This was also one of the reasons why I went to Egypt earlier in the year to get my PADI course (this is and international diving certification that allows you to dive anywhere in the world).
Now that I was fully certified, I could enjoy the crystalline Brazilan waters of Fernando de Noronha. María already had the certificate from the time she was in Thailand and Susana did like me and got hers before coming here... somewhere in the South of Spain I believe...
I had the option to do the course in the UK of course, but given the choice of diving in blue warm waters full of fish and coral in Egypt or diving in freezing black waters full of washing machines and tyres in the UK I opted for option number one. I know... shocking...
Getting to Fernando de noronha wasn't easy. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and there's only one way in... by plain, unless you own your own boat, of course, but giving my propensity to sea sickness I'd rather pulling my teeth with pliers and no anaesthetics than travelling by sea.
Places in the island are restricted so you need to make your booking well in advance, on top of that you'll also have to pay a tax for "nature preservation" which will vary depending on the amount of days you spend in the island.
That's not all... then you also need to find accommodation... and let me tell you... it's not cheap. There is a limited number of beds in the island so they know they can charge you anything they want...
Once we got to the island we started looking for a place where to stay (as we hadn't booked anything before hand). On the internet the prices looked pretty high so we thought it would be easier to find something on our own once there... and we did... we found a cheaper place...
You need to understand... after spending 2-3 days in the jungle and another 2-3 days in a stinky boat lost in the Amazon river, our standards for accommodation were quite low, we could pretty much sleep anywhere so when I say we found a place you need to understand that, most of you, would have probably run away as far and fast as possible from that place but for our standards at the time... it was an improvement over the past experiences.
A lady offered us a couple of rooms in her house for a reasonable price... let me describe the rooms with one simple anecdote... a couple of days in, coming back from a diving trip María and Susana found and invading army of ants in both their suitcases... there were so many that they had to fumigate both suitcases (and fumigate is the right word here). An invasion of ants took over their suitcases... there were ants everywhere, in the hundreds... so they had to buy one of those sprays for killing insects and fumigate both suitcases inside out... a few hours later they removed the hundreds of casualties from the suitcases and left the suitcases outside to freshen up because the stink from the insecticide was hard to bear inside the windowless rooms... I bet had they still have those suitcases today... you could probably still smell them now...years later...
And let's just finish this by saying that ants weren't the only insects around either...
Moving on to the most interesting parts of the trip. The first day we did a little wander and found a diving shop so we booked a couple of days (4 dives) starting the following day.
So the following day, we went to the supermarket, bought something for breakfast and headed for the diving boat. In this case, the diving boat was a small boat with 10 places or so for divers plus a couple of dive masters. Once everyone was on board we headed for the reef... and the sea was a bit choppy... so 5 minutes in and I was feeding the fish with my earlier breakfast... by the time we got to the diving spot I was green and could barely stand up... someone put the equipment on me and pushed me to the water... as I sunk in I started to feel a lot better and once I was 15 metres down I came back to life...
All the dives we did were quite shallow... no more than 15 metres
and apart from the extra light you get at that shallow depth we got to see lots of different creatures... from turtles and manta rays to some kind of very docile shark
and we also had the chance to go through some really cool caves
After the second dive we headed back to port... and although I didn't have much left on my already empty stomach my generous nature made me keep feeding the fish all the way back to port... You can't imagine the feeling of satisfaction when my feet touched land ... like being born again.
In the afternoon... after re-filling my more than empty stomach we headed for the beach... there were plenty to choose from so we decided to visit a different one every day...
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