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We spent 5 days in Buzios, a beach resort town about 3 hours north of Rio. According to the marketeers, Buzios became famous when Brigitte Bardot spent a summer there with her Brazilian boyfriend. Previously, we had planned on going to Foz de Iguacu (waterfalls) and the Pantanal (marshland with lots of wildlife) but a timing mistake prevented us from getting the Brazil airpass which one can buy only outside of Brazil. We had no problem getting to Buzios - Brazil has a great network of comfortable buses which run on time (quite unexpectedly!) to all corners of Brazil.
Our goal in Buzios was to get certified for open water diving, something that we had wanted to do in Thailand but did not do because of the tsunami. Bernd and his brother, Jan, were very helpful in this respect and referred us to a well-reputed dive-shop in Buzios named Casa Mar (pronouced 'kashamah') run by Marcos Dias (known as Kupeu around town). Kupeu turned out to be great instructor and we would highly recommend him if you happen to need open water certification.
Our lessons were conducted in the ocean near a beach in about 7-8 meters of water. We had the usual problems of learning how to equalize our internal pressure with the ambient water pressure (through the valsalve movement) - without this, our eardrums would collapse - how nice! We also got to know how to put on all the equipment (wetsuit, tank, buoyancy compenstor jacket, regulator, timer, pressure gauge, flippers, mask...). One of the keys is to breathe regularly in the water with a normal inhalatation and then a long exhalation (sounds like 'Booooooooooooo').
On our last day, we took the boat out to Ilha A___ (can't remember the name!) for our big dive! We spent about 4 hours there. We dove to about 23 meters depth. The water was warm on top and ice cold further near the bottom! We had a bunch of other divers with us also. We saw moray eels, turtles (I swam along with it and touched the shell!), twenty types of fish, octopuses (octupii??) and crabs! On the way back, we sighted several dolphins which swam along with the boat for several minutes!
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Well, after five days of theory lessons and diving classes in the sea, we are now certified to dive in open water up to a depth of 25 meters! We got the PDIC certification (Professional Diving Instructors Corporation) which is equivalent to the PADI certification and is accepted around the world. Our only regret is that we hadn't gotten our diving certification earlier - we could have gone diving in some of the best places in the world on our RTW trip - Red Sea (Egypt), New Zealand, South Africa, India, Spain, France etc. Anyway...
We spent the days on the beach and in training and the evenings going around the restaurants and bars of Buzios, listening to bossanova and noisy crowds (and me with Brigitte Bardot! - see photo to the left). Huge crowds there with music and dancing going on until 6am! Quite insane! Also, too many speedos around here! Time to move back to Rio and then on to Peru!
- Dev
My twin!
Posted by: Dev | Saturday, February 19, 2005 at 06:02 PM
Whos the guy with the facial hair?
Posted by: Gautam | Thursday, February 17, 2005 at 12:41 PM