Mozambique

 Last week was Botswana's Independence day, so we had Thursday and Friday off of work.  Bri, Gelane and I decided to take the first three days of the week off as well and take a week long trip to Mozambique.  It was an incredible week.  We traveled to the Barra Peninsula, which is on the Southeast coast and spent the entire week in a beach house 100 meters from the ocean.  The region is known for great scuba diving, so we decided that it would be a great opportunity to learn to scuba dive.  In four days we went from not knowing how to put the gear on, to scuba diving 15 meters deep and swimming with sea turtles!  It was a crazy experience.  The first two times I tried, I freaked out and did exactly what you are not supposed to do - come back up to the surface.  But I had a great scuba instructor who held my hand and led me down again.  By the third try, I was having fun.  It feels really weird to breath through your mouth the entire time and to have this mask in our mouth and on your face that you cannot remove.  And the popping of the ears was a constant feeling for the rest of the week.

But eventually we got the hang of it and got to swim with sea turtles, manta rays, fish, etc.  Each day we would get up go scuba diving in the morning, have a relaxing late morning, eat lunch and often go diving again in the afternoon.  The placed we stayed was fairly isolated and since we did not have a car we spent a lot of time eating and hanging out at the bar next door.  We made some friends with German tourists, Welsh tourists, a South African Family and the bartenders, scuba instructors, etc.  Most days we had the beach to ourselves which was incredible.

On Saturday morning we went snorkeling with the whale sharks!  After a week of scuba diving it was hard to get used to not being able to dive down and we spent a lot of time drinking ocean water!  Snorkeling is quite a challenge in an ocean because each time a wave comes you get a ton of salty ocean water in your snorkel.  But it was quite cool to swim after giant whale sharks!
All in all, it was a great week and as usually pictures tell the story a lot better so here is a slideshow....