Hot, hot heat.

This post was written a week ago but blogspot was having some sort of meltdown and wouldn´t let me post so just pretend you were reading this a week ago...

I feel like that fish, a lot of the time. Shiny. Puffed up. Baking. Dry and scaly.

IT IS SO GODDAMN HOT.

Here is a man carrying a door frame on a moto. Because, why not?

It´s low season for tourists now, maybe because their own Northern hemisphere countries are starting to heat up, or maybe because here is a furnace. After Easter, this town quietens down considerably, and doesn´t pick up again until November. In the last 2 weeks the temperature has gone up about 10 degrees, and this Irish girl is melting. It´s not only me, all my colleagues are like wilted, sweaty balloons. Still, some of the Dominican kids come to school in jeans.

Another random street scene - woman with parrot.

Since Meaghan left 2 weeks ago I´ve been working on eating well, sleeping, and limiting the booze to weekends. Hot climates and friends make a cold beer irresistable. But now I am a glowing veggie-eating, athletic vision of healthiness. In my head, anyway. 

On Saturday, I got up at 7am (I didn´t go out on Friday) and went scuba diving and snorkelling off some small rocky islands near here. My lovely girlfriends in Dublin got me a voucher for TurtleDive Center as a going away present, and I finally got to use it. The water was beautifully clear, and you could dive to 5 metres depth. It was my first time scuba diving and it was not easy. Trying to breathe in and out through your mouth is hard, and I kept breathing out through my nose a bit and fogging my mask and having to surface. And then you´ve to pop your ears when you get down a couple of metres, and I couldn´t always do it. Let´s just say I had to resurface various times. But my dive master was patient and held on to me the entire time and I felt safe, although I constantly felt like I might cough or sneeze at any minute and it´d be horrible. But I didn´t, and I was fine and I saw lots of brightly coloured fish, striped black and white or bright blue or crazily patterned like the Lion Fish and I saw 3 squid, hanging out in a row, waiting. I hovered around hoping to see them eat something but they stayed in their formation for ages. After a break at the beach, we went back out and I snorkelled, which was a welcome relief after the stress of scuba. Still, I want to try it again, I felt like by the end of it I was getting the hang of it more.

The dive site

Since I wrote this, I´ve returned from another adventure, to Las Galeras. But it´s a Friday evening and I´m just not arsed, so I leave you with some random photos.

Tayota and Irati at sunset