Uncle travelling Gjerulf

Really happy about my results today:

Knowledge Development Teaching Presentation: 5.0
Confined Water Teaching Presentation: 5.0
Skill Circuit: 5 x 5.0

Grades go from 1.0, which is a fail, to 5.0.

Happy Uncle Travelling Gjerulf!

Since my last post, I’ve been a busy little bee…

As you know, I’ve been working hard on becoming a scuba instructor. A definite highlight was this Sunday, when we went to Nusa Penida for an Adventure Diving Workshop. The first of our two dives was a dive to 39 meters, practicing teaching deep diving. We all had different tasks, like showing the difference in colours at that depth, showing the effect of pressure on a closed plastic bottle of air and a tennis ball, having people perform a timed task at depth and on the surface, and breathing from a pony bottle. My timed task, pointing at randomized numbers from 1 to 25 in the right order on a slate, took me 36 seconds at depth, and 24 seconds on the surface. I didn’t feel like the nitrogen was affecting me, but the numbers speak clearly of increased problem-solving time due to nitrogen narcosis! Our second dive was a shallow one, max depth a little under 12 meters, but really beautiful, drifting over a gorgeous coral reef. On that dive we practiced leading Discover Scuba Diving customers, people with no training in diving whatsoever, which means I as the instructor have to do everything for them.

Tuesday and Wednesday we did our Mock  IE, and Wednesday was the last day of my IDC, Instructor Development  course. After finishing off our presentations, we went to a restaurant on the beach for dinner and beers, compliments of Jonathan Cross, our Course Director.

Yesterday was my second day off since I came to Bali. This time there was no enforced rest, so I headed out to find a rash vest. Eeva from Finland also needed to do some shopping, so off we went to do a round of some factory outlets outside Kuta. I was disappointed with the selection, even in the Billabong factory outlet, but I found a decent one that wasn’t too expensive. We also padded around in Kuta for a bit, had lunch, and went down to the beautiful crescent beach there to have a look. I rounded off the day with an hour of relaxing traditional Balinese massage, priced at a friendly NOK 33, or about 4 Euros.

Today was the first day of our Instructor Examinations. We met up at Blue Season Bali around ten a.m. to go through some paperwork, and a little past one we went to Hotel Parigata here in Sanur for the theoretical part of our examinations. It started with a briefing on the logistics of the three days of examinations, and then we dove right into the written exams, first 5×12 questions on general dive theory with no reference materials in an hour and a half, and then 50 questions on PADI Standards and Procedures, open book exam in another hour and a half. My results ended up being:
Physics 11/12
Physiology 12/12
Recreational Dive Planner 12/12
Skills and Environment 12/12
Equipment 11/12
and
Standards and Procedures 49/50

The lowest passing grades are 9/12 and 38/50, so I was in the safe end of the spectrum. I’ve generally not had problems getting passing grades, although in the Physiology part of my Mock Exam I had four mistakes. Still, I’m happy with my results, but curious about what the three questions I missed were…

After the written exams, we went back to Blue Season, to prepare our Knowledge Development Presentations for tomorrow morning. I’ll be “teaching” the rest of the crew, who’ll be posing as Open Water students, about how to find minimum surface intervals, using the eRDPML (electronic Recreational Dive Planner, Multi Level)

After those presentations, we’ll head back to Blue Season again, to prepare for our next presentations, and tomorrow afternoon we’ll be in a pool in a hotel here in Sanur, where we’ll do our Confined Water Teaching presentations. My assignment is to once again “teach” four of the candidates, once again posing as Open Water students, how to establish neutral buoyancy, using the low pressure inflator.
After a skill circuit in the pool, demonstrating Regulator Recovery and Clearing, Breathing From a Free Flowing Regulator, Alternate Air Source Use (stationary), Neutral Buoyancy, and Controlled Emergeny Swimming Ascent (CESA) it’s back to home base at Blue Season to prepare the last set of presentations, which will take place in open water on Sunday.
Early Sunday morning we’ll  head out to sea, and my presentation to my “students” will be Alternate Air Source Use (stationary) and CESA. The final task for the examinations will take place immediately after our Open Water Teaching presentations, when we’ll all do a rescue presentation, towing an unresponsive nonbreathing diver to safety, while removing scuba gear and giving rescue breaths.

