We’ve been offered a chance to run a small dive operation in the north of Bali. The dive centre is owned by the Company, and accompanied by a hotel resort. The customer volumes have been low throughout the year for the last two years or so, and the Company would like to see the business grow. That’s what they’re hoping to achieve by sending us up there.

There are positives and negatives to the offer, as always. Negatives first: It’s up there, far away from everything. It takes three hours in a car up the winding roads over the mountain range and through the jungle to get there, and the facilities are not that up-to-date. Only one of us would have the actual work visa with real pay to boot, the other one would have to get by with commissions and sales, which means quite a meager wage for one of us, and not a massive amount for the other one either. (I do have to say though that we’ve been living off one budget for quite a while now, so that wouldn’t be anything new.) The local religion (Balinese hinduism) has a habit of sounding off very lound prayer calls in the morning as well as in the evening, which has proven irritating in the past. And we’d have to do supplying trips down south (read: Sanur/Denpasar area) pretty much weekly to keep the shop and the resort stocked.

On the positive side, it would be an unparalleled chance to show what we can do. We would get to design the dive shop interior, run the daily operations, deal with customers and answer their emails. We’d also have to manage a little staff, learn the nooks and crannies of accounting a small business and do all the marketing both online and offline. There is an opportunity to be one’s own boss without actually bearing the financial burden of becoming an entrepeneur. We’d have the freedom of making the best of the business as we can, creating our own best practices and ways of working. Also we’d improve on the web pages, try to get them higher in the search results and also do some translating.

Moreover, it’s not every day that fresh diving instructors get the opportunity to run a business to the best of their abilities with this amount of history in the field. It will look very good in both our diving and non-diving CVs, not to mention the mass of experience we’d gain from the trip. Plus, we’d be diving easily the best sites in Bali pretty much daily. Just because of the remoteness, not too many divers actually make it all the way up there which makes the sites absolutely pristine and teeming with marine life.

Adding to that, we’d finally have a real apartment, with a real kitchen and bedrooms and air conditioning and stuff, all paid for by the company. That is to say, yours truly has been suffering from home sickness in the sense of longing for a home anywhere for a while now, and having a place to call home is extremely fetching for me indeed. Even if it wouldn’t be for much more than a year or so, it would still beat moving every four months. And, did I mention the steady pay for one of us already? That’s something freelancing instructors down in southern parts of the island don’t get. That would mean we wouldn’t have to dip into our savings any longer, even if we wouldn’t be generating much income either. And we’d still get the commissions and provisions on diving days and equipment sold, as well as courses taught.

Many of the actual details of the agreement are still open, but we’ll do our best in negotiating them. We haven’t been discussing the actual whens of the deal either, but we do know that we could do our trip back to Finland in September and continue the work in October.

But, as always, it’s not as cut-and-dry as one would hope. As Heikki wrote, there’s the option of Finnish summer, our loved ones and probably the best food in the world. With the unemployment benefits and summer cottages to take care of, we’d be happy as pigs in mud there. Need a good, hard think on this.

Now, I know this isn’t the industry to get rich in, and I’m not planning to: that’s a project for another time. Right now I’m looking for a job that can support my accommodation, food and other running costs without having to count every single penny. So far I haven’t found it, but I know they’re out there. We’ll have to keep on looking.

And while looking for it, there’s two options: we can either stay in Bali and hope that there’s some work to do, or we can go back to Finland for a while. I know there’s a lot of stuff to do back there, and we would get a living out of it. Both options have their sides.

Staying in Bali would allow us to do some work and gain experience, but also requires a lot of compromises. We’ve been staying in the Bedroom for four months now, listening to a crappy live band next door six nights a week, and that’s something we need an upgrade on. Higher rental costs, food, everyday items and transportation will be tough to pay on freelancer salary, even if we worked full time and a bit.

Now don’t be fooled by the small paradise island image Bali gives out – the rent for proper accommodation can be as high as in Oulu. Throw in professional insurance, instructor fees, clothing plus other expenses and we’re again facing a situation where we need the savings to stay in balance. Not good.

