Asher 4/2/22 El Nido, SCUBA and more
- Cris Ballonoff
- Apr 5, 2022
- 2 min read
We made it to El Nido from Tay Tay three days ago on Monday 3/29/22.
We are staying at this very fancy hotel that has a buffet for every meal! The breakfast is the best. It has tons of pastries, fruits, and tasty rice. On Palawan Island, the rice is grown locally, right here on this very skinny island.
On Wednesday in El Nido we went to Palawan Divers and started our first of two days of Scuba certification open water dives. We saw two green sea turtles on our first dive! The turtles were very playful and would chase you around! We even got to feed them some of the seaweed! Thursday we did our last two open water dives to get certified. Getting SCUBA certified is not an easy thing to do for people who live in Colorado. But despite the difficulty getting to this amazing beach we passed! We are now open water certified in diving, so we are not going to be taught any more. Our teachers, Jok and Ryan, were the best teachers that I have ever had. They explained everything that we needed to know to stay safe and live underwater. They even had pneumonics like “BREAKFAST WITH RICE AND FISH” for our equipment check. B for buoyancy, W for weights, R for releases, A for air and for F for final check. The wildlife was also amazing. There were so many fish and other animals to see. We even saw an octopus! We even saw a banded sea krait! These snakes can kill a full-grown man with just a drop of their venom. I know they don’t attack so we were safe, but it was still scary. The underwater ocean is a whole new world with billions of amazing things to see. Sharks, turtles, rays, octopi, and millions of fish.
Our boat out to the dive sites was a Pilipino craft that has stabilizers on each side. This boat is called a banca. Some banca boats are very loud and can make you not hear for the rest of your life. We were on one of those to the underground river and closed our ears the whole time. But some bancas, like the one we were on for diving, is not as loud because it has an inboard motor.
The Philippines is a magical place for me and is never boring. It is some place that most people could only imagine.
Do you think a banded sea krait has ever seen a banded sea ballonoff??? Well, now they have. And I heard they're terrified.
Love your exciting descriptions of the Philippines! Congrats on getting certified for open water scuba diving! Sounds like the Filipino people have been kind, helpful & generous.