And VOILÁ, I’ll be an Open Water Scuba Instructor!

In the week since my last post, I’ve mostly been studying, but there’s also been a rather special day here in Bali… Not much interesting to say about the studies, other than list what I’ve done. We finished the Assistant Instructor part of the course, and then we did an Emergency First Response Instructor course, which makes me qualified to teach CPR and first aid. We’ve started the Open Water Scuba Instructor part, which culminates in the Instructor Examinations a week from now. It’s all going quite well, although I had to cut our pool session short today due to a cold that plugged up my ears so I had some difficulty equalizing, and even greater difficulty when ascending from the  bottom. The reverse squeeze was never bad enough to be painful, but made me a bit dizzy, so I hope it’s improved by tomorrow morning, when we’re doing our second set of Open Water presentations in the sea.

After the IE, we’ll be doing five Specialty Instructor Courses, and then my 30 day on-arrival visa for Indonesia runs out. I haven’t bought my plane ticket yet, so I’m considering staying on for a few more weeks, maybe do an internship so I can get some teaching experience, or maybe just kick around and explore some of the dive sites around here. It would feel a bit wasted to not have done the Liberty wreck, for example…

So, for the special day here in Bali last week… It’s called Nyepi, and it’s the Balinese New Year! On the evening of March 15 there was a big parade, with some awesome statues made from papier maché or something. The night ended with a balcony party at some of my fellow instructor candidates’ homestay (guest house), and then I had to get home to my own place before they closed the streets. On the first day off the new year, the Balinese Hindus have an enforced day of rest, so the traffic is stopped, and if you’re caught out on the streets between 6am on the 16th and 6am on the 17th, you’ll get fined, or even put in jail! Lights or fire of any kind (that can be seen from the outside) is prohibited, and a few more things I can’t remember… All in all, it was a wonderful day, when I went from my bed to my porch, to the pool (a meter and a half from my porch), and back… And there was nothing to be done about it!

Today I finally managed to find time to go shopping for diving equipment. It took an hour, and it meant me sitting in the class room preparing for my knowledge development presentation on Peak Performance Buoyancy till nine this evening, but it had to be done, and I’m eager to try it out!

*Warning, this paragraph is pure equipment talk* I bought the AquaLung Micron regulator, with a standard LPI hose, Calypso Titan Octopus, and SPG with integrated compass. That deal set me back a total of about $735. A pair of off-the-shelf booties cost another $35, and a safety sausage, pointer, writing slate and clips account for the rest. Originally this was almost $1000, but luckily Blue Season Bali, the dive centre I’m training with has a deal with the dive shop, that gave me a discount. I still haven’t looked everything up on the web to see how much it would’ve cost to buy online, and I’m not sure I want to, in case I find out I could’ve gotten it half as expensive if I’d gone web-shopping…

A couple of days ago we had our first session in the sea since I got here, and we’ve had a couple of pool sessions, but I really miss diving! I was prepared to not dive overly much when I got here, but one dive in over a week, and that one a pure skill training dive, is a bit on the tough side for the part of me that aches to explore the local dive sites a bit.

It’s been a few days since I landed in Bali, and my internet access has been sporadic at best. I did a clean install of xp on my eee, but it’s still so slow it seems fast only in geological terms. I for some reason was unable to reinstall the nLited version I was running before, so it’s now running full xp, and not handling it well.

I have five knowledge reviews of independent study to go, and the IDC briefing is tomorrow. Still need to shop for some equipment, but all hours of daylight have been spent studying, so I haven’t had the opportunity yet.

