The title of my blog entry today is a quote overheard from a group of young men taking six weeks to go from getting their Open Water Certification to being Dive Masters. I was sitting in an open-air dining area at a small hotel/dive shop in Tulomben, Bali, the rain coming down in sheets and divers coming in with all of their gear on, walking up the beach from their night dives. I'm not sure what he was refering too, but it struck my fancy. Isn't that what life is? Doing the dishes, raising children, working, hanging out on a porch with friends, it's all playing with your life. Sure, sometimes it doesn't FEEL like play, in fact, there are many moments when I'm pretty darn convinced it's not play at all, danggummit!
Then that moment passes. That mood. That crisis of my will somehow not bending reality into something different. It's all playing with your life. Risking vulnerability, humiliation, trying something new, sinking into the familiar, it's all playing with the reality that is that life's moment. The mental adjustment to allowing that sense of play has led to my greatest memories. It's not all risk, but it can all be play.
Today was a rather spectacular example of that, granted, but I hope to take that little bit of wisdom my mind gleaned from the shocked exclaimation of that young man into many areas of my life. Following boiling sap, dead creatures who may never have a name in English but make good satay, forestation planting, chicken hugging, and the craziest motorbike ride of my life, I had a very high bar for my day today. And I reached it, folks. Pictureless and unapologetically one of the most beautiful, I am left with descriptions that will never do it justice and a mine of memories to tap into.
I went diving in Tulomben. Let me back up. After wrapping up my blog post at 2am, I woke at 6:30am (easily 45 minutes before my alarm) and went diving. Liz was my Dive Master for my refresher course dive and her charming English accent and well-practiced listing and exemplifying skills made the daunting task of trying to remember how to breathe underwater after 3 years without trying it again, fairly approachable. Sure I bombed my first skills test once we were chest-deep in water and kneeling on the bottom. I breathed water. Whoops. Then I recovered, tried it again a few times, and we were off.
Tulomben has a quiet shoreline (other than the dozens of scuba divers in various stages of going in and coming out), a few local scattered around serving up snacks and carrying tanks on their head (seriously, a 55 kilo woman mounted 2 tanks on her head and lugged that stuff with all of the grace of a queen waving down to the beach). The water laps at a shore of large, dark rocks, and you walk straight in with all of your gear on and pop your head in to see immediately that the world underwater is a super highway for the neon, florescent, sci-fi creature inspiration type.
A few fin flips and I'm trying desperately to reunderstand boyancy while avoiding flicking any debris on a garden of corals teeming with life. My best description would go like this: imagine the coolest aquarium tank you've ever seen. You know the one, where you stood there longer than all of the rest of the displays and struggled to make sense of how this glorious life exists. Unfortunately you can't dive with your jaw unhinged with wonder, or even with a smile (mask leak! trust me), but my head was aglow with that buzzing of taking it all in as much as possible, as quickly as possible.
Black tipped sharks, eels, shrimp as large as lobsters and colored like a rainbow scarab, leaf fish, piper fish as long as my leg, and the coral. My god, the coral and plant life. The sheer amount of biodiversity shoved into that area is staggering, precious, and totally unique. The common fish are ones I've only seen in books, videos about cool sh*t, and aquariums (stop drooling on the tanks, Rebecca, there's a whole aquarium to see...).
Time passes quickly. An hour flew by and we're back out of the water and walking with all of our gear on the 100 meters back to the dive shop and I want MORE! Oh yeah. At $25 a dive, you're darn right I'm going back in after an hour of "surface time" scarfing an omlette and drinking Bali coffee (dip spoon in rich coffee grounds as fine as dust, put in cup, add hot water, drink).
My second dive is to the same spot, I learn as I set up my gear. I'm mildly disappointed. Okay, really disappointed. Didn't I just see that stuff? And this time I'm going with another Open Water Certified woman and a Dive Master. Let's call her Jane. I hit the water, ready to work on my skills and see the same stuff as the tail end of my refresher course, but what's this? A whole lot more. I'd just danced at the edges after my skills test and now we were hitting the good stuff. Unfortunately Jane is plauged with problems. It takes 5 minutes for her boyfriend to get the mask on her head and she's floundering around in the shallows like a fish out of water who also can't swim worth a damn.
