On The Banana Pancake Trail

off the Reef of Rarotonga, Cook Islands

[Audio https://dl.dropbox.com/u/9901364/17%20Under%20The%20Sea.mp3%5D

going down

Tim and I chose the Cook Islands to get certified in scuba diving. There wasn’t any reason that we chose there to get our PADI license, other than it being the first stop on our trip, and we didn’t even have a great reason for wanting to get certified – but in the spirit of our travels we wanted to open ourselves up to as many new experiences as possible – and there’s a lot of cool things going on below sea level.

We didn’t set up the training in advance, instead the first thing we did when we got to the island was wander around and into the closest dive shop. In there, we met Courtney, an Aussie, who had the exact schedule we wanted for classes and was going to be our instructor.

We need to point out at this point that when we accidentally wandered into Pacific Divers we had no idea how great of a little dive shop it would be. Courtney has been a dive master all over the world and couldn’t have been a better teacher, but the owner was pretty cool too. We spent a lot of time Friday night at the bars with Steve and some of the interns. Steve has a pretty cool intern program where you can come over for four months and and do every level of certification up to Dive Master and literally learn the ropes while hanging out in paradise.

While Tim and I have no aspirations of taking our Scuba skills to that level we did pretty well with the Open Water course. Tim was worried about his ears and it took him a little while to get down on day one, but it was pretty smooth after that. We got down as far as 18 meters, and on our final dive when we finally were certified we flipped for joy!

Celebrating