La Paz - day 3 and 4

Decided not to Dive today and it was a good decision. I created the Delhi shopping tour site and spent my time having coffee and walking around La Paz. I read, "The clash of kings". All in all an awesome day.

Day 4 diving was great. Saw 10 Manta rays... 2 ship wrecks, a swarm of fish... It was great. Most likely I'll go to Cabo Pulmo tomorrow. It will be awesome. Funny that this opportunity was created out of the incompetence of the Baja Paradise team. 

La Paz - Day 2

while I did not see any sharks today, I did have a good time playing with the sea lions at La Isleta. This island is located very close to espirito santo island. Its funny how harmless they are and how playful. They could easily hurt you but they dont.

Tomorrow - the dive shop wants to go to the same place I dove yesterday and today. I really dont want to go but I dont know what else I can do in La Paz on a Sunday. Is that a good reason to still go? What if they see more hammerheads that I.. I can live with that I guess.

La Paz - day 1

Today I understood why La Paz is heaven for divers. In 3 dives and 10 minutes of snorkeling I saw:
1. Hammerhead sharks
2. Whake Shark
3. The most fertile reef I've seen yet
4. A bird diving in the water to get her fish

What a great day for diving. Not sure how I'll ever be able to top this.

The hammerhead shark - 2nd dive of the day was interesting. We were panting so much after the fast swim to get to the sharks that we surfaced. We surfaced from about 80ft to 0 in about 2 minutes or less. It was shocking and scary how quickly we came up. The dive master should be shot. He surfaced before everyone. Two other Japanese tourists with me had there dive computers and stayed at 5m/15ft to decompress. We all should have done that. Lucky escape is all I can say.

Berlin. 27-30 September 2011

It was my first trip to Germany. I had to meet Grundy UFA in Griebnitzsee. It was a beautiful town. I stayed at http://www.avendi.eu/?tree_id=521 - A really nice hotel with good breakfast right next to the lake.


The day I arrived, I decided to go to Potsdam just to walk around and have dinner. It was a fairly odd experience. Not a single shop would accept credit cards, I did not want to change money if I did not have to.. eventually I had to and that too at a low rate with fees.. crap. So amateurish I felt. I also walked and walked and walked.. everything seems closed. I could not find any restaurants or people I could talk to. This was just Tuesday afternoon so I thought people might be on the street but they weren't. Finally somehow I ended up on brandenburgerstrasse.

The lunch/dinner was a pizza in front of St. Peter and Paul Church at Brandenburgerstrasse. Good pizza and beer. The service was crappy... I had to "ask" for breads and then "ask again" for olive oil for the table.. wierd since other tables were getting it without asking.. my "foreign, brown tourist" radar went up again.

Anyhow, I had to buy trousers since my luggage did not make with me to Berlin Tegel airport. I bought one from H&M and left my credit card there. I was lucky that I was able to find time to go back and get it. I had a good dinner and drink and conversation with Marc from Grundy in Potsdam. I had "Tequila Lime Chicken" with a sweat spicy sauce.. imagine that. I thought you could only get that at Applebey's in Austin.

Going back to Griebnitzsee was easy. The trains were always on time. I had a great time at TV studio looking at set of "good times bad times"

Going to Berlin was an experience. The train station was beautiful  I enjoyed the walk from the train station to the reichstag and bundesstag and the chancellor's house and the holocaust memorial. I had a good large beer in the sony center right by Potsdamerplatz after seeing the remnants of the berlin wall. I planned my transcription business at this spot. Hopefully I can bring it to life. 

It was very interesting to see how the wall kept what looks like one city divided for so long. And, the tragic history of it all...

The hotel was great, they packed a breakfast for me since I had to leave at 4AM in the morning to catch a 6AM flight from Berlin Tegel. All for free.

Isla Cozumel. Oct 8-13 2011

I traveled, by myself to Cozumel in October 2011. The main purpose of the trip was to dive and see what cozumel has to offer. 9 dives and 4 days later, I'm a reasonably happy man. Diving in Sipadan and Pulau Payar have spoiled diving anywhere for me. Especially when in comes to macro diving. I guess hurricane Wilma really damaged cozumel's reef systems.

I saw turtles, sharks, stingrays, crabs and lobsters and that's it. There is so much more and so many of each kind in malaysia that I would recommend all asians to dive there and not spend the money to come out here. That said, the best part of diving here was all the swimthroughs. The cave like formations in the reefs and lots of little holes and passages make diving fun... gives it a little more action than just looking around.

I'd recommend diving at Punta Sur (Devil's throat), Palancar gardens and the Santa Rosa Wall. Most of the other places are similar.

I had an interesting/scary experience with a nurse shark 2 days ago. I thought it was coming for me since our group of divers had surrounded it. Luckily for me, it chose to defer its plan to bite humans.  I later found out that a girl was bitten on her finger by a shark. She survived and so did all her fingers. Later, people were calling her "Shark Bait".... funny divers.

There is always an interesting dynamic on a dive shop. You meet people from all over the world. Instructors are mostly local, when not, they are foreigners trying to figure there life out while diving for a year working at a shop. I've been tempted to work a dive shop but I dont think it will work for me... I can't dive as work... might take the fun out of it for me.

I took a bunch of videos that came out really well. Comment if you want to see them.

I really enjoy diving puns and am thinking about writing them up...Here are a few:
1. Enjoy the pressure
2. More Bottom time (with a picture of girls bottoms)
3. Go deeper

Here is a better list

And here is darker joke

As always here is what I spent:

Stay:    $200 (incl breakfast) at Suites Bahia
Diving:  $300 (9 dives, incl gear) with Scuba Mau
Gifts:       $22
Food:     $110 ($55 for a food tour + about $60 for 5 meals)

The food tour with Emily was interesting. In retrospect it was not that great and too short (2 hours). It might have been more fun if I had more people than just Emily with me. The problem for me was that honestly.. for vegetarians mexican food is not that exciting. You always eat rice, beans, tortillas, salsas and cheese and an assortment of grilled vegetables.

The eating experiences that stood out to me were?

1. La Palmas (Palmitas) - a place where locals have lots of food for cheap
2. Los Otates - great selection of salsas, introduced to me by Emily
3. La Choza
4. Casa Denis

The other thing I learnt in this tour was that its easy to start a food tour business but has a very limited upside financially, but could be really rewarding emotionally. Funny how life continuously offers these trade offs/opportunities to you.

More later.