It was really special. It was another SCUBA diving trip, so I spent as much time as possible under water (about 34 hours in total). I saw some of the weirdest looking shit and I am still processing how cool everything was. It was mostly tiny critters that live in the sand, as opposed to various fish species we have been focused on, previously. I have a ton of video to edit, but once I get everything done, I will try to share some here.The Marshall Plan wrote: ↑Tue Jan 23, 2024 4:10 amThat's awesome.LacertineForest wrote: ↑Sun Jan 21, 2024 12:31 am I left for the Philippines the last Sunday of the regular season and arrived back in LA today (my last flight home is tomorrow). I believe my car is buried under a foot and a half of snow in the economy lot at the Madison, WI airport, but it was in the 80's about every day on my trip.
Looks like I missed all the extreme cold, so that's a nice bonus, but I am still not looking forward to the adjustment in temperature when I return tomorrow.
How was the trip?
One other special thing we did was this snorkeling tour where you got to snorkel with whale sharks, the largest fish (and I believe non-mammal species) on the planet. I thought it was going to be like you get to swim and see then kind of from a distance, to but no - those big, beautiful beasts come right up next to you. During the briefing, they tell you to stay 5m away from them, but that's kind of impossible. They just keep coming from all around you for about 30 minutes and it was amazing. I highly recommend it if anyone has the chance (they also do it in Isla Mujeres near Cancun, during the summer months).
One weird/shitty thing that happened was, on the last day of the trip, my wife and I were taking some pictures/videos of the resort when she heard one of our group members (there were 26 of us) calling for help. Almost everyone in the group got sick at some point, with some having just had congestion and others getting more fever-like symptoms. What happened to this poor guy was he had a fever, got dizzy, and then fell and broke his leg in 5 places. He had to stay behind and get surgery, and the hospital required another person to stay with him at the hospital, 24 hours per day. One of the trip leaders stayed with him, but they had to have hotel staff from our resort come and spell her so she could sleep and shower. On top of that, we were told the hospital came and demanded $2,500 USD without really any warning, so it was tricky to coordinate all these moving parts with the guy's family. It sounds like they didn't want to fly out to stay with him, but given his recovery time, they don't really have a choice. Thankfully, he had a trip insurance policy, but we'll see what they all cover.