So what’s the alternative like? My last ties with the Corporation will be cut in mid June,  after which I’m a free agent on the employment market, with full benefits. Even without doing anything I would earn way more than I could dream of in Bali, would have plenty of time to watch for job openings and could attend one or two happenings I have been hoping to go to. Apart from the risk of getting stuck in Oulu and not getting a teaching routine running, it seems like our best bet right now. Even with the flight costs around 1300 euros one way, we’re better off financially after spending a few months in Finland.

And we would have moose on the table,  chainsaws in our hands, a proper motorbike to ride on, and a lot of dear friends around us. Goddammit, how hard can it be?

If a couple of the coming days are a bit uncertain, so is the big picture. We have less than two weeks left in the homestay we currently live in, and no one seems to know if it’s feasible for us to stay here or not. It depends on the job description and amount of customers, but that’s not all. We’ve been looking around for alternatives, and surprisingly there’s a host of things in favour of returning to Finland for summer. More about those some other time.

Now don’t get me wrong, working and living in Bali is excellent. The most pressing reason to leave is a financial one, since at least the first three months here would be without base pay or other benefits. Paying the rent, transport, food and other mandatory things  on commission only would require us to work around the clock without a day off, to cut down on accommodation and food, or most probably both. The alternative is to supplement income from our savings, but that’s neither sustainable nor good for other future plans. Money is not going to multiply by itself, so we need to find a way to support ourselves. On the side it would be nice to accumulate the savings a bit instead of devouring all of them.

We’ll keep you guys posted on where we are. There should be something to tell in a few days.

Otherwise it’s been quite quiet and relaxing, I’m still on the internship (i.e. not getting paid but getting to dive a lot) whereas Heikki signed off from the internship (guiding & teaching for money, but when there are no guests, he’s not diving either).  As Heikki already wrote, we’re looking for a place to move into, as our rent for the Bedroom is only paid  until May 17 or 18. The little room has served us well, but I’m most definitely looking forward to not having to use earplugs six nights a week thanks to the less-than-brilliant band playing across the street. Some of the places we’ve seen have been absolutely beautiful, some less so, but all the same they’ve been pretty much in the top end of our price range. Looks like we need to do some more searching, which requires a lot more footwork than back home.

Most of the rentals are not in newspapers or online, but simply advertise their availability on the street they’re located. The closer you get to the beach, the steeper the prices (obviously). Luckily we have the scooter, which gives us a pretty nice range too. Keeping our fingers crossed.

Hingeback crabs in Tulamben

Oriental sweetlips on the USS Liberty wreck

A nudibranch in Tulamben shallows

I’m having a day off today, so I’ll just sort through my e-mail, do groceries, and maybe go check out some places for accommodation. We have found a couple of nice ones already, but I feel like we need to check out some more before doing the decision. Eve is doing first aid training to one of our new divemaster interns, so she should also be available to check out places in the afternoon. Stay tuned.

Well, except the airline companies. Like, ten million a day? Dude.

There was some tame wildlife available for photos somewhere between north and south Bali

The anemones in Purijati were full of small things

We also found a type of nudibranch (armina sp. 2) I hadn’t seen before

Yes, there were sharks in Menjangan island, and no, they’re not dangerous

I’ve been trying to get a decent shot of a stingray for quite a while

I’ve seen this barracuda threee times now, but it’s so big it’s hard to get good photos of it

It seems that there’s not much to do at the dive school today, so for once I have enough time in my hands to post something. I hope to find a few minutes every now and then to update the blog, but don’t hold your breath. The busy season is just around the corner.

Now we’re out to do some groceries and have dinner. Tomorrow – you guessed it – diving. We’ll be teaching a course called Underwater Naturalist to three divemaster interns. Should be fun.

You’ve seen these ones already: a lionfish at Padang Bai

The definite highlight of the day: a juvenile clown frogfish

Hermit crabs occupy abandoned shells for protection

Cuttlefishes are way cool

If these don’t qualify me to teach Digital Underwater Photography course, I don’t know what will. And it’s so much fun as well!

