Diving in Taganga

In Taganga we stayed in Mr. Wilson’s guest house, where we hung our hammocks for $5000 pesos each! But poor Isabel was stuck sleeping next to a crazy Colombian guy, who showed up at 4 in the morning on our first night and stood outside her mosquito net telling her how much he’d like to be her companion for the night. “Sorry I’m tired, and anyway I like tall guys…” said Isabel.. which provoked him to go on a pseudo psychophysical discourse about the connections between manhood and physique and his personal abilities until 8 in the morning. The next evening when she shunned him again he started rocking in his hammock like a baby so that the whole gazebo shook and she couldn’t sleep. On the third night, the proprietor of the guest house kicked him out. And all these nights I slept without disturbance 15 meters away in my hammock in the lemon trees.

Taganga is pretty ugly and there is not much to do besides go diving and party. There are numerous guesthouses and bars but not enough shops selling fresh fruit. The sea is cleaner and less crowded than in Santa Marta but it is not like some of the Thai beaches I’ve been to where leaving feels like saying goodbye to a good friend.

From Taganga we organized 4 fun dives in park Tayrona. There are many dive schools and I don’t think one is really better than the others but just for reference we paid $200,000 pesos for the 4 dives each. It was my first time diving since getting my SSI (Scuba School International) certificate in Thailand in 2009. Isabel, who is a dive master, was more prepared than I and helped me set up my equipment and reminded me the basic rules. A story I heard the other day weighted on my mind, about two newlyweds who went diving in Australia to 30 meters (about a 10 story building), when he’d turned off her air and swam away. She drowned and I kept asking “but couldn’t she have done something?”

When I dive I actually feel more relaxed than when I snorkel. When I snorkel my heart pounds intensely in those first moments underwater. But when I go underwater with my scuba gear, I feel calm. There are moments when I am 19 meters below and start thinking about how unintuitive scuba really is, and yet how natural and easy it feels to be gliding through the reefs like a mermaid, and when I realize how much I depend on my equipment down here and how even my reflexes might not save me, it makes me nervous, but not overwhelmingly so, but more like a seed that might grow into a terror if I feed it with more thoughts, but quickly I change my line of focus and watch a fish, or coral reefs that look like they come from a Kandinsky painting, or equalize my ears.

It’s a really special experience. When I first dove I didn’t enjoy it very much. It was expensive, learning was time consuming, and there was a lot of dependency on others (boats, partners, equipment). But these past few days I enjoyed it so much and I can say that it is worth all that preparation to visit this other world :)