Debating about Diving

Water, as it turns out, is the medium through which we ultimately experience Rangiroa, because in the course of a short stay I am baptized three times: first in ocean, second in spirit, and finally in community.

Before I traveled to Rangiroa, scuba diving was an activity to which in all honesty I love. Yet if you have a close-death encounter and not-so-good experiences after which, where your hydrophobia has still yet to be conquered; the whole operation as Mike word it and still struck me as "a lot of equipment for a relatively small return". Plus, I assumed, it was probably as dangerous as, parachuting or bungee jumping, and, unlike those two death-defying activities, underwater one might actually encounter another creature who regarded oneself as a blue-plate special. Yet, it was the dive of my lifetime and his as well. For shortly after his fifth dive, he turned and said, "I'm hanging up my dive gears" - left me completely agape and flabbergasted. It was just outrageously insane to hear this from someone who dives well with confidence compared to an accident-prone crony like me, that never think she would give up diving, nor has even ever cross her pea-size brain!

Context, however, is everything, and on Rangiroa not to dive, not to experience the island from below as well as from above, was, to everyone I met, simply unacceptable, even prior to the decision to come here. Foreign visitors arriving in duffel bags bursting with wet suits and fins are apt to inhale, during their stays, almost as much highly pressurized air as tropical sea air.

If Rangiroa is, as its most ubiquitous English-language postcard proclaims, "for lovers", the preferred objects of affection for its aficionados are often reef sharks, manta rays, or moray eels. To depart without first producing an ascending trail of bubbles was equivalent to not drinking coffee at a sidewalk café in Paris. To remain on just the landmass of Rangiroa was, I gathered, to miss the island's essential soul, to view the place through half-closed eyes. And so, armed with excuses and hesitation, I decided that it would probably land me in the seabed thousands of feet down below should anything happen - but in Rangiroa - it's worth all the danger.