And that’s not all: we’ll start teaching our first course in two days. This will be interesting!

[a very diving-specific explanation follows, skip if not interested:] For the uninitiated, a new wetsuit is very buoyant indeed, and going diving with a brand new one means you need to take a lot more weight than with an older, dived-in wetsuit. This essentially means that I was wearing both a weight belt and my weight pockets (integrated into the BCD), one of which gave and dropped off. In the blue. Which sucked big time. The buoyancy is a result of having gas bubbles within the neoprene (incidentally, this is the feature that keeps you warm, not the water that gets in your suit), and as gas bubbles have the tendency to be lighter than the surrounding water, buoyancy increases as the thickness of the wetsuit increases and vice versa. That’s also one of the reasons behind our doing a lot of deep dives lately – both me and Heikki have been compressing our respective suits.

Also, a cool feature of my suit is that as it’s deep red in primary colour, it turns dark purple when I go deeper than about 15 metres. This is because water absorbs certain wavelengths of light, and one of the first colours to go is red. So in effect, my suit changes colour! How neat is that?
[end of diving-specific explanation, you can breathe now]

In other news, we’ve been doing instructor specialties for the last two days and have a day or two more to go with that. We will end up with ten specialties each, which in turn means that we have a wider range of courses we can teach. We have now the Wreck, Deep, Drift, Night, Nitrox, Oxygen provider and certain fish identification, coral conservation and the like specialties. We’ll see what the eventual list looks like, but not a bad start at all.

While we were doing the wreck specialties, we bumped into a napoleon wrasse. It is a big fish indeed.

In the photo is our fellow German instructor, Mel (left). On the right, the aforementioned napoleon wrasse with a jack. Gives you some sense of scale, Mel’s a little taller than yours truly.

Also on the same dive we found an octopus barely hiding:

It was nervously flickering colours, which looked very wicked.

All in all, the Liberty wreck is a fabulous dive site, and the dives yesterday were just the thing that was needed to remind me why we do this. On a good day, the diving is spectacular, people are nice and things just roll. On a bad day, it’s just the opposite. We live in the hope that the majority of the days will be good ones.

Here’s a portrait of our colleague Mandy (U.K.) on a good day:

Look at those moves!

And I’ll leave it that. Will upload more later when we have a better internet day.

Yes, we’re going to party tonight.

All is well then, and we should be bright and royally intoxicated tomorrow at this hour.

Next up: knowledge development presentations and pool. We’ve done these so many times I could do it in my sleep.

Knowledge development presentation: 4.7 (minimum of 3.5 required for pass)

Confined water presentation: 5.0 (3.5 required)

Open water presentations: 4.5 average (3.4 required)

Skill circuit: 5, 4, 4, 5, 5 (Sum of 17 and at least 3 on every skill required)

On top of these there were a couple of exams, namely general standards and dive theory. I scored 49/50 on the former and something like 56/60 on the latter one, passing criteria being 75%. No problems there whatsoever.

Looks like the IE itself will be easy sailing, but messing up is actually really easy. I hope I can keep my concentration during the presentations in order to avoid those easy mistakes. I’m not concerned, but a bit wary. Just in case.

I keep on thinking back to home, and the more I dive here, the more I want to dive back in Finland too. Yeah, sure it’s cold water and the visibility is anything you can put your hand through, but nonetheless. I want to take those tanks to our summer cottage, grab a row boat and go dive our fishing sites. I want to go find Oulu 2, the tugboat that sunk over 60 years ago. I want to teach everyone I know to dive (okay, exaggerating but anyhoo). I want to, because now I know for a fact that I can.

One of the things that kept me from diving back home was the fact that I wasn’t comfortable with my skill level in doing so. Sure, there were friends and probably people from the dive club or centre who would’ve helped, but now I know I have what it takes and that I can handle it for sure. Conditions are different, but these months have given me skills to adapt.

