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Hola Costeño beach surf camp! Although there were no waves until our last day here so we couldn't actually attempt to surf anyway, it was still a sick three days! Its such a chilled out place, about 25 minutes walk along a track, so secluded from the other places further up, with some little cabanas and wooden buildings, and a whole load of palm trees, then the beach and the sea, the only danger being from falling coconuts, or getting to drunk on rum at night!
The eight of us had a really chilled time just swimming, reading books,sunbathing and making friends during the day, with the occasional game of beach volleyball, spotting the multicoloured lizards, and the boys entertained themselves finding various ways of opening the fallen coconuts! At night we all drank a lot of rum and played a lot of cards, drinking pictionary, drinking charades, and watching the lightning over the sea that you could see every night! It was a lot of fun!
We were sad to say goodbye to Kelly and Charlie, and Rohan, James and Leo, and have our group seriously downsized back to three, but we stayed another night anyway, and there was a HUGE thunderstorm that came out of nowhere, crazy winds, lightning all around, coconuts falling everywhere! Most of us took refuge inside the kitchen, one of the palm trees even fell completely down! We trekked the long walk back to the main road and caught the bus back to Taganga, to our dive shop, where we were staying for the night before setting off on a three day diving safari in Tayrona national park.
The diving was awesome, me and Megan did our advanced open water, and Ambar wasn't doing the diving but just came along anyway and hung out on the beach reading when we went on dives. We stayed on a little beach in the national park, literally in hammocks sheltered by a wooden roof, and a toilet, a kitchen and a big wooden table, no electricity, no showers, but a little old man who cooked every meal for us! When we went diving we went out on the dive boat and the rest of the time we stayed on the beach!
The diving was pretty cool, our instructor did a refresher dive with us to make sure we could remember all our open water skills, then as well as that we did a dive close to our beach that day There's a lot of coral reef in the park, so loads of different coloured fish, puffer fish, stone fish, lionfish eels, lobsters, shrimps.... The second day we did a deep dive in the morning where we went down to 30m, then a dive where Megan led the dive and navigated us all.
That night we did the night dive, which I was slightly hesitant about, but it turned out to be really cool. We had really strong flashlights, so you could see the colours of the fish much better than in the sunlight, which you lose colours from as you go deeper down, and it was funny to see some fish sleeping, while other creatures came out, I even saw a few tentacles of an octopus disappearing back into a hole as I shone my light at it! What was wierd as well was that there were tiny fish and see creatures that loved the light and same around it, crashing into your arms and hands, like moths to a light. At one point we all knelt on the sand and turned our lights off, and got to see the luminous plankton, which swirl around in different patterns as you move your arms around.
The last day we did my navigation dive, and the cave dive! The cave dive was exciting, we swum up along a wall until we reached the opening, then swam all the way to the back of the cave using our torches. There were a few schools of fish that seemed to love the cave, and kept swimming in and out and around, and a huge moray eel, which was slightly disconcerting given that we had nowhere to swim away to! There was a tiny airhole in the top of the cave that we could one by one swim up to and stick our heads in and actually take off our masks and respirators. On the way back we swum over the top of the cave, which looked really beautiful with the coral growing on top and fish swimming around, then streams of bubbles appearing from the rock where the air we'd left in the cave was escaping through tiny cracks!
We returned to Taganga as dusk was falling, with lightning storms surrounding us far out to sea, and arrived back, Saturday night, in time for one last trip to Babaganoush and the Mirador!
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