It's A Small World (After All). Sort of.

There's a ride in Disneyland called "It's a Small World".  It features animatronic babies representing various nationalities singing a cheesy jingle in their respective tongues.  You have the Japanese babies and the English babies and the Scandanavian babies and the American babies and the Inuit babies all in a row singing a canon about how the world is not so large and that we are all one internationally united family.  It's more of scare than "The Haunted Mansion" but we go on it anyway because my Grandma loves it and it's a staple of Disneyland.  It's the kind of thing that was designed for children but really only registers in the minds of adults.  By having all of the babies sing the same jingle throughout, the ride is able to capture the common sentiment of peace held by human beings around the world, while still showing how massive the Earth is by making the ride 15 minutes long.  You will do terrible things to get out of the Los Angeles sun.
Anyway, this week I learned the meaning of the ride.  I saw how large and how small the world is.

Oh young me.  So much to learn about life.

I went to Cairns in Northern Queensland for a week.  Cairns is a hub for international tourism in Australia.  The city's close proximity to the Great Barrier Reef is the driving force behind the international draw, enabling many companies to thrive by offering sightseeing, snorkeling, and scuba diving.  The Great Barrier Reef is what drew me to Cairns.  Heck, it's what drew me to Australia.  When you grow up with a Marine Biologist for a father there will always an invisible force dragging you to the ocean.  Maybe it was the Whale Watching trips on Puget Sound or the weekend stays at Appledore Island off the coast of Maine, I've always wanted to go unda da sea.  So the Great Barrier Reef has always seemed something of a Mecca to me and although I'm Catholic I still wanted to go.

I signed up for a PADI (Professional Association of Diving Instructors) diving course with Deep Sea Divers Den.  I've taken a PADI Scuba diving course before at Cornell but I never got certified because the course didn't include an open water dive portion which is required for certification.  They used to offer the open water portion but they stopped doing it because of something about not wanting to jump into Cayuga Lake in the middle of April.  Makes sense.  So I decided to retake the course in beautiful, tropical Cairns.

I signed up for a 5 day dive course, which involved two days doing classroom and pool work to learn how to dive followed by three days living on a dive boat that stays out on the reef to get my certification.  There were three people in my group during the classroom and pool session: Prema and Ben, who would eventually join me on the liveaboard portion and I will discuss later; and Rachel, a very sweet native Australian who ended up doing her liveaboard later in the week.
Altogether the pool and classroom portion went without a hitch and I won't spend much time discussing it.  We'd generally be at the center from 9 to 4:30 with half the day devoted to classroom work and the other half devoted to pool work.  I could spend my evenings walking around Cairns, which was a very touristy town but also very pleasant.  Sounds like a vacation in and of itself.

Look, Simba.  Everything the light touches is our kingdom.

Now I want to preface this section by talking about the people who work at the Divers Den.  They are the some of the most charming people on the planet.  All of the girls call you "Love" and all of the guys call you "Mate".  They have the confidence one only gains from being as comfortable in the water as they are out, and the person-to-person skills of someone who deals with people learning a difficult skill day after day.  And deep down they all share a love of Marine wildlife, which I believe can make anybody a softy.

Luke, I am your father.

My Scuba instructor was a guy named Olly.  Olly is from the UK and sounds exactly like Jason Statham.  It seemed like he had been diving all over the world.  It is a very large world after all.  He had a nerd like passion for Biology and Physics and once perked up with excitement when he heard somebody mention Particle Physics.  I could always ask him questions about different dive locations and marine life and he could generally come up with an answer.  He was also an extremely experienced diver, having spent several years in Central America doing research.  However his most defining quality was his patience in helping us make the transition from classroom to pool to reef.  Olly was a good instructor.

So on the third day me, Prema, Ben and Olly got on a ship called SeaQuest that would take us out to Taka, which is the boat we would be doing the liveaborad on.  We were also joined by a fourth member to our open water certification group, a Japanese girl named Hannah.  SeaQuest is where we would do our first two open water dives before transferring to Taka.  It was also full of people doing day trips out to the reef, snorkelers, and other liveaboard members making their way out to sea.  It was a veritable hodgepodge of nationalities, personalities, and intentionalities, which makes sense; it's a big world after all.