We finally set off and it's spectacular. There's a bunch of structures out there to help create more interest areas and they're darn interesting to the fish, plants, and the people looking at them. It's the best fish TV ever and I never want the episode to end. I'm getting the breathing thing down and I'm not bobbing wildly up and down with every breath any more. The Dive Master holds his hands in a prayer like fashion over his chest, cooly gliding along without all of the extra manuevering I seem to be doing to follow him.
We're 30 minutes in the dive and I'm in a wonderland of color, movement, and life when I notice everyone is looking around in an alarming fashion. Jane's gone missing. I let the others worry about it and stay close to the bottom to watch morrey eels hunt, fish with thingys sifting for food, a chase between beautiful flashy fish over some bizarro territory only they can see and sense. Jane has gone to the surface all of a sudden and it's all equiptment failures and adjustments. I attempt sighing, my bubbles floating gently to the surface as I sink slowly deeper into the amazing and the Dive Master is adjusting this and that while they discuss it with hand signals. Please don't end the dive....
She manages to carry on, usually while hitting everything with her fins. She bangs them on the sand and clouds up the area, breaks off pieces of coral and plants, smacks fish, and of course I'm hit in the head, the back, you name it. Jane's single-handedly demonstrating everything a diver shouldn't do. The Dive Master, god bless his Balinese soul, tries to point out really cool stuff to me as we swim through the rest of our dive, occasionally grabbing Jane by her gear and yanking her up and away from clearing out a delicate part of the life with her thrashing and thoughtlessness.
We emerge and when I'm told the next dive of the day is the USAT Liberty Wreck I'm beside myself. I WANT that. This is a transport ship sunk during WWII that has turned into a reef. So freakin' cool, I start trying to do the logistics of how to make this dive happen. As it turns out, Aaron is headed my way and I'm thinking he would be a perfect edition to the group. When he gets there he agrees and we're back in the gear room getting ready for my third dive of the day.
You know it's a good day when there's this much competition for coolest moment of the day. I really can't choose. Sharks? All those crazy fish? When we swam up under the stern of the ship and it loomed mountain-like, Titanic-like, a dark wreck rising 20 meters above me? All good contenders. This ship has been almost fully reclaimed by the sea, it's so covered with life and schools of life rising and swimming in and out of it. We circled for a while, then swam through the cargo hold. Jane crashed about, brushing against every possible surface (including me, of course), and pretty much annoying everyone around us (fish included). The Dive Master was a really nice guy, and when I pointed through a tight hole at a turtle feeding on the other side, he led me right through there and we hovered and watched. In fact, it was a lovely trip of DM and I cruising around, showing each other cool stuff and trying to ignore the human wrecking ball in fins on top of us.
I could probably spend a few hours in there every day and never get bored. There's that much to play with, to see, to experience, to catalog. The systems, the interactions, the individual parts. Just amazing.
Not to be outdone, Bali then turned on the waterworks once we emerged and Aaron and I raced the rainstorm on our motorbikes as soon as we peeled off our wetsuits and paid the tab. I carried my Patagonia bag on my back - computer in a waterproof bag inside, the rest of my gear also in a dry bag. My poncho flapped in the wind as Aaron and I played games of weaving through the modest traffic on the only main road lining the coastline of northwest Bali. We passed many beaches, drove around volcanos, up through tight corners, hills, down through small towns, a carefully controlled pell-mell of hell-bent to get home before the sunset. It was exhilerating, that ride, flying beneith thick canopy of palm and jungle, past a wedding at a temple overlooking the ocean, a game of chase and follow. I had my soundtrack in my ears and checked out the entire new Bonobo album (freakin' fantastic. Seriously - Northern Borders is the sh*t) while we cruised into the traffic of the North Denpasar bypass.
I definitely increased my motorbike skills this week. Between giving rides to tons of folks, sometimes two at a time, driving through insane amounts of gravel and sand, and all of the other crazy roads, this highway was the breeze that carried me home. Thank goodness I have a full face guard on my helmet, or I'd have a million bugs crushed into the huge grin I wore most of the time. After a nice dinner and a beer, Aaron was off to sleepy land, and I passed the time working and chatting with Candice. On a day like today, it's easy to believe that life is playground.