed; most of the hotel staff seem Filipino but then again nothing is for sure. The lady at the tourism kiosk in the hotel lobby looked Hawai'ian but then she mentioned that her mother was French (and made a killer sushi). It is really a melting pot, at least on the surface. According to the Lonely Planet though the melting pot is just an illusion, underneath there are still ethnic group differences in this place.

We aren't lucky with the weather. I am afraid to tell my friends who are coming to join me later this week that the weather forecast is cloudy and overcast for the next 10 days, which is unusual for the Islands. Oh well... I've always thought that the fish came out more when it was less sunny, so it should be all right for the scuba diving.

We'll see what happens.

So far, so good. I like this place, its multiracial heritage, the vicinity of the ocean, and of course the weather

Et le but d'aller au Mexique c'était?

de passer par Holbox en ce moment-ci de l'année pour voir des requins-baleines!

Saison des requins-baleines qui broutent les champs de plancton entre Holbox et Cancun: juin à août.

Saison des moustiques à Holbox: juin à août.

Saison des no-see-ums à Holbox: à l'année.

Conclusion: on a nagé avec les requins-baleines, on en a tiré quelques films, mais on est bourrées de piqûres!

Hola desde Cozumel!

Buenas tardes de Cozumel,

We have now left Tulum, the city of hippies with cheap cabanas on the beach where iguanas poop on you at night - true story, it happened to a poor Swiss girl that we met! We spent 2 days in Playa del Carmen, the fastest growing area of Mexico, which is completely rebuilt after Wilma the hurricane last year. On est vraiment craquées de plongée alors on n'a pas arrêté!!! Day one in Playa del Carmen was 2 more cenote dives completed by a tour in a local bar also built in a grotto (on ne se tanne pas!). Day 2 in PDC started with 2 amazing reef dives in 5 knot current, watching gigantic turtles grazing the bottom and landing in a school of 50 huge tarpons which are gigantic sardines about 6 feet big. Moi j'avais faim alors je me demandais 'ça se mange-tu ces trucs-là?'... nitrogen does funny things to you, I tell you... :). Then on the same day we packed our wet stinking stuff in my net bag, checked out of our Playa del Carmen hotel, boarded the ferry to Cozumel, arrived in our Cozumel hotel, and proceeded in doing the night dive there too. Faut être motivées! Ou folles drette! The night dive was awesome, gigantic gray moray eels the size of me (or bigger!), 4 octopuses, a scorpionfish, a lobster scared by our dive lights whom bumped into a gigantic king crab also confused by us....

Cozumel has been damaged by hurricane Wilma last year and apparently the reefs have been affected. I ain't complaining though, the viz is still quite acceptable although not spectacular, and there is a lot of sand on the reef as well. But the fishies and the baby fishies are all there, it is all teeming with life. We are diving with a bunch of Americans who invade the island and drive the prices up. But the diving is still not too expensive when one can share a room.

Alors c'est les nouvelles. Pas d'anecdotes marrantes comme à Tulum, ici c'est plus civilisé, on a l'air climatisé et l'eau courante. La santé va bien, et on vous envoie des photos!!!

Hola from Tulum!

Cheers from Tulum where S and I are today, after two heavy days of diving in cenotes. S, officially my new dive buddy, has this mega big camera that takes amazing pictures. We dove in grottoes and cenotes and did a crazy dive this morning down to 52 meters (not feet!!!) viva el narcosis and time to deco! Friggin amazing dive in a little water hole with a strange cloud of sulphur and some serious walls around.. it needs to be shown... According to S it beats the Blue Hole in Belize anytime...

When S arrived a day before me in Tulum she tried to stay on the beach, as recommended by the friendly lonely planet. Well, her adventures in the cabanas lasted one sleepless night, with mosquitoes and 34 degree heat and a hippie crowd who doesn´t seem to appreciate the virtues of air conditioning, water and electricity. Hippies with tattoos, body piercing, rasta and poor general hygiene. There were cabanas on the beach with a thatch roof for 16 USD a night but now we understand why they were so cheap - if you can see the stars through the roof, it usually means that you will get wet if it rains!!! Also when electricity works with solar panels, well, at night there is none!!! Given our dive gear and her camera gear, it was not such a good idea. Plus, the divemasters that she dealt with at the dive center at the cabanas seemed like they had waaaaay too much weed - the neuron wasn't connecting much. On their reef dive her DM managed to lose two divers - out of a group of three!!!!

En fait maintenant on a une super idée pour un prochain party à thème dans le Nord: un party de néo-hippies Babacool, avec rasta, tatous, backpacks et bandanas!!! Ça devrait arriver près de chez vous cet automne...

Where we did not stay. Iguana poo free of charge.

Strange findings in Mexican pharmacies... available over the counter.

So S found a hotel in Tulum Pueblo right in front of the dive center and we love it; paying the 5$ cab fare to the beach is no big deal and we get to enjoy civilization, electricity, access to water and food. The cenote - cave diving is awesome - great views, awesome visibility, stalagtites and stalagmites... Very eery!

Demain on se barre sur Playa del Carmen pour faire du shopping, d'autres cenotes pis peut-être la fiesta... puis ensuite Cozumel avec du drift wall diving et enfin on sera sur Holbox la semaine prochaine à plonger avec des raies manta et des requins baleines.

Comme quoi au Mexique - même s'il fait trop chaud, la vie est belle!!!