Now I'd like to take a minute, just sit right there, to tell you about my other open water team members.  First off, Ben.  Me and Ben are both from the US.  We're both from New York.  We're both from upstate.  Ben's from Albany and grew up about three hours from where I grew up.  He's studying abroad at Griffith on the Gold Coast about 2 hours from where I live now in Australia.  And we met in Cairns taking the same openwater dive course.  I guess it's a small world after all.  Now me and Ben aren't exactly peas in a pod.  He's into extreme sports: surfing, skateboarding, snowboarding.  I enjoy running because it allows me to eat whatever I want.  I would wake up at 6 so I could watch the sunrise.  Ben would wake up 5 minutes before the first dive and let the ocean be his alarm clock.  I guess you could say that Ben was seeking the ocean for the swell and I was seeking it for the calm.  This doesn't mean we didn't get along.  We were dive buddies throughout the trip.  We were both at the reef to learn something and to experience something.  And once you're underwater differences in personality and lifestyle don't really matter.  Ben would always suprise me with insights into his views on adventure, like how he felt other abroad students were wasting their time just going on tour buses from bar to bar, getting wasted.  He really wanted to experience Australia.

Prema, on the other hand, is from the UK.  She was travelling around the world before she started school.  She had this distinct English sweetness to her.  We bonded over our love of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, and she would always help me with my crossword puzzles.  We discussed one of my favorite topics: accents; as well as the differences between the UK and the US.  I will never get tired of hearing about how someone from a different country perceives their own culture or my culture.  What impressed me most about Prema was her ability to make the best of a bad situation.  She struggled with pressure equalization, a big part of scuba diving, throughout the trip and it ended up decommissioning her for the entire second day.  Instead of moping, she started snorkeling in the shallower portions of the reef and ended up seeing a lot of animals me and Ben didn't get to see.  Like turtles.  Why didn't I get to see (sea) turtles?

Anyway, our first two dives took place in a part of the reef called Platetop.  The first time diving in the ocean is incredible and shocking.  The deepest depth you are allowed to dive at with a basic open water certification is 18 meters.  That may not seem like much but think about it for a second.  According to Google that's about 59 feet.  (Isn't Google great?  Have you guys tried Google Hangouts?)  Imagine 59 feet of water between you and the surface.  Like a 5 story building of water.  And the amount of life that surrounds you is incredible.  I saw more life in those first two dives than I'd probably see in a year at Cornell, granted engineers aren't known for their liveliness (ba dump cha).   I saw a bluespotted stingray settling into the sand for camouflage.  A small black tip reef shark swam by us while we were practicing our dive skills.  We saw Clownfish nestled in some anemones.   A Maori Wrasse, an enormous colorful fish that follows the boat from dive site to dive site that the dive instructors have named "Wally", playfully followed us around.  Olly claims that Wally must have been a dog in his past life because the instructors were able to pat Wally on the muzzle and he would become docile as a tired puppy.  The reef was vast.  Mountains of coral standing over 20 feet high.  Scores of fish I couldn't even name.  The world is pretty big place after all.

So that was my first two dives.

In the afternoon we transferred to Taka, the liveaboard vessel.  We didn't dive for the rest of the day but it was a good time just to relax and enjoy the ocean.  The boat itself had roughly four stories, with the bottom deck containing the passenger cabins, the first deck had the dive floor, the bathrooms, and common area where we ate, the second deck had crews' cabin, and the top deck being an open floor where they would store stuff and where the divers would hang out for the most part.  Aboard the ship you aren't allowed to wear shoes, cellphones didn't get reception, and there is nothing really to buy so you spend most of the three days just wearing swimsuits.  It's liberating.

View FROM Taka, not of Taka.

My roommate was a Torontonian named Robin.  He was doing his graduate work at the University of Queensland.  Robin had a lot of energy and talked a lot, which contrasted my generally silent nature.  He would talk to anybody about anything at anytime.  And everyone would hear him even if not everyone was listening.  We made good roommates.  I'm always happy to listen when somebody is willing to do my share of the talking.  And though it was easy to poke fun of his enthusiastic personality, it's refreshing to see someone with a zeal for life in an often sour world.  The Earth is too small for so much negativity...man.