I’ve met my class mates, and been hanging out with a few of them. A Finnish couple, Eeva and Heikki, turned out to be LARPers, not a very common occurrence! I’m looking forward to getting my nose out of the books, and also to getting a better idea of what we’ll be doing in the weeks to come. The other candidates have been here a while already, while I haven’t even quite figured out what questions I need to ask…
It’s almost midnight, and I need to get up early, so this’ll have to be the whole update for now.

October 19

So. Two weeks ago I posted from KL, and later that day I headed to the airport. By 1am I was on a plane from KL to London Stansted, where I had to spend 27 hours, due to a slight brain hiccup in the booking process…

I bought a ticket from Kuala Lumpur to London, leaving in the middle of the night on October 6, and arriving the next morning. So, being slightly retarded, I booked a ticket from London to Oslo on the morning of October 7, not taking into consideration that when I’d arrive in London it would of course STILL be October 6… When it dawned on me, I tried to change my ticket from London, but that was about 10 times as expensive as the original price of the ticket, and a new ticket on the correct date was about 15 times as expensive. So, I organized a couchsurfing host in Bishop’s Stortford, next to Stansted airport, and prepared for a stay-over.

The stay-over was actually a lot of fun, as I got to experience small town England for the first time. My host was working as cabin crew for Ryan Air, and we spent the day exploring Bishop’s Stortford. (He’d moved there 10 days earlier, so he didn’t know the town either) The evening was spent in an old English pub, even though I was dead tired, seeing as my jet lag made midnight in London feel like seven in the morning…

On October 7 I flew to Torp, and hitchhiked to Oslo, where Annikken was waiting for me. She had made me an awesome Tiramisu (my favourite dessert!) and we cooked a nice Norwegian dinner. She was leaving for Stavanger the next morning, so I wrote to my cousin Gaute on msn and asked if he had plans for the evening. He answered a mildly confused “uuh, no? Why?” and was slightly more than mildly surprised when I invited myself over!

I spent a long weekend with him, his wife Beate and their three year old son Filip, who is my godson (fadderbarn).

On Monday morning, a week ago, I got on a bus to Arendal, where I dropped in on a surprise visit at my grandparents’ house. When I got there, the door was open, so I walked right in, and when I was on my way up the stairs, my 85 year old grandpa called out for my grandma. I answered “No, it’s not her, it’s a surprise!” Needless to say, he was surprised, as was my grandma when she came home for dinner a few minutes later… I visited my other grandma as well that evening, and the next morning I headed west again, to surprise my parents. I hitchhiked to Kristiansand with a nice lady who was going to the university, and then through Kristiansand with a guy my age, who had recently been on a long backpacker trip. (!) From there to Vanse I got on a bus, and walked up the drive to my parents house. My father saw me through the window from his office, and opened the window but was too surprised to say anything coherent. The look on my mother’s face could not have been any more surprised if I’d been a green Martian…

I stayed with my parents a short week, ordered a new Visa card (the old one was destroyed by mould in the Perhentians) and returned my malfunctioning EeePC901 to the dealer. On Saturday I also went diving with Farsund Undervannsklubb, the local dive club where my parents live. It was a beautiful day, and we were four people who headed out to Ytstesteinen, far out in the archipelago outside Farsund. The water temperature was around 13 degrees, quite different from the 29-30 I’m used to… I had no clue as to how much lead I had to take down, seeing as the last time I did any dry suit diving was a year ago, and I was a complete newb… I took three kilos less than I used before I left home, down from 16 to 13, and was HORRIBLY over weighted. I’ll try with nine next time…

This morning I hitchhiked from Vanse to Bogafjell, where I eventually managed to locate my little sister’s house, and rang the door bell. When she opened, she told me later, she was prepared to tell some annoying door-to-door salesperson to bugger off, when I shouted Supplies! for the n’th time this week. A short while later my brother-in-law came home, and another surprise was sprung… It was REALLY nice to finally meet my little nephew Terje, who is named after my grandpa, his proud great-grandfather! Terje junior was born in February, so he’s almost eight months old. As I write this, my sister and brother-in-law are at a cell group gathering with their congregation, and the proud Uncle Travelling Gjerulf is babysitting his only nephew!

