Much Ado About Diving

Our diving obsession began rather innocuously and as a hopeful solution to the motion sickness Mariya had started to feel while snorkeling. We scouted out a shop for our visit to Gili T and made up our minds to do the Discover SCUBA Diving activity – just to see how we would like it. TBH – we were both pretty nervous, like if we were meant to see the weird, creepy creatures under the sea, wouldn’t we have been born with lungs? Tempting fate seems to be our motto, so when the guy at the dive shop said we might as well jump right in by doing the open water course, we shrugged and signed up. Our open water course took place exclusively in the pool, with another group also doing theirs, so things were cramped. To say it was a nightmare experience would be only slightly dramatic. Mariya still has physical scars from it; Sam’s are more emotional. We completed our dives in the sea, passed the test, and were rewarded with our certificates – all with the very real understanding that we might never dive again.

Fast forward a month and we’re back in Gili T (because things had gone awry elsewhere). We booked an Airbnb for a month-long stay on the island before we headed off to Europe. We take a multi-hour boat ride to Gili T and then load our bags into a horse and carriage to be taken to the Airbnb. When we get to the Airbnb, we’re welcomed with confusion (both ours and theirs) as we take in the space around us. It clearly hadn’t been open in years – pre COVID we were soon to find out. The hosts had nowhere for us to stay – so we chaotically searched online for some place with a vacancy. We found one slightly overpriced but what else are we going to do? We hop back in the carriage as the horse carries us to our new location – which just so happened to be a dive shop. You probably guessed it – after spending a few days here watching everyone return from dives with their diver’s high – we had to give it another shot. Thus birthing our new obsession. If you’re wondering, Airbnb did comp our new hotel and refunded us for the nonexistent one. Now, we travel to places almost exclusively for diving (and require extremely recent reviews before we book Airbnbs).