Back to Base
Trip Start
Feb 25, 2008
1
37
Trip End
Mar 25, 2009
Mahahual, Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico
Sunday, October 19, 2008
The Expedition base is in Punta Gruesa, a place on the beach about 45mins north of Mahahual..... And there is even less here. One way is the beach, the other way is forest and mangroves.
There is no phone, no mobile reception and a very tenuous internet connection.
Our accommodation is ... er rustic. We live in huts on the beach made from slats of wood with a roof made of palm leaves, the floor is sand and we have no electricty or running water.
The base has electricity for 4 hours per day from 6pm to 10pm and we are allowed to shower once every 3 days in the main building.. luxury... i have never before got quite so excited about a cold shower.
Food is all vegetarian with lots of pasta, rice and beans. We have no fridge or freezer so food options are quite limited, but it is amazing the variations we have come up with from the same ingredients!
We started off with 15 Volunteers, or EMīs (expedition members) as they like to call us and it{s been a pretty intense first couple of weeks.
The daily routine goes soemthing like this
6.30am Duties for which there is a daily rota of Communal, Kitchen, Boat or Grounds
This invloves cleaning communal areas including toilets, preparing meals , preparing the dive boats, or maintaining the grounds by raking sand to keep the sand flies away.
7.15 breakfast - always porridge or panckaes
8.00 start of first first dives subject to weather
12.30 Lunch
13.30 Start of second dives
if you{re not diving there are always things to do like refilling the dive tanks, radio duty when the boats are out or one of your speciality roles. I am first aid monitor, social secretary, hut rep for Tortuga (my hut), and community liason.. We also are doing TEFL stuff and will be teaching english twice a week in mahahual w}to the locals. I have also found myself being involved in the health and safety and manual handling risk assessmesnts... amd you thought this was a holiday!
Week 1, we all got 2 dives per day and those of us who wern{t already certified, were able to get our advanced diving certificates. 1 Deep Dive, 1 Naturalist Dive, 1 Navigation dive and Peak Performance buoyancy.
Week 2 we didnīt do a lot of diving as the weather has been bad with lots of rain storms and rough sea. So plenty of time to study my list of 62 coral species including all the latin names..coral ID test Pass mark is 95% and I finally passed on the 3rd go!
Now learning all the diseases, predation and algae and other creatures for another test next week.
We also did our Emergency first responder course which was hilarious... tell you more about that later..and TEFL stuff too
"Hola soy Denise. se primeros auxilios, te puedo ayudar?"
This weekend was my first venture off base for 2 weeks and we are in Tulum for the Turtle Festival. There were loads of activities planned which we were meant to help out with, but much of it ended up being a wash out with the heavy rain storms. Well we got to help out with a beach clean on saturday and fortunately the rain held out for the main event in the evening which was an awesome production of a the lifecycleof a turtle.
Well just wating for a bus at the moment back to Mahahual and looking forward to preparing for the Emergency Rescue Diver course next week.
well that{s it for the moment.
talk soon
den xxx
