Cozumel

First, I have to get this off my chest: coming home from vacation is not pleasant. The realities of a corporate job are not fun to face. Being stuck in a cubicle is NOT for me. My commute sucks. This situation has to change in 2012. I’m trying to be optimistic right now, I am quite honestly struggling. I hope to get out of this funk soon!

Ok, enough of my griping - here’s a recap of my vacation to Cozumel: 

Anenome (similar to the one that Pepe fed a Lion Fish)

On New Year’s Eve, R and I hopped on a flight to Houston to stay the night with my uncle and aunt who live there. Luckily, Houston happens to be a hub for Continental, so staying the night wasn’t a problem and then we didn’t have to take a red eye (really, Continental? a red eye??). R and I met my parents and my other aunt at the airport and headed to the house. We were greeted with a fantastic meal and spent the evening with friends and family. The next (hung over) day, we headed off to Cozumel. Through some excellent fluke, I got upgraded to first class with R, however, we couldn’t enjoy a glass of hair of the dog as we had a checkout dive planned. After getting to our beautiful condo, the dive company we were using pulled up at our dock, we met Pepe and headed out for our check out dive. It was incredible! I get pretty anxious and nervous about things like this, but I really enjoyed it. Once I’m under the water and blowing bubbles at fishes, I relax and enjoy it. On our first dive, Pepe found a lion fish. They’re extremely poisonous, luckily not aggressive, but are an invasive species. Pepe grabbed the lion fish with a pole and fed it to an anenome! The dive masters and instructors of Cozumel will kill lion fish simply as they’re destroying the habitat.

Crab

On Monday, R and I slept for 12 hours (!!!) and spent the day relaxing and exploring the downtown area. My uncle went diving for the day without us. Annoyingly, the wind picked up that evening and the port was closed for the next two days - GRR. No diving. We spent Tuesday exploring the island, seeing some Mayan ruins and having an excellent lunch on the beach. Wednesday was another day of relaxing and then finally on Thursday we were back out on the water.

We essentially had 2 dives per day on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Thursday and Friday we dove with Ernesto, a dive instructor who does cave diving and is a clinical ENT for the barometric clinic. Saturday we dove with Roger who was hilarious and is a dive master. I think the pictures explain it all. We saw nurse sharks, turtles, eels, rays, parrot fish, grouper, tons of coral, lobster, shrimp, a lion fish and so much more. It was really a visual feast and sort of hard to grasp all at once. All of our dives were drift dives, so the current would pull you north. It was too much work to fight the current, so it was sort of like sitting on a couch and watching everything fly by!

Me!

Nurse Shark hiding under some coral

Saturday night we went to a really nice restaurant in the north part of the city and had a great birthday dinner for my Dad. Great way to finish celebrating my Dad’s 60th Birthday and to finish the vacation... but I was in denial. I didn’t want to come home!

I think I’m realizing that I really am an adrenaline junkie. I think that’s one reason why its so hard to be back in San Francisco right now. Diving every day made me nervous but after the first dive I couldn’t wait to hop back in the water for the second dive. I woke up happily every morning at 7:30a to get breakfast and then nervously wait for the boat to pick us up at the dock. Dive, eat, dive, eat, repeat! The only drawback is that I have a really hard time with clearing my ears. Currently, I have some barotrauma so my hearing is muffled, my ears hurt and I’m a bit dizzy. Yuck. But SO worth it. There’s talk of us doing a bike ride this weekend, so I guess I’ll get my adrenaline fix then (assuming I feel better). I’m getting antsy to ski, as there is a massive lack of snowfall in the Sierras, so I’m really, really hoping it starts to rain soon (ie snow in the mountains).

Toad Fish - endemic to Cozumel and found no where else in the world

Beautiful Sea Turtle

Palancar Gardens - huge coral structures that we went in between

Sting Ray

Even though it’s January, get out there and so something that scares you every now and then! You might be surprised by the experiences that you’ll have. I never thought I’d be ok with swimming with sharks- after seeing 3 nurse sharks, I think they’re beautiful creatures and would happily get back in the water with them again.

R & Myself