I'm On A Bus

Three months and 105 dives and too many Mad Monday Pub Crawls and I am on the road again at last. Currently I am doing a full day of bus riding from Townsville to Mt Isa. But I will backtrack a bit and talk through my last week in Cairns.

The big finale of my time by the reef was my Dive Controller course (same as Divemaster course). This course is supposed to be the thing I had been working towards for the last few months as a trainee on the boat. I did the trainee program more to get a lot of diving and time in the water, but getting the DiveCon certification is a nice little bonus. The course lasted five days and was done completely in the classroom and in the pool. The focus of the course was to learn how to teach. I made two classroom presentations (15 minute lecture on dive masks and then a 20 minute lecture on nitrogen narcosis) and two pool presentations (explaining and performing certain diver skills such as mask clearing and alternate air share procedure). The narcosis lecture was fun for me to put together. Lots of fascinating research done on what exactly the nitrogen is doing to our heads that messes us up at depth. Masks not so much. I don't care too much for equipment unlike my instructor. So it was great to get my second lecture topic changed to something a bit more biological.

Besides passing the presentations, we also had to pass a watermanship evaluation and a multiple choice test. The watermanship tests included swimming 400m, snorkel (swim with mask and fins) 800m, and treading water with hands out of the water for 15 minutes. Lots of fun. You get different points for how fast you can do the swim and snorkel. I did fine on the swim and I dominated the snorkel. With the swim you need to have good form and technique which I don't have. With the snorkel you just kick and kick and kick and don't have to worry about technique. That's more for me. Same with the multiple choice test. Much of the test was a lot of math (calculating air consumption and using dive tables) which I liked because there is a definite right answer. It was the questions that have a few good answers and you have to select the 'best' answer that I don't care for. But I did fine.

So that's that. I am a divemaster or DiveCon or whatever you want to call it. There is some outstanding paperwork that the shop still needs to get me before I can actually receive my DiveCon card. There always seems to be some sort of problem with the paperwork.

Anyways I finished my DiveCon course Friday night and then spent the weekend figuring out what I would like to do next. Watched the Lakers dominate on Saturday and did a lot of the aforementioned paperwork that day as well. Sunday I stared at a map of Australia for a long long time and from that decided I would like to find my way out to Darwin. Sunday night I had one last night out with my friends before getting on a bus bright and early Monday morning. But I had a bit too much fun Sunday night apparently. Slept in an missed the bus. Fortunately another bus came at midday which I managed to make. But still I wasn't happy to start my travels by missing my first bus out to Townsville.

It all turned out for the best though. The ride out to Townsville was a 6 hour trip down the coast. Halfway through the trip we stopped at Mission Beach to pickup/dropoff people. At that point a nice group of kids who I had met and hung out with a little up in Cairns boarded the bus. Whataretheodds is what I said. It was very nice to catch up with them for the second half of the trip. Unfortunately once we arrived in Townsville they had to immediately take a ferry out to Magnetic Island. I was on my own again.

There isn't much to Townsville. Small little town with some nice museums and an aquarium. Big reptiles roaming the streets. Unfortunately I didn't have time to see them. The bus got in at 6pm and I needed to catch the 7am bus out to Mt Isa the next morning (which I am on now). I really only had time to grab some dinner and make some new friends at the hostel I was staying at for the night. There were some large animals on the street. This morning I tried to run up Castle Hill overlooking Townsville. I figured it would be a good little workout plus some amazing views of Townsville and the surrounding area. What I didn't figure was that trying to run a rocky/uneven trail at 5am without much light at all is pretty much impossible. So I got halfway up the hill before having to abort in fear of breaking an ankle and leave the conquering of Castle Hill for another day. Mark my words Castle Hill. I will be back for you.

Boarded my bus at 7am and I arrive in Mt Isa at 7pm. I will spend a day there before moving on. I expect to make one more stop before I get myself on up to Darwin. I purchased the bus pass that gets me from Cairns to Darwin one way, but lets me get on and off the bus as much as I want in between. The bus pass cost about as much as a flight would but I prefer to see some of the things along the way. Once I get to Darwin I will be looking to share rides with other people driving out to the West Coast. That way is cheaper and we have more freedom to stop and go when we please. But for now I am enjoying spacing out as the bus just goes. Plus we stop at the most random roadhouses and I eat the most random food and I always picture Jesse and Erin standing there behind the counter right before I walk in. Alas I am missing their roadhouse by about 1000km. Anyways I got this Lot Burger yesterday in Hughendon I reckon and as far as I could tell it contained: beef, steak, egg, beetroot (bears, beets, battlestar galactica), pineapple, coleslaw, carrot, cheese, tomato, lettuce, onion, pickle, and much more.

So that's where I am now. Where are you? I haven't heard from a lot of you people back home in a while. As always we really love to get comments or even whole emails about life back home. Alright that's it for now. Time to go back to sleep.

Divemaster B