Instructor Development Course

Hello again everyone!

It's been ages since my last post... life here is pretty hectic and i barely have the time to get some sleep, let alone blogging! :-P

These past few weeks have been extra full because of my Instructor Development Course, which finally finished yesterday... now we have a couple days to train for Specialty Courses (Deep Diving, Night Diving, etc) and then finally it will all be over on the 20th with our final exam! I'm not too worried about it; I'm confident Andy (our Course Director) taught us well and everyone will pass without any major problem.

Now i just cant wait to start teaching! :-D

I have another 5 weeks to go here in the Maldives and unfortunately I still haven't found anything certain for later on. I did a couple interviews for  marine biologist positions in two different resorts here but in both cases someone with more experience or with a higher education came along and swept the place away from under my nose :-(  The more i try this the more i get the feeling that I'll have to revisit the idea of a PhD somewhere.

 Alternatively I could just take a break for a while, get a job as an Instructor somewhere and do that while I wait for the right opportunity as a biologist to come along, which seems like the only option for now. Tourism in the Maldives is entering low season now (June to August) and the Dive Shop is pretty much fully staffed at the moment; the manager said we could talk about a possible short term contract after I pass my Instructor Examination but I'm trying not to get my hopes up. Luckily though there's the whole rest of the world to go to and this new qualification has opened a lot more doors for me so the situation is not that bad after all.

For the moment I'll just have take things one at a time as they come.. first let's get the Instructor Examination out of the way... then I'll worry about the job. Who knows, maybe something completely unexpected might turn up.

Maldivian Life

Hello everyone!



I finally have a day off from work and I've been postponing blogging for way too long already...

It's been almost 3 weeks since i got here and I've definitely started to have a routine now... as you can guess, the dive shop is pretty busy every day, lunch breaks are barely enough to get some lunch and take care of a couple things like laundry etc before having to go back to work, and the evenings wither down to a couple hours free time after dinner and a quick workout at the gym. It's a busy life, but really satisfying; I go to bed exhausted but even though i barely get 6-7 hours sleep, i'm always happy to start a new day. Guests who come diving are generally the more easy-going ones, they're almost always very pleasant and make the days fly by without even noticing it.
The resort itself is high end to say the least... expensive and luxurious like advertised on the website but the whole operation behind the scenes, in the staff area, seems like a big happy family... everyone is always happy, sociable and really fun to be with.
The dive shop is nothing like I've ever seen before: big, organized, functional and just a really nice place to work in. All my colleagues are friendly and always happy to help out with anything, which makes a work day turn almost into a day out diving with friends.

There's really not much else to tell, I've been working since day one and i still haven't had the chance to visit the guest-side of the island yet (apart from the dive area of course). On top of that this seems to be a really busy period of the year so the resort isn't really comfortable with staff personnel walking around taking photos as if they were paying guests. I'll have to wait for things to settle down a little bit before i can explore it properly and take some shots. The staff side is obviously less luxurious, or better, not at all. It's still really pleasant to live in, with almost every commodity anyone could ask for: almost 24h buffet cafeteria, bar, gym, staff beach (with kayaks, windsurfs, etc), soccer-volleyball-basketball-badminton fields, laundromat,  internet cafe, island-wide wi-fi, etc. Surely I won't get bored on my time off.

Speaking of which, I think i'll go enjoy some sun at the beach... i need to even out the tan marks i got from my wetsuit. :-P

Back on track

Hello everyone!

Good news! It stopped raining! After a week of continuous storms the sun finally started to shine again... and we sure didn't loose any time waiting around! We've been diving as much as possible, every morning. Afternoons are still dedicated to "office work" since we still have a lot to finish before next week.
I've almost finished the fish presentation (which turned out to be even longer than the inverts one... 97 slides) and there's only one left to go... corals. That'll be very tricky... especially since the're often hard to identify because the same species varies so much in appearance depending on its environment...
Life on Koh Sdach is enjoyable, but i'm really missing Koh Rong Sanloem... the morning runs on the beach, attending to clients... the big lunches and dinners... and the people ofc. Here we have no outsiders passing through and it gets a bit boring at times...
Today we went diving on the neighboring