October 22

Yesterday I called up a few friends of mine in Stavanger, and arranged to meet them at The Irishman for our traditional Wednesday night at the pub. A couple that I hadn’t called also showed up, and there were welcome-back-hugs all around. I’ve stayed the night at Hallgeir’s place, and am looking for a job and a place to live until I go back to Malaysia in March. If you’re around, give me a holler!

Uncle Travelling Gjerulf will travel once again! I have lived in Moonlight Chalets on Long Beach on Perhentian Kecil for two months and ten days, but tomorrow morning I head out to Taman Negara. The boat leaves the island at eight, and my bus from Kuala Besut to Taman Negara leaves at ten, and if we keep to the schedule I’ll arrive around four pm. That means that most of my birthday will be spent travelling, but that is only fitting. I haven’t decided how long I’ll be staying in Taman Negara, but I’d like to do a proper jungle trek, so possibly a week. After that I head out to Kuala Lumpur.

As for the the snorkel test, I survived, although my rib came out the other end a little worse for wear… The first thing we had to do was get dressed up in clothes that were supplied by the instructors. We then had a quiz about obscure diving knowledge, where for every question not answered, or answered wrong, we’d have a shot of monkey juice. (Orang Utan, a local fortified wine) Then came some charades where the three of us were miming different fish, and competing against everyone else, with the punishment for us if the others guessed it first being another shot of the monkey. This was followed by an obstacle course on the beach, and finally the snorkelling itself. The mix was evil, but Rich spared us his home brew, so we all survived. The rib, which I’ve kept bruising when it’s just about healed, bruised up in the end of the obstacle course, where we had to wrestle our way past the instructors to get to the finish line…

I love the island, and the crew here, so I’ll be back!

So. I have finished my Divemaster training. Paperwork is the only thing separating me from a certification, but there is still one unofficial test to come: The snorkel test… For those of you who have no clue what I’m talking about, I’ll give a brief description.

There are variations over a theme, with quizzes, obstacle courses, competitions and various embarrassing performances, but the central feature of a snorkel test is the snorkel. (of course) With a large audience in a bar on the beach, the budding Divemaster (read: victim) has to put on a mask and snorkel. The snorkel has a funnel attached to the top, and the victim has to drink whatever comes through the snorkel. The “drink” depends on the experiences of the instructors and divemaster friends organizing the event, i.e. how horrible was the concoctions poured down their own throats when they were going through this rite of passage. Some places I know it is pure alcohol, other places it’s just pure evil… Beer, soup, wine, milk, liquor, HP sauce,  syrup, etc. Since the victim is wearing a mask, he cannot breathe through his nose, and with the evil mix being rushed through the snorkel by the weight of what’s in the big funnel, the only to options are to swallow, or spit out the snorkel.

Tonight we are three Divemaster Trainees going through this at the same time, Emma from Sweden, Jukka from Finland and myself. I know that Richard, an assistant instructor, has been brewing some crap on his balcony, made from coconuts, watermelons, sugar and yeast, so I suspect that will feature strongly in the snorkels tonight, probably along with both beer and the infamous Monkey Juice, which is the nickname the local Orang Utan brew has received from the foreigners here.

On a more sober note, I am happy to be done, but a little sad to be leaving soon. I’ve made some good friends here on Pulau Perhentian Kecil, and I’m quite sure I’ll be returning in the future. I might stay around here for a couple of weeks still, in order to get to celebrate my birthday with friends instead of strangers. I am also 17 dives short of 100, so I might try to get my 100th dive in on my birthday.

