Tidal Revival

Friends, we made it to Central America.

WE BACK

Our journey home was done in typical Lari fashion: the realization of a lost boarding pass as we neared the front of the long TSA screening line (If looks could kill, Landyn would be dead), stopped for additional screening and questioning because a baggie of Costa Rican coins scanned as something much more threatening (Oops, my bad), and a customs agent who did not believe our story and almost didn’t let Lari in the country (Plz don’t deport us).

My inner Tica rejoiced when we exited the airport and I had my first solid view of the mountains. I got a lump in my throat as I sat in the back of the Uber, finally headed home after a long travel day and a long travel drought.

We pulled in the driveway around 9:30pm, and as soon as I got out of the car Sofía and Lupe were at my ankles. Our landlord and his whole family greeted us with a touchingly warm welcome and helped us bring all our suitcases up to our apartment. We chatted for a bit and said goodnight, the click of the closing door an audible signal to the end of the journey, the end of the waiting. We made it.

Landyn and I looked at each other and sighed in unison. A release and a preparation for what came next: a week in Honduras. Our first trip of the semester started in just four hours when our scheduled 2am-taxi-pickup would bring us right back to the airport.

We unpacked a little, prepped our Honduras bags, and napped.

We Gone

When we got back to the freezing San José airport, to say we were on the struggle bus would be a vast understatement. There comes a point where you can no longer pretend to have your life together, you just openly wear your disheveledness for the world to see. This was mine.

Our brief layover in El Salvador began as nothing special. I was quite pleased to see a normal 737 waiting for us at our gate. I had been worried that they would put us on some little puddle-jumper plane since we were flying directly into the island of Roatan.

Dodged a bullet, thank god.

So you can imagine my surprise and confusion when the airline attendants scanned in our boarding passes and then directed us to go downstairs and outside. Like on the tarmac.

Alright. Kind of weird, but I guess we’ll just board from outside. 

But when we got outside, instead of climbing the detachable staircase affixed to the 737 that I thought was ours, we got into a shuttle van. They drove us down the tarmac, past a wide array of big, beautiful jets until we reached the very last plane parking spot.

It was a propeller plane. Literal. Propellers.

You could’ve flown all the other jumbo jets through the gaping hole my jaw made as it hit the floor. There was no way I was getting on that shit. Hell. No. I hate flying on a jet, I think airbuses are too small, I was absolutely not getting on that dinky oversized child’s toy.

But I did. Because sometimes to have the awesome adventures you have to do some shit you don’t want to do and overcome some serious, deeply-rooted fears. Looking back, it set the stage for how our entire week would go.

So I bawled for ten minutes after we took our seats, before even taking off. And then I put my big girl pants on, pulled my seatbelt as tight as it could possibly go, and reminded myself that this is all part of the adventure. Trust the process, and all that.

After an hour-long flight that probably shaved seven years off my life, we finally landed in the Bay Islands.

 

We ferried from Roatan, the more touristy island we flew into, to Utila––a smaller island comprised mostly of locals and scuba diving centers.

 

How did we get here? How did we decide on the Bay Islands for our first trip?

Excellent question.

One of Landyn’s “bucket list” activities was to become a certified scuba diver. Utila is one of the cheapest places in the world to do this, and its shores boast an incredible reef, part of the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System, which is the second largest in the world, coming in right behind the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Between the huge, healthy reef and the hundreds of aquatic animals native to the area, it was clear to see why divers from all over the world flock to Utila. After we booked our tickets, Landyn was like a seven-year-old waiting for Christmas. Pure excitement.

As for myself…I have an interesting relationship with water. I love it, but I’m also petrified of it in a way. I have these recurring dreams where I’m in water, typically some sort of lake, and the seaweed is pulling me under, I’m stuck and can’t get free, or I’m drowning, slowly getting dragged under the dark water by some invisible, malevolent force. It’s just occurring to me that the dreams are always about freshwater, never the ocean…maybe from a near-drowning incident I had at a lake when I was young? Maybe years of my sister tubing with me, yelling to me over the roar of the boat that the muskies would get me if I fell off the tube?

At any rate, between Landyn and I, I was the one with much more trepidation. I had some massive, longstanding fears I would need to overcome: open water, seaweed, marine animals. But I was all for trying it. Yolo.

We’re Really Doing This

First and foremost, we immediately loved the dive center we chose to go through––Alton’s Dive Center. The property was everything we wanted and more out of our island vacay, and our instructor, Hannah, seemed great.