So, tomorrow it’s the mock exam open and confined (read: pool) water parts, where we get to demonstrate our abilities in teaching, problem solving and evaluating whether or not the students can master the skills they need to. Lots of fun, and some not so fun. I have one of the trickier ones to conduct, but preparing carefully should do the trick.

Chances are that next time I write, I’ll have a new certification to my name. Wish us luck!

An evil spirit in action

The funny thing is, not all of the evil spirits are religious figures. Some of them depicted tourists and other western symbols, like Mickey Mouse in diving gear or a white drunk with his willy hanging out of his shorts. And one on a jet ski.

At least my shorts weren’t blue and white

It’s funny to see how the ones bringing in most of the income are also the ones that are hauled around with the bad spirits and other such evil ones, but I guess it’s just one of those situations where money talks and so on.

After the parade and sellingburning the ogoh-ogohs, the whole town literally silences down for 24 hours. The Nyepi day (Tuesday the 16th this year) is like there was no one in: all shops and restaurants are closed, the streets are empty and even the tourists are kept inside their hotels. Only emergency transport to hospitals is allowed besides the traditional guards who keep watch.

Anyway, it’s over now and we’re almost finished with our Emergency First Response instructor course. Soon we’ll be able to teach CPR and first aid on our own.

Our typical day starts around 8:15 in the morning with classroom sessions, followed by an excellent buffet lunch and maybe some pool learning in the afternoon. The official part concludes around five, but usually we stay for some time to prepare our presentations, surf the net or do some studying. Sometimes we just go out for beers and hang out with people.

The classes are not so much about diving itself anymore, but more about how to teach. The actual subject matter has already been covered during the divemaster course, so we’re able to concentrate on how to deliver that information to our students. We practise giving presentations by doing very compact, but still complete lectures on small subjects such as staying warm underwater or how to avoid ear problems during ascents. Even though the whole presentation may be only two or three slides long, we include a full introduction, the matter itself and a summary in each one. Our performance is constantly evaluated by at least two persons from the staff.

So far the IDC has been from a different planet compared to the divemaster course. We have a schedule, clear objectives and maybe the best educator-mentor-role model the island has to offer. His example sets high standards for the whole course, and that’s the way I like it.

http://img254.imageshack.us/i/bombsquad3kn.jpg/

Now, think of the moment when the bag goes off…”

Oh, the presentation? Lung overexpansion injuries.

We also got a quick glimpse at technical diving (tec for short) by trying out double tanks and other tec gear, and boy was it difficult. I’ve done a fin pivot (see a demonstration in Youtube) approximately a million times in my own and rental scuba gear, but the buoyancy/weight balance of the tec set was so completely different I didn’t even get close. On the other hand, the additional mass made it somewhat easier to control my depth. That may sound a bit odd to someone who has never dived, but it goes like this:

[a long explanation follows]

Whenever I’m underwater, there are two forces that affect my depth, namely gravity and the buoyant force of water supporting me. When these two are in balance, I can float around in same depth for as long as I want. However, the buoyant force is a bit complicated to manage.

As we know from elementary physics, the buoyant force of water depends on the volume of the object, which in this case is a breathing human. When I breathe in, my external volume changes somewhat. I then displace more water, become more buoyant than with my lungs empty. It may not sound like a big deal, but breath control is actually the most effective way to do depth changes in two to three metre range.

Now, throw in around 10 kilograms of extra weight (compared to my standard equipment), and the situation changes somewhat. The weight has to be countered with extra buoyancy, which in turn makes my breathing relatively less significant to my total buoyancy.

[a long explanation concludes]

Anyway, the experience was fun, and I was still able to control my depth with breathing well enough. The experience was fun, but right now I’m not sure technical diving is my choice. I still find a lot of interesting stuff within the limits of recreational fun diving, so there’s no incentive for me to go there – at least not yet.

Tomorrow we’ll be having a compressor and equipment maintenance workshop. Should be fun!

So, here’s what we got:

That’s mine…

…and this is Eeva’s. Note the slate pocket on the right thigh.

And all this for 700 US dollars. Assuming these last five years, that’s 20 cents per head per day. Just in case you wanted to know.