In the evening was the first night dive.  Since Ben, Prema, and I weren't certified yet we weren't allowed to go on the night dive.  However, we were allowed to stick our heads in the shark infested waters just off the dive deck.  I'm not kidding when I say shark infested.  And I'm not kidding when I say stuck our heads in the water.  We literally put on our snorkels, laid down on the grate, and stared down at the sharks and Giant Trevallys.

Where I stuck my face.

I should mention that part of Ben's reason for coming to the reef was to overcome a fear of sharks.  Good way to do it.

 

Footage I took of the dive deck.

Artist's depiction of my shark encounter

After we pulled our heads from the water and the night divers came back they served us dessert and I talked with some of the other divers.  I met a nice couple named Steve and Sarah who were teachers in Brisbane.  Coincidentally, they got married in Buderim, which is the town where my Australian-Benetti family lives.  Steve and Sarah had the coolness that one can only get by being off duty teachers.  Patient enough to deal with kids all day and interesting enough to have vivid personal lives.  Steve and Sarah, I believe, had a taste for the extreme.  They tried to do a liveaboard at least once a year, both had been skydiving before, and Steve had even been bungee jumping.  And yet they both had that "teacher" coolness.  An almost indifference to cool.  You could even say that they're too cool for school.  I enjoyed talking to them throughout the trip and they offered me a place to stay anytime I was up north of Brisbane.  Steve said he had a rule where he tried to offer up his home to people because so many people had offered up their home to him.  I guess it's those people who make the world seem a little bit smaller.  A little bit more manageable.

Sunset

The next day we had 5 dives.  The first two dives were again guided by Olly at a location called Troppos and completed our certification.  After these two dives we were on our own.  Unfortuneatly, as stated earlier, Prema was having some difficulty equalizing during the morning dives and wasn't allowed to dive the rest of the day and Hannah joined a group of Japanese divers.  So me and Ben went off into the vast unknown by ourselves.  I have a terrible sense of direction.  I could get lost in my own hometown with a GPS.  Correction, I HAVE gotten lost in my hometown with a GPS.  If I recall correctly, which I probably don't, Ben's last words before we stepped off the boat were, "You lead, I'll follow" (this is before we learned the concept of planning a dive).  So imagine me navigating underwater with a visibility of only about 10 meters.  I was lost the second we hit the water.  Fortuneatly you don't have to go far to find life on the Great Barrier Reef.  Just keep swimming.

It's difficult to describe the sensation of diving on the Reef.  Here's my attempt: imagine you can fly, but only in slow motion, and everything around you is vibrant and beautiful, and everything you see you've never seen before, and you have to go to the bathroom but you don't because the dive instructors told you not to because they have to reuse the wetsuits and that would be gross.  That's what it's like to dive.

Sunrise.  Or is it the other way around?

In between dives all of the divers would generally congregate on the top deck to talk and tan (or burn in my case) with conversations ranging from politics, to school, to culture, to well...anything.  I guess that's the purpose of talking.

    There was a lovely blonde duo of divers, Beate and Karla, who were on the liveaboard before I arrived and were still there when I left.  They had only actually met on the boat, which was one of the interesting things about diving is that you could be thrown in with some random diving buddy and generally it worked out well.
     Beate is from Norway and is also studying at the University of Queensland (the current tally of UQers on the boat is three).  She had a curious Norwegian passion and was often the center of the more in depth conversations of science and politics.  She also wasn't afraid to speak her mind.  When a German diver came aboard later in the day, she claimed the Germans always sounded angry to which he fiercely replied in a thick German accent, "That's not true!".  Later on she wondered why there weren't more Scandanavians on board.  It's a pretty big world and Scandanavia is a rather small part of it.
     Karla on the other hand is from Northern California and is a student at USC, but is currently spending the semester in Sydney.  This is where the coincidences get really weird.  Her dad grew up in upstate New York, went to Cornell, moved to Sacramento, and now she goes to school in LA.  My dad grew up in LA, went to school in Sacramento, moved to upstate New York, teaches at Cornell, and now I go to Cornell.  And we met on the other side of the planet.  I guess it's a small world after all.  Naturally our conversations drifted towards our homes; Upstate New York and Northern California.  I've always harbored a fondness for Northern California; the forests and the cities, the lakes and the ocean, the mountains and the bays.  Eclectic and lovely, and I suppose that's the best way to describe Karla.  Both her and Ben are journalism majors so I'm sure they will both write great articles about the dive trip.  But hopefully there won't be too much media bias, AMIRITE? (I don't know much about journalism).

