We are now PADI certified!!

Hey guys,

When we last left you we had already done two days of scuba. The third day we had our final exam and we did great although jo had a little bit of trouble but that was mainly due to the translation to the french, it was quite crappy! Then we had our last two dives where we still had to do some skills, such as the mask flooding thing I dont like but we did great, I'm telling you, once you know you can do it you just need to breathe and take it easy and redo what you know you can :)

That day we also learned how to use a compass underwater, quite cool but I was crap at it, so Jo and the instructor had a good laugh about it...well, at least I'm good at reading maps!
At night we had a really nice barbecue, although we had to wait 2 hours for it as they got our order wrong the first time (just a tip, you need to be very patient with the island people here, they are incredibly slow and a bit dim-witted sometimes!!) And then we went ot one of the local bars and they had a band from El Salvdor playing drums and a hippie guy was juggling some fire torchs, pretty cool but we had an early night as the next day we had to get up super early in order to get our free fund dives before leaving with the 14:00 ferry back to La Ceiba.

For our fun dive we went to the other side of the island where the current is much stronger. I had a really hard time equalizing and sometimes it was really painful! And Jo went into the water with a headache so that wasnt too good either. We did get to see a lot of waterlife but in the process you kind of forget your underwater and start chasing the fishes and then find yourself much deeper than you should, at one point we were at 24 meters when we really should have only gone down to 18!!! So, when we left the water -- which was in itself a battle as the current was killer that at points you were swimming with all your strength and you still felt like you werent moving --- Jo started getting decompression symptons, such as headache and tingling limbs and had to be administered oxygen for 40 minutes, the poor guy!! I was okay but my ear was blocked for the rest of the day, also very painful...so all in all, we didnt get to do the second dive as it wasnt safe for Jo to return to the water... but we are now certified and free to dive unsupervised anywhere in the world (where gonna check out where we can do it in Belgium hehehe)

Now we are in La Ceiba with my friend Tiga.Tomorrow we are taking a tour to Pico Bonito, a mountain with white water rafting and we stay in a lodge in the forest so shuld be nice and then saturday we will head out towards the capital as we do have to start moving towards Nicaragua and our flight home hehehe...

Speak soon,
Love,
Jo and Fil