Snakes and eating with Rene

Sea snake swimming mid water

After drinking so much wine the night before, I woke up with a slight hangover and a little lethargic. But, I was excited to be diving Snake Island again because I remember it as a fun dive and also I wanted to see more snakes. However, it's a challenging dive with usually strong currents. The initial descent and swim to the underwater island was very tiring; I almost had to find a rock to hang on to and rest. My air consumption was a concern because I went through a lot of air in a short amount of time.

Clownfish in anemone

At first, I didn't see any snakes until the later part of the dive where I saw a total of about six snakes. One of the snakes was curious of his reflection from my camera lens, swam up to it, bumped his head on my lens, and quickly swam away. I love these snakes, they have such a curious personality. Our next dive at BBC was really nice in that I've never dived the site before. It was a sandy bottom dive (as opposed to wall dive), with a mild current. As long as the current is going your direction and isn’t too strong, it’s a relaxing dive. It was fun hiding behind rocks to avoid current and catching current to go to the next spot. It almost felt like a ride at Disneyland that takes you on a tour of a uncharted land.

Sunset in Tagbilaran

For dinner, Rene agreed to pick me up in his truck and take me to a fish market in Tagbilaran where they have cheap, fresh seafood and sashimi. At 5 pm he picked me up and we drove to the restaurant that had gorgeous waitresses and a beautiful view of the bay. Unfortunately, they didn’t have the fresh prawns we were craving so much. We bought 6 large previously frozen prawns, and two large chunks (about 16 slices each) of fresh tuna to have sliced up for sashimi.

While with Rene, I got a good chance to ask him about divemastering since he has been working as an instructor at Genesis for 9 years. Most resorts seem to hire instructors which also are dive guides (divemasters), so it’s very hard to compete just being a PADI Divemaster (divemasters are two levels lower than instructors). Rene suggested that I try to become certified as PADI Instructor and mentioned a guy named Tim Option who was the first PADI Course Director (top PADI level) in the Philippines.

After eating, I felt a tired and had a headache. Rene wanted to go to another place and grab a drink but I said I’d rather go to the cinema to see what was playing. Seeing a movie here costs about 120 pesos ($3 USD) and they have both Filipino (English subtitles) films and current US films. A couple weeks ago they had the movie Jumper which I wanted to see, but, now it’s not in the cinema. We went to two theaters and there wasn’t anything interesting showing so we drove back to Alona.

Back at Alona I went to Oops for a pair of happy hour rum and cokes. This was a bad idea as my headache got worse. Back at home, I just drank a ton of water and took an Aleve. It was unusual for me to feel this way and was thinking I probably shouldn’t have eaten raw fish from that market; there are really no food health quality standards here. It was hard to sleep at first and was thinking I had some fever or food poisoning type problem, but later in the night, I felt better and fell asleep.

- jason