When evening fell it was time for my first night dive.  They wouldn't let us go on our first night dive by ourselves, which I'm thankful for, so we were led by Olly whose dives are characterized by a slow and meandering pace through the coral.  The group consisted of me, Ben, Robin, and the German guy whose name I forget but I think it was Irving.  Let's just call him Dr. J.  He doesn't really factor into this part of the story much.  The night dive was awesome and spooky.  Many animals become particularly active at night.  The Giant Trevallys would follow us around and basically use our flash lights to catch fish.  They would even bump into you as they swam past in enthusiastic pursuit.  There were also these small bait fish that were constantly running into you as you swam.  It felt like a bunch of underwater flies were trying to land on you.  During this dive I saw two Lionfish, one of which was a baby.  These fish are known for their extravagent appearance and dangerous venom.  The real highlight of this dive however was the ascent.   The lights from the boat turn the waters below the dive deck a tremendous glowing green.  And as you approach the boat the water begins to fill with life again.  And there you are sitting in an aquamarine aura with fish flying past you and sharks eyeing you and four other human beings just suspended in water.  But the water doesn't seem present.  Just suspended in space.  The fear you had for the animals that swarm you now has melted away because it's too warm on the reef.  And here I am writing like I think I'm an actual writer but really I just experienced something cool.  And that was my second day on the liveaboard.

On the third day Steve, the cool teacher from before, joined mine and Ben's group because Sarah wasn't feeling well.  This was a welcomed addition because he actually had a sense of direction and knew what to look at and what to look for and how to pace a dive.  Basically he was way better at scuba diving than we were.  And we saw way more because of it.  This dive was started by Matty, one of the dive instructors, Spartan kicking us off the boat.  Very cool start.  Steve navigated us through this maze of massive coral pillars and pointed out beautiful tiny sea slugs and enormous camouflaged giant clams.   At one point he swam up through this tight opening of coral and I thought to myself, "There's no way I can do that".  But then I did it and it was cool.  We ran into Beate and Karla who pointed out an octopus that was hiding in the rocks.  And we saw fish.  We saw big fish and small fish.  This was my favorite dive of the trip.  It was beautiful.
On our final dive we were joined up by Sarah and they led us on another wonderful dive.  This dive was marked by a Stonefish sighting, yet another extremely dangerous fish.  I would have never seen it if it wasn't for Steve and Sarah.  The Stonefish is basically the Lionfish's really ugly brother.  Because the Stonefish is so ugly it spends all of its time hiding in rocks while Lionfish is the life of the party and ends up going to prom with Unicorn Fish.  What I'm trying to say is that the Stonefish is well camouflaged.

And that's how diving on the Great Barrier Reef ended.  In the afternoon we packed our stuff back onto the SeaQuest for our return journey, said goodbye to the lovely blondes, and the talkative Torontonian, and Hannah our Japanese group member, and Dr. J, and Olly, and headed back to the mainland.  Me, Ben, Prema, Steve, and Sarah were able to score prime seats in the Captain's Cabin.  Ben and Prema slept while Steve, Sarah, and I chatted.  The boat arrived back in Cairns and the trip was over.

Prema

Ben

I will try to refrain myself from waxing poetic in my reflection of this adventure.  I won't pretend to know which experiences and which people will go on to shape my life, however I'm too young to allow myself to walk away from an experience like this and not feel like it has been influential on the way I see the world.  Some people on the boat probably just left feeling it was just another trip, just another day at work, and that's fine.  More than likely they've already been through the learning experiences I went through on the boat.  I'm just too darn young for some things not to be profound.  Like the realization of how lively the ocean floor is.  Or how massive the reef can be.  Or how interesting strangers can be.  Or how liberating disconnecting can be.  Or how small the world is (after all). 

Oh present me.  There's still so much you have to learn.

I give the Great Barrier Reef two thumbs way up.