Approximately a week ago I was diving the Sugar Wreck, and my hand slipped while I was pulling myself up into the boat. I put a little to much weight on my chest, and there was a popping sound accompanied by a sharp pain. When I got back in the boat I tried to lift another diver’s scuba unit out of the water, and the pain was suddenly so strong I had to struggle to get the unit into the boat…

Since then I’ve been feeling quite useless, seeing as I can’t do any heavy lifting. I was also a bit curious as to whether there are any negative effects of high nitrogen levels on healing bone, but there are none, so I keep diving. For the first few days, under water was the only time breathing didn’t hurt… It got a little better, and I tried to carry some cans of fuel for the boat, and now it’s worse again…

All in all, though, I’m having a great time. It’s extremely busy here now, so it’s not every day I can dive, since all our equipment is in use, or the boat is full or something similar, but it’s good to have a break from the water every now and then.

Yesterday I had a bit of spare time, so I did some research on the Sugar Wreck. What I found was quite sparse, but apparently she is the 3,500-ton M/V Union Star 17, which had run aground on Pantai Sri Tujuh, and was dislodged Dec 13 2000. She was then sent on her way to Batam in Indonesia for repairs, but she sank between 4pm and 5pm on Dec 16, six nautical miles off Kuala Besut, due to a leak. The captain and 16 crew members were rescued in their life boats by marine police. About 1,000 tons of sugar were transferred to the M/V Union Star 20. 

I have not been able to find out who owned her, but it would be cool to find someone who has blueprints.

I am feeling more and more as a part of the staff here at Sunlight, and that feeling was especially strong yesterday. I ran out of cash a while ago, and while I can write everything on my tab at Moonlight, where I’m staying, I don’t have a tab anywhere else yet. Eventually I had to go get some cash, and the island I’m living on is remote enough to not have a single ATM. There’s one place where you can get some cash, but they charge 10 percent for the service, just because they can. In order to get my Divemaster license, I also needed to have a physician’s signature on a paper that says I’m fit for diving, so I really needed to take a trip to the mainland.

Yesterday I organized to not assist any dives, and off I went at eight a.m. First I have to take a taxiboat out to the speedboat, and then the speedboat to Kuala Besut on the mainland. At the jetty in Kuala Besut I found a taxi that could take me the last fifteen kilometers to Jerteh, which is the closest place with an ATM… I had my own cards to withdraw money from, and a handful of other cards from other people working here, so that when I was done, I had about 15 000 NOK in my bag. With the shopping I had to do, my visit to the doctor, and mailing the camera I’ve been using, and which has stopped working, back to Norway, I wasn’t back on Long Beach till three pm.

But, returning to the reason I started writing about this, feeling part of the community here; when I was going to get the boat back out to the island, I didn’t buy a ticket, and when I was stopped and asked for my National Park pass, I just said that I was working at Sunlight, and they waved me past. On the boat I paid the “local price” directly to the captain, instead of the more expensive tourist ticket at the ticket office. On the boat I also sat with the crew, and helped out a bit with loading and stuff. It was a bit weird, but a good feeling of belonging anyway

A more average day on the island starts at a little before eight, because the shop opens at eight. Just about then the first boat from the mainland comes in as well, so people start arriving. It’s quite laidback around here, so the things that need to be done in the morning are just done as people kinda feel like it. There’s sweeping sand off the floors, putting out buckets for people to wash the sand off their feet when they come in off the beach, and emptying, cleaning and refilling the pools that are used for washing the salt off masks, snorkels, fins, regulators, BCDs and computers after every dive. Then during the day, I study dive theory whenever I’m not out assisting on a dive. The shop closes at seven, and in the evenings, I spend time with students and staff, or after a day with too many dives, just lay vegetating in front of the TV in the “lounge.”

As you might see, the time for writing blog updates is limited, and even if I did have time they would probably be more of a dive log than a travel log.