 

On our first day of scuba school, we watched a lot of required videos, took quizzes on important information, and discussed the overall key aspects of diving. Beyond the classroom work, the diving certification process is comprised of five training dives done in “contained water,” i.e. a pool, or in this case, the shallow waters just off the dock, and four dives in open water. Right away, that afternoon, we began our contained water dives. And I was nervous.

Knowing that I could quit at any point if I truly hated it helped me find the courage to try, but even still, I thought I was going to pass out as I stood at the end of the dock, suited up in all of my heavy scuba gear, waiting to step off into the water. When it was my turn I looked at Hannah waiting in the water and said, “Ah shit. Hannah, you got me?”

“I got you.”

Kerplunk. In I was. Big girl pants: on.

And honestly, I only panicked a couple of times. What really got to me was the sensation of breathing underwater; it’s the wildest, trippiest act because it goes against everything you’ve always known about swimming––plug your nose, don’t breathe. It also took me a little bit to get used to relying solely on breathing through my mouth. Given I had a pretty gnarly chest cold settle in THE DAY BEFORE we left, I was rather nervous about the mouth-breathing. Loads of cold medicine and an inhaler carried me through, though.

By morning’s end on our second day, after completing all of our confined water dives, I was feeling confident and capable. That afternoon, however, we were getting on the boat and beginning our open water dives, and I was absolutely terrified.

Holy F***

The week before we left, my mom kept expressing her concern over me and Landyn diving. “It just makes me so nervous…I don’t know about this diving thing, Cari…Isn’t it dangerous?… I keep having these dreams where you go under the water and the boat leaves you and you’re stuck out there once you come back up…”

(That last one really got to me, as I’ve had similar dreams myself)

So after I popped a non-drowsy Dramamine and the boat took off into what the staff called “really rough” waters, not typical of Utila, these conversations played back in my head. My own water-related nightmares replayed. My deepest fears and anxieties came to the surface. My hands were visibly shaking.

They stopped the boat in the middle of the ocean and said: “Alright, get in the water.”

I slipped into my gear, carefully, as the boat lurched (literally, lurched,) from side to side, nearly kicking us out of the nest before we were ready. Hannah got in the water as other staff members helped us scuba babies in, struggling to stay standing in the turbulent tide themselves. To a panicked Cari, the choppiness called out like a warning, a severe reminder that the ocean is in charge. I was on her turf. You ain’t shit, I imagined her saying.

The staff reached for me, first. I couldn’t have asked for a more anxiety-inducing scenario. Hannah seemed far, too far for my own liking, on the tow line. I was about to plop into the ocean all by myself, a little sitting duck on the surface.

This year abroad has tested me and pushed me in ways hitherto unimaginable. I have let go of so many fears and tried things and conquered things I would’ve thought were for crazier, more adventurous people. I have learned I am much, much braver than I thought I was.

But walking to the edge of the boat, waiting for the boat to rock back down off of a strong wave, and waiting to take one giant stride into the ocean, sealing my fate as there would be no backing out once I was in, takes the cake for the scariest thing I have ever done. I was border-line hyperventilating. I felt the norepinephrine and cortisol flood my bloodstream from my hair follicles to my toes. What the fuck am I doing?

Feet on the edge, staff member holding me steady, “You’re good,” they said. But I wasn’t. And sometimes that’s your gut telling you that you are not cut out for whatever it is you’re about to do, your intuition screaming at you that something is not a good idea. But sometimes it’s just anxiety (which can sound a lot like intuition) trying to hold you back from the cool things life has to offer. Sometimes it’s nearly impossible to differentiate between the two. There’s only one way to find out.

“Holy fuck.”

*steps off the boat*

I inflated my BCD, the device that inflates and deflates depending on whether you’re trying to ascend or descend during a dive, also the thing that helps you float on the surface when the weight of the air tank threatens to sink you, and painstakingly made my way over to the tow line attached to the boat so as not to end up truly in the middle of nowhere. As I waited for my classmates to enter the surf, I bobbed up and down, the menacing water getting alarmingly close to flooding the top of my snorkel.

Once everyone was in, we laboriously swam over to our descent line, switched from our snorkels to our regulators (the device connected to our air tank which allows us to breathe underwater), went through the checklist of necessary steps to take before beginning the dive, and finally began to descend.

I made it about 14 inches down the line before I panicked and kicked back up to the surface.

I just needed a second, a quick pep-talk. The whole process felt incredibly stressful and rushed and I wasn’t quite ready. Deep breath. Get your shit together. Life is for living.

I re-deflated my BCD and slowly began to drop below the surface.