island of Koh Chan... I didn't think it was physically possible, but the visibility is even worse than on Koh Rong. XD
I brought along the coral identification guidebook and started looking at corals while Fia and Owen were looking at fish. After a while Fia found a huge net caught in a coral patch with a couple crabs stuck inside... we decided to free the crabs and bring the net away with us, but it proved to be way more difficult than anticipated. The net was tightly caught in a big chunk of dead coral, and it was full of sand so as soon as we started moving it the viz went down to 0. After trying to cut the coral loose for about 20 mins we realized we weren't gonna accomplish anything anytime soon so we pulled the whole thing up to the surface and managed to untangle the coral chunk from there. We managed to free one of the crabs while underwater, while the second was so tightly tangled up that we had to deal with it on the boat while coming back to Koh Sdach. In the end I managed to cut it free and release it under the unbelieving eyes of our two lifelong fishermen captains. :-P
Tomorrow Owen and I will go on a field-trip to Koh Kong...he has some Shallow Waters business to attend to while I have to sort out my visa situation instead. Visas always seem to have a problem with me.. doesn't matter in which country i am.  Turns out my electronic visa can't be exchanged for a business visa, so i have to cross the border and come back in with a new business visa.
Oh well.. it'll be a good excuse to do some travelling and see a new island...and it won't take more then a couple days anyway.
Only one week left before the next volunteers come in... and we're getting quite exited about it! I can't wait for the science officer to get here so i can bombard her with the million questions i've been asking myself for the mast month and a half... she'll probably start hating me right away.  :-P

Still no reply from all the job ads I e-mailed... I hate when this happens. I'm starting to accept the idea of having to come back to Europe for a month after this... :-(
Oh well... I'm sure I'll enjoy the food and Christmas atmosphere :-)

Until next time!

In the Middle of Nowhere

Hello everyone!

I want to apologize for the multiple, super late posts... I have a perfectly good explanation for it and this post will tell you why…

04 of August…

After a night at the dive centre staff house in Sihanoukville, we loaded all our stuff on a mini-truck and went to catch the boat to Koh Rong. The boat trip was about 2 and a half hours long, which passed relatively fast… partly because of the gigantic mattresses on the top deck, that allowed us to sleep for another hour or so, and partly because of the numerous Spanish tourists on board with us, sharing all their adventures in the neighbouring countries (Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, etc).

After a quick boat change in Koh Rong , we set off again for Koh Rong Sanloem, which literally translates to “the further away island of Rong”. The trip was fairly fast, roughly 30 minutes, after which we finally arrived to our final destination: the Eco Sea Diving Centre and Bungalow Resort.  The location was incredible… it is the only Resort on this whole side of the island, right next to the local village (known either by its local khmer name, or even just as “Village 23”), of barely 100 families. We soon discovered that the resort is relatively new, just 5 months old, and that it still needed a lot of work to be done.

After meeting our dive instructor Fia (short for Sofia) and enjoying a nice cup of fresh iced tea, we moved from the bar to the dive shop, which is located in the middle of the water, almost at the end of a long pier in front of the resort. Here we sorted out all the bureaucratic paperwork with Fia and received our first training manual:  Emergency First Responder… to be read by the end of the day.

Luckily for me some guests were about to go out on a fun dive, so I got out all my new gear and jumped at the occasion to test it all out. The dive spot was really close, at about 200m from the resort, under which we found the remains of an old wooden pier, probably washed away from the close-by village during a heavy tropical storm some years ago… the visibility was horrendous (about 1m), but we managed to spot out lots of rabbit fish and crabs living in the remains... oh, and also an enormous boxfish… completely different from the small cute yellow ones I got used to in Bora Bora. Anyhow... the purpose of my dive was to test out my new equipment, not sightseeing, so it wasnt too much of a disappointment. We came back up and headed back for shore (everything works perfectly, by the way).
Quick shower, a moment of relax, and soon after it was already dinner time! Yay!
Dinner and lunch here are served as buffet…. So I really had to control myself to leave something for the other guests to eat… in any case, the general menu here is rice, vegetables, meat, chicken or fish (with vegetables) and a soup (again, meat chicken or fish… … … with vegetables)…surely I can’t complain about not eating healthy!

Oh, I almost forgot... the reason i'm posting everything together late is that we don't have any internet on the island and electricity only from 7 to 11 in the evening... digital detox!