Surviving on Ulong

The last few days we have been living on the cheap. Today we rewarded ourselves by going diving for the day. We rode our bikes a few miles early this morning to the dive shop, where we were told that we would be going to Ulong. "Oh, sounds great," we said, neither of us having any idea what this ooolong place was. On our boat ride out, we learned that Ulong is one of the eastern rock islands, which has four very good dive sites surrounding it. Also, interestingly enough, Ulong is the Survivor island. You know, the place where one of the Survivor TV shows was filmed. More about Ulong, which is now often just referred to as the "Survivor Island" later.
The first dive site we were taken to is called Siaes Tunnel. The main feature of this site is a giant cavern that starts at about 70 feet. When we entered the cavern, it looked almost black. Just about the time this dive site started to feel like a rather bad idea, our eyes adjusted, and began to behold some true beauty. There was light at the end of the tunnel, and several "windows" along the way. By the time we were most of the way through the tunnel, we were at around 115 ft. and were met at the end by a good sized shark. The rest of the dive was particularly enjoyable because of the colorful and unique coral.
After a long surface interval, it was off to Ulong island for a lunch break. This is an incredible place. As we walked along the beach, chilled in the shade, scouted out coconuts and bananas, we agreed that this would not be a bad place to survive for awhile. Ulong is actually a state park, complete with a few picnic tables and an out-house, which were removed during the filming of the show.Above is a picuture of us standing on part of the Ulong beach. Just behind us is where one of the survivor camps were.
Our lunch consisted of pringles, donuts, vienna fingers, and a can of pears. We were rather disappointed in ourselves for this. It was also sort of embarassing, given the fact that we were given a discount for being SDA, but our actions were not exactly preaching the health message.
I (Jason) was given advice before we left that it was good to be frugal, but that it is my honeymoon, and I need to splurge once in awhile. Larissa has noticed that I have been taking this advice, but honestly I think it has gotten out of hand. We are like kids with an unlimited candy budget. For the past four days, we have visited the donut shop at least once per day. Larissa says she likes me this way, says I seem more human. I am not quite sure how to take that.
Anyway, back to the events of today. Our second dive site is called Ulong channel. We waited until afternoon to dive there, because we wanted to dive during incoming tide. This dive site consists of a long channel, about 40 feet wide in most places. It is particularly entertaining during incoming tide because of the fact that the current will glide you through the tunnel, while you just have to focus on steering, and swimming upstream once in awhile when something particularly interesting wizzes by. We found this to be a really fun way to dive, but also found it frustrating in that things did, in fact, wiz by quite quickly. Wow, Shark, turtle, oh eel, no over there, school of. . .
I am experimenting with underwater photography. As long as I claim to be experimenting, I cannot be expected to produce quality results. This is good, fish never seem to smile and look at the camera at the right moment, and they, and everyghing else, looks blue in the photos. I did try one minivideo today, which I thought turned out well. It is of a couple of anenome fish in there anenome. Maybe we can figure out a way to post it here.
Remember the avacados that we got a few days ago? Seemed like they were never going to ripen. Fortunately they have ripened, unfortunately, they have riped all at the same time. Luckily we are good at integrating avacados into just about anything. Larissa made dinner tonight, rice with avacado chunks on top, and steamed carrots on the side. We did not clean up after dinner, had to get over to the computer lab to make a blog entry.