The beach

As you might expect in a place with no personal injury lawyers, there are many oportunities to hurt yourself. You get around in the back of pickup trucks. The dirt roads are muddy and bumpy, so hang on. To get to the dive boat you have to climb across two or three other boats, so don't fall or you'll be crushed between them. The floors of the nightclubs are littered with broken glass.

We did two open water dives today. I've been using too much air, about 50 bar (a quarter of the tank) of which I use in the first couple minutes descending because I'm stressed out about equalizing. I was trying to go down slow, signaling about my ears, but Henrick, our Danish instructor, just dragged me down. On the second dive I used all my air. We were doing our safety stop at 5 m, and I kept signaling to my dive master buddy 30 bar, 20 bar, and he kept OKing me. Then I could feel the air running out, so I signaled out of air, and got to practice ascending while using my buddy's alternate air source. When I checked at the surface my gauge read zero.

That night we went to Venus Park, which was having a big party. The place is in the middle of the jungle, and to get there they pack you in to the back of 4WDs. The dirt road has potholes as big as the truck, and goes straight up for part of the way, so it would be easy to fall out if we weren't packed so tightly. The place was pretty neat, and even had walkways in the trees, but there weren't that many people there. We talked to Henrick there, but he didn't remember anything the next day.

On the way out at 4 am I had my first banana pancake. These things are great: dough filled with bananas fried up, sprinkled with condensed milk, then slathered with chocolate. Yum.