"I Think I’ll stick with the Dolphins": 

20/1/2013 home written stream of consciousness 

There was this one trip to Mexico which was rather adventurous. I got to swim with dolphins, climb ancient pyramids (funny story, I'll leave that for later), and even got the chance to go cave diving. Now, I have been a certified open water scuba diver since I was ten years old, so by then I had already been on a few dives; I was twelve. However, I had never been so scared, vulnerable or prone to death while scuba diving. 

Honestly, when my dad told us that we were going cave diving that morning, I was really excited, because this isn't an opportunity that comes up often. So later that day we went to take a course on cave  diving where we learned all the guidelines, rules and safety procedures on what to do while underwater. This whole lesson just made me even more excited, but it wasn't until we were about to go underwater when the nerves kicked in. My whole idea of what this would be suddenly took a drastic change and I no longer wanted to do it, nonetheless, I ended up doing it. But here's what made me nervous, it wasn't the 1,000 pound sharks or an eel the size of my arm, the worries lied in the holes that you had to squeeze through in order to proceed with the dive. Those holes were really tight! So really the fear factor roots from being in a foreign environment, where you can’t breathe, and you can lose your breathing apparatus in a heartbeat. There are practically hundreds of things that could go wrong. 

But the fact of the matter is, we pushed through and made it to the end of the dive. This adventure ended on a humorous note: while we were putting our gear away, my dad asked me "What did you think of cave diving?" and I answered "I think I’ll stick with the dolphins."