Today was the day I journeyed back to Manila. I woke up in the morning with my head spinning a little. I ordered some breakfast and it came as 2 pancakes, 2 eggs, 6 strips of bacon, and 3 servings of watermelon. I felt pretty luxe so I made coffee and broke my fast outside watching the sun rise. I decided that today I would scuba dive and head back, possibly stopping to check a volcano on the way.
I finished my coffee, took my morning poop and headed on my way down to go diving. I realized halfway down that I forgot my helmet and knew it wasn’t totally legal there. I ventured on anyways assured by the fact that no one else was wearing one. When I got down towards the port as I passed the little police checkpoint 3 of them about had aneurysms when they saw my helmetless head. They all felt the need to blow their annoying whistles in my face even though I had clearly already stopped. I made a quick mental judgement on if I should just pay the white tax or try to argue. I really wasn’t sure how much I would be paying so I chose to be difficult. I started pointing out how every single other person failed to wear a helmet to. And spend about 2 minutes pointing at helmetless heads. The cop wasn’t liking it, but I kind of went on saying that he was stealing from me and it was bad for tourism and that if I didn’t know that I wasn’t supposed to wear a helmet that it wouldn’t be fair that he give me a ticket. He said something like, “I give you discount, don’t no pay for no license.” I just looked disgusted at him and kept pointing at other heads. They got fed up and eventually took me to their office. They put me in a time-out where I pondered how bad they were for tourism and how the dive would go on without me. Finally they let me go and I shot down to the dive shop where I just barely got on with a dive.
I must say, diving may be my new favorite thing on this earth. There’s so many things to see and it’s like flying an airplane in that you can move around in this 3D space. Today we saw some eels and this hairy crab thing. I was able to go the whole dive without peeing in their wetsuit because they told me not to. But honestly, if I had really had to have gone I would have just gone.