Scuba Diving day in Havana

Scuba Diving day in Havana

Havana, Cuba, North America

I got to go diving today! I got my taxi at 9am and went straight to the Hotel Copacabana which is only about 15 minutes away from where I’m staying. It’s another one of these nice big hotels, but this one is right on the water. I found the dive center and arranged with the dive instructor to go out right after breakfast. I had a great buffet breakfast at the hotel for 8 CUC. It was nice to have omelets made to order and tons of fresh fruit. I really enjoyed it.

I went out to meet my instructor and he had wrangled up three more people to come diving as well. All three were Canadians (Jim, Jennifer, and Roger) who are working here in Cuba, and have lived here for years. Roger and I are advanced certified so we went down with the instructor Peter, and Jim and Jennifer went down with Octavio. We got down to 32 meters (which I think is the deepest I’ve ever been), and it was pretty good. There wasn’t anything spectacular to see down there, but I was also spoiled on my last dives in Israel.

We were down for just over 45 minutes and saw lots of coral, some lion fish, and a few other tropical fish. Nothing else was very eye catching. I took my GoPro camera down and Peter was nice enough to take the camera for most of the time and film me while I was down there. The cost for the dive was only 40 CUC ($40) which is incredibly cheap, so I gave them 50 CUC so they could each get a bit of a tip. They seemed grateful, and it was well worth it for me.

Jim, Jennifer and Roger invited me to go out to dinner with them tonight, and gave me Jim’s phone number. I walked around the city for a few hours after diving, and got back around 5:30pm to the casa. I have tried calling Jim around twenty times tonight, but the call just will not go through. They told me that this can happen sometimes, so they said just to keep trying. Unfortunately, I never got through, so I missed having dinner with them. It would have been really nice to be able to go out at night with some people who really know the island, even if they’re not actually Cubans.

While I was out today I also tried to organize a tour for tomorrow to get out of the city and my timing couldn’t have been worse. Apparently there are almost no tours that go out on a Sunday. The one I really wanted to do was to Vinales which brings you to a cigar factory and out to a huge cave in a boat. I was pretty upset to find out that no tour operators were going there, or to Varadero on Sunday. I guess I’ll just spend tomorrow in the city getting to know Havana a bit better. I’ve really enjoyed getting to some places where the locals hang out and getting to see what part of their real life looks like. It couldn’t be much more different than life that I’m used to.

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