Maybe I should change that last “Wes Knows …” thing to blame Wes. I’ve somehow landed in one of the sunniest places on Earth … I don’t really get the conversion, but, they keep advertising here that they get more than 2500 hours of sunlight every year … whatever it works out to, it is sunny. After a few days in Croatia, I’ve learned that there is no need to check the weather forecast … you’re pretty much guaranteed blue skies, sun, no clouds and hot. I’ve got access to three bottles of sunscreen, which should be enough, provided I stay indoors for the majority of the day. No bad burns yet, but, I need to stay careful.We’re on an island called Korcula now – it was about a 4 hour ferry ride northwest of Dubrovnik. We haven’t seen too much of the island yet – we’ve spent most of our time on Korcula town, a small place that seems like a mini-Dubrovnik, mostly because of the old town here. We’ve got a decent little apartment to ourselves … a/c and a kitchen, with a 5 minute, downhill walk to the water.
There is supposed to be some decent diving here – neither of us have gone diving since 2001 though, so we thought we should take a refresher course before going. It’s a bit of a long story, but, we found a good instructor to take care of us. Yesterday afternoon he took us out in his boat, got us up to speed on the basics, and then we were in the water. The only other diving I’ve done was in the warm waters of SE Asia … thin wetsuits with short legs and sleeves were all we needed there. I’m not sure why, but, the water is much colder here … we needed thick, full wetsuits here … they were very bulky and uncomfortable.
Anyway, as we were descending in about 15 or 20 feet of water (very shallow for diving), Michele was having a lot of problems ‘equalizing’ … that’s when you need to pop your ears because of the increased pressure … she had a cold a few weeks ago, and maybe was still a bit stuffed up inside … the same thing happened to me in 2001, and really sucked. It’s a short-term problem, but means that you can’t dive. She went back to the boat, and I stayed under for about 20 minutes with the instructor … going through some of the basic skills. I was glad to know that most of the basics came back, but, I found just swimming around with all of the gear to be quite difficult. We cut the dive short, in part because I was tired, and in part because Michele wasn’t able to join us — she tried a second descent, and it was equally painful/unsuccessful.
That’s about the only highlight from Korcula so far … we’ve been laying low and avoiding the heat and sun. Not too many photos yet, but I’m hopeful that there will be some before we leave.
As seems to be the case throughout this trip, we’re trying to figure out our next steps travel and accommodation wise … not sure when we’ll leave, or where we’ll go — we’re pretty happy where we’re at right now.