Day 74 – Friday 2nd December 2005
I woke up unable to walk. My legs had stiffened up and I was hobbling like an old man as I walked towards the lakeside restaurants to get breakfast. I was unsure what to do with my day, and the way I saw it I had two options. Option number 1 was to do nothing, to have a lazy day reading and writing and nothing more. Option number 2 was to go to a village on the other side of the lake and start a scuba diving course.
I had my breakfast and decided to call the company who ran the scuba course to see what their course availability was and when I’d be able to start. I was told that they would be able to start me on a course the following day. Thus my mind was made up. It would be a lazy day, but it would be a lazy day in the village of Santa Cruz where the course was to take place. I gathered all my stuff and caught a lancha to the village, where I checked into a hostel named La Iguana Perdida.
Before my arrival at Lake Atitlan it had been my intention to learn to scuba dive in the Bay Islands in Honduras over Christmas, as that was supposedly the cheapest place in which to learn. However I discovered that the course in Lake Atitlan was only US$175 as opposed to the US$200 they were charging in the Bay Islands. This was the initial attraction to the course, but the moe I thought about it, the more I would rather do the course before Christmas and be able to just dive over the festive period, rather than have to go through the ball ache of having to do tests and learn at that time (plus it would have gotten in the way of the Christmas parites).
Once i had checked into the hostel the diving instructor, a lad from England, gave me a thick book to read about the safety and science of scuba diving. It wasn’t a very interesting read, but I wanted to get teh academic crap out of the way so I read it for some of the afternoon. We also arranged my first dive to be the next morning.
Aside from reading the scuba book, I read my other normal fiction book and did some writing in my journal, but nothing major or interesting happened so I wont bore you with it. I managed to do all this boring stuff until it got dark, then it became more difficult. This is because despite the hostel being operational for 10 years, the owners have neglected to install electricity as yet. This gave the place quite a relaxed air and because of the candlelight and communal meal there was a good atmosphere. For some reason the candlelight also made it fell a lot later than it actually was, so by 9pm I was feeling pretty tired, and went to bed to rest my weary legs ready for some diving in the morning.
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