The whole Europe seems to be in a halt because of the volcano and its ashes, but there’s always a silver lining for some of us: one of my old friends was in a seminar or such in Kuala Lumpur, and his flight got cancelled yesterday. Being the resourceful chap he is, it took him a full two hours to haul himself to the airport and buy a return ticket to Bali. I immediately took off to make him a hotel reservation, and it seems like we’ll be teaching an open water course starting in a day or two. Everybody wins!

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

Tags: diving, flying, friends and family, holiday, practical stuff, surprises, teaching, work

It’s been fun, I have to admit. Also, it’s been hard and occasionally not fun, as I managed to drop a weight pocket today (writing this offline on Wednesday) to a slope on Sakenan dive site, depth of about 30 metres and struggled afterwards a bit… So yeah, becoming an instructor does not make you infallible in diving. We did get some pretty good dives in with moray eels and a frogfish, got the new wetsuit down to about 40 metres and crushed. I still need lots of kilos to get me under with it, but slowly it’s getting easier and easier.

[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.

Tags: diving, instructor internship, it's good to be me, natural beauty, oh bugger, PADI IDC, photos, practical stuff, stress

The song by Dio keeps playing in my head on repeat, as we’re closing to our instructor examinations. The next two days are about our mock examinations, then we have a day off and then it’s the real thing. The point of no return, so to speak – we’re about to become certified as instructors. Time flies.

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!

Tags: diving, exams, instructor internship, PADI IDC, practical stuff, time

Our schedule got updated a bit (like there really was an old one) and we’re doing our instructor course already in March. After that we’ll have our OWSI certifications and we can start teaching while we’re still here. We’ll get some proper teaching experience and some real students before trying to find jobs, plus we don’t have to just hang around for several months without proper objectives to achieve. Nice.

And my youngest brother is here with his GF and they’re starting their OWD course tomorrow. Something tells me we’ll be assisting on that, which would also be nice.

And I almost forgot the best news of the day: we have a bottle of Ardbeg on us, kindly brought in by Andy. Bestest!

Tags: divemaster internship, diving, instructor internship, planning, practical stuff

Yeah, it’s warm and sunny, occasionally rainy. No, our place is nowhere near as flamboyant as the crib in India was, but that’s really beside the point – we’re not here to stay indoors, we’re here to dive.

And that’s pretty much what we’ve been doing. Monday we just settled in and took a look around the town (basically one road with a T cross) and got the necessities. Tuesday we got the orientation going, met pretty much everyone at the dive centre (later on known as BSB for Blue Season Bali), got our luggage which was left behind already in Helsinki (thanks again, Finnair and their outsourced ground staff), and fixed transportation (a scooter of about 100 cubic centimetres) as well as telecommunication. Numbers given on request.

Wednesday, pool day. Talk about starting by jumping into the deep end… literally. Figuratively it was true too. There were some skills we were supposed to demonstrate I had never done before since I did my open water course with another company, not PADI by whose standards we’re now studying. All things considered it wasn’t that bad, but I would’ve wanted to shine, of course…

Thursday, Tulamben. Up at 5.30 am, gear all together at 6.30 at the centre, and then two hours and some change up north with a wheezing minibus. The views were amazing, as was to be expected. Bali is a volcanic island, and there is a functioning volcano. We drove up and around it to get to Tulamben, where off the black beach lies the wreck of USS Liberty. It’s one of the easiest and safest wreck dives in the world, and probably one of the most famous too. We went there to learn new species of fish, and how to identify fish we don’t already know. I did my very first swim-throughs there too, and saw a humongous barracuda slumbering under the hull. (by humongous I mean about 2 m long, looks like a hauki [pardon my Finnish]) And yes, we learned new fish species. Two dives on that day, and back on the bumpy bus.

Friday (that’s today as I’m drafting this offline, we don’t have the net in the Bedroom which suits us just fine) was a three dive-day. Off the Sanur beach to south-east there are three more islands, one of which is called Nusa Penida. Off Nusa Penida there are lots of reefs and sloping, coral-clad walls with currents blowing past them. When in season, the Mola Molas a.k.a. oceanic sunfish come to Nusa Penida to hang out and reproduce. Now is not the season, but there was plenty to see nonetheless. Scorpionfish (in the picture), frogfish, stonefish, heaps upon heaps of the usual suspects (different angels and butterflies) and a huge napoleon wrasse. We just drifted along the current, letting it do most of the work.

As I’m writing this it’s almost nine pm, and we’re pretty much ready to call it a day. Tomorrow we’re going – surprise surprise – diving again. It takes forever to upload the photos, but eventually they’ll get there – just be patient.

To be continued…

Tags: Bali, diving, practical stuff, time, why I wanted a change

While we’re in the capital city area, it’s easy to get the visa process done in person. No need to send the passports via post, no need to wait for them to come back. The Indonesian embassy surprised us positively by being so very efficient with the visas. We took our passports there on last Thursday, and on Monday when I called, they were ready.

The amount of paper was not overwhelming, they just needed the digital copies (this is unheard-of sometimes even in Finland, that a digital copy of something would suffice!) of the recommendation letters from Indonesia plus the scan of the identity card of the person who wrote the letters, our tickets there and away from the island, and the receipt that we had paid the visa fees.

But of course, there’s a catch. The visas are only valid for  60 days, and our training takes twice as long. What this means is that we need to renew the visas while there, but the good thing is, we have the dive school people to help us with the process. Having natives to help you is a huge bonus, and I’m pretty sure we’re not the first ones to extend their visas while in the country.

Talking of embassies, the Finnish honorary embassy in Indonesia is in Bali, so in case of emergency there’s help to be had. Not that we plan to have cases of emergencies, we plan not to have any.

Not too long now…

Tags: bureaucracy, diving, practical stuff, surprises, travel

Oh, how I love being European in the world economy of 2009.

The guys in Bali have decided to operate on a steady currency instead of Indonesian Rupiahs (a wise choice as such), so everything is paid in US dollars. However, while the steadiness of euro has been rock solid, the value of USD just hit its all-time low at .66 euros. I just paid our 5-figure course fees and accommodation, saving several thousand dollars just by living in the this specific part of the world!

So, we have the flights, we have the course payment on its way, and we have accommodation waiting in Helsinki after New Year’s. And it seems like we’re getting to visit Vuohijärvi as well!

Tags: it's good to be me, money, planning, practical stuff

Okay, let’s have a checklist. Just in case we’ve forgotten something.

We are in the process of getting visas for Bali. Our passports have more than a year in them left.

I’ve found suitable flights for us and we have someone to take us to Helsinki first. There’s enough time for transit in Singapore even though we will have to transfer our check-in baggage by ourselfs.

We can pay for courses, flights and visas any day now without going bankrupt. And I still have my final salary payment ahead of me.

We have an appointment with a doctor for health certificates and we have all the necessary vaccinations in effect.

Are we missing something hugely important here?

Tags: Bali, let me know, planning, practical stuff, travel, vaccinations

I’m going to the office tomorrow to sort out the details of my short but interesting post-Bangalore career in the Corporation. Most probably I will go back once or twice after that, but that’s about it – I hope. I’m not going to say anything as fact before having something about this on paper.

Still, it’s good to be back.  Clean streets, peace & quiet, me blending in the crowd… Oulu is a lot better than most of people even realise.

Tags: planning, practical stuff, work