And it was like I stepped into an alien world. It looked so different it scared me for a second. I kept descending, equalizing the building pressure in my ears along the way, slowly adjusting to the perpetually increasing weight on my chest until I made it down to Hannah. She reached out for my hand, helping me move away from the reef and towards the sand patch we were going to kneel on, and I grabbed for her eagerly, tensely. I took a moment to squeeze her hand, a physical shedding of my stress and apprehension.

She guided me towards the sand, and then let me go. I pinned my elbows to my body, removing the rest of the air from my BCD, enabling me to drop the rest of the way to the ocean floor.

As soon as my knees touched the white sand, I let out a laugh, an influx of bubbles floating from my regulator up towards the surface. I watched them, taking in the visual distance 12 meters was from the light of the outside air. I was on the ocean floor. The true bottom of the ocean. As I looked around at the reef, slightly more accustomed to the new world I entered, it no longer scared me; rather, it intrigued me and left me feeling awestruck.

Landyn dropped down on the sand next to me and made the “okay” symbol with his hand, the diving world’s official hand signal for both the question and the answer: okay? okay. And when I signaled “okay” back to him, I really was. The lines around his eyes crinkled, magnified through his mask, and I knew he was smiling. I smiled back as we pounded fists, Team Lari doing the damn thing.

Our first two open water dives that afternoon primarily consisted of us getting used to the dive process and reiterating skills we had learned in our confined water dives. Skills like intentionally filling our mask with water and subsequently clearing it using nasal exhalation to force the water out (y’all, this really had me struggling at first…damn near dropped out of scuba school over it), practicing proper emergency ascensions if you run out of air, and adjusting your BCD so that you have neutral buoyancy in the water––the thing that allows you to hover over the reef, using only breath control to adjust your height over its hills and valleys.

As the boat headed back for shore that evening, I felt simultaneously accomplished and slightly in shock at what we had done.

The next morning we took our final exam and prepared for our remaining two open water dives that afternoon, which, upon completion, would conclude our certification process. We would be official by the end of the day.

Those dives were significantly less scary. We had fewer skills to complete, thereby leaving us with more time to actually swim around and examine the reef. On our first dive, Landyn and I saw a stingray within the first five minutes of being on the bottom, which set the stage for the intensely cool exploratory journey we were going to have that day.

Our second dive, in particular, made me feel like I was in Finding Nemo. After dipping below the surface, I saw that we were dropping down into a school of big, purple and blue fish on one side, and a field of jellyfish on the other. Check “get stung by a jellyfish” off the bucket list, too.

Seeing hundreds of various fish species, coral, sponges, and other types of life on the reef was truly breathtaking. The best part was that they didn’t even care that we were there––a huge school of Blue Tangs swam right through me, narrowly dodging my gear, splitting around me as if I were a simple median on their path along the current. No big deal.

The following day, the water finally calmed down enough for us to make the 40-minute voyage to the north side of the island––somewhat of a rarity for visitors. The reef was even more alive, even more incredible. We reached our furthest depth, 18 meters, and enjoyed the freedom of being a certified diver––no more skills tests, no more training wheels, diving solely for fun and reef exploration.

 

When all was said and done, I was actually quite sad to be done diving. I had grown accustomed to diving every day, and what started out as a fear-conquering, anxiety-inducing activity morphed into something I found extremely enjoyable with just the right amount of challenge.

There was a large part of me that didn’t want our trip to end. But the other part of me, the Tica part of me, was so excited to get home and stay home for more than four hours. The mountains (and the dogs) were calling and I needed to go.

On the planes, I thought about this insane life we’re living, and I decided that everyone has varying thresholds of acceptable “crazy,” and what might be too much for some is just the right amount for others.

This life is just the right amount of crazy for me. 4 countries in 23 hours, crazy. Plopping into the middle of the ocean, crazy. Moving to a place I had never been, crazy. But it’s just my kind of crazy, my brand if you will. Maybe that’s how you live a life that never leaves you bored––identify your brand of crazy, how much you want, how much you need, and keep a consistent flow.

Diving is the craziest, coolest, scariest thing I’ve ever done. There’s something so freeing, so liberating about doing the things that scare me, and I love re-writing my story, re-wiring my brain to delete past anxieties and just roll with the adventures.

Maybe someday this lifestyle, these excursions, will be too much for me. Maybe one day we’ll pack it up and decide we’ve had our fill. Maybe I’ll never get enough––an 87-year-old jumping off of waterfalls and hanging out on the ocean floor.

All I know right now is that I have never felt better about our crazy, and I want to keep it coming for as long as I can.

Until next time, friends.