June 15, 2018
After the dive, everyone meets at Tir Na Nog, the Irish bar of the island. Instructors, DMTs, customers, everyone comes for a drink or a party. It is not always easy to get up the next day to go diving … Although the roosters and the muezzin who begs for prayer at five in the morning help to wake up. After two weeks, Pierre, our Dive Master at Koh Tao joined me at Gili Trawangan. There is a job at another dive center. For the birthdays of the instructors, they organize special evenings. For one, it’s a kind of olympic games on the beach: a human wheelbarrow race in fins, a race in fins holding a lemon in a spoon … For the other, we go to eat the cake of
I spend most of my time with Pierre and Caroline, a Dutch Dive Master from my center. He can only stay one month because his visa expires. On the advice of the people at the diving center, I took the risk of giving my passport to the captain of a boat who took him to Bali with a small sum that allows him to return duly stamped by a customs officer, as if I had left the country and returned. Not very very legal all that. I must admit that I was not too reassured during the two weeks that my passport was in transit.
At the end of September, the end of my training is approaching. Francois joins me to attend the “stress test” and the “snorkel test”, the two final tests of the DMT (see videos). For the stress test, it is a question of exchanging all the equipment under water with another diver while breathing on a single bottle. If you put the head back out of the water, it’s lost. Tradition has it that during this time, the instructors have fun tearing off our masks, cutting off the air, handcuffing us or passing us beer under water (Grand Bleu style , but in English version). For the test snorkel, it’s happening at the bar. It is a matter of ingesting the alcoholic content of a pitcher through the snorkel with the mask on the nose in a single step, so without being able to breathe.
