Wandering Soul

Only if knew I had to say this line for next 3 days all the time before rescuing the same instructor or fellow students for 100 th time, I wouldn’t have considered taking up this certification. And the tiring hours of ascending and descending every 5 mins to rescue someone enacting as tired, unconscious or lost gradually changed from having ball time learning to frustrating time when I had to do each scenario atleast three times with the instructor and other two fellow students. One of them reminded me of cry-baby, so I really didn’t miss the experience of diving with him. Steve the dummy The German girl was a better buddy. We saved Steve the dummy’s life intermittently, so often that we ceased to feel our hands on the first day, its draining to keep up with 100 beats per minute chest compression one set 15 mins odd on a huge playlist of songs matching bpm. Each time you miss a beat start all over again or rather each time you miss one step in safety procedures start all ove...

Finally everyone arrived; Cry-Baby was staying at a 5 star resort just 100 metres walk from our guest house, MIA guy and Tourist girl found a budget place in Kuta. My inner alcoholic was satisfied enough after a bottle of Bintang only to make me super hungry. Just couldn’t wait to dig into some chicken. The first question instructor asked me on our way to grab beer “Are you a vegetarian or non-vegetarian?” the answer was pretty quick, I can’t do without Non-veg food once out and travelling. I could see his happy face as all he had for last few days was vegetarian hard-to-find food with Cry-baby. My Precious! Bintang! Me + Hungry = Boom! POW! Combination, hunger makes me less interesting and crankier especially when I have to choose out of all options to eat. All I could see around were numerous Warungs;  the Warungs look different across different places in Bali some may look shabby, some may look like bamboo shack, some may look unhygienic or some may look like next door re...

There’s no direct flight to Bali from Mumbai. Too Bad! The Enthu Cutlets like me wish to reach destinations ASAP. You atleast have one layover depending on airlines you choose. The most common route is Mumbai – Kuala Lumpur- Bali with cheap air tickets and multile airline choices. I already had a Singapore visa on me so I opted for Mumbai-Singapore-Bali and the reverse route back, while enjoying the perks of having father working for Air India. But with free things cometh the layovers. In my case the impatience was directly proportional to layover time. Although Changi Airport (Singapore) is known for best in-transit passenger facilities with around six gardens across three terminals, skytrain connecting the three terminals, also to my disbelief a movie theatre and a city tour facility if your layover is more than 4 hours, the four hours felt like longest four hours. One particular store reminded me of Comic-Con. It was name it and you get it store for all action figure buffs. I c...

The solo trip to Andaman gave me enough credence to plan another solo trip but just to amplify the confidence it had to be an outbound/international. The prognosis of previous trip was that my inner traveller would start craving for more now on. Scuba has now become an integral reason for my trips, shooting off a travel bullet on Scuba’s shoulders. The inner peace I seek is still underwater and nothing can compensate that so I decided to do this outbound trip around my Birthday, only if I could dive on my birthday it would have been the best day of my life ever. Again the pre-planning started as soon as I got back to regular grind I guess that’s the moment you wish for some more, the travel hangover is not off yet and your mind fixated to another trip. Now ofcourse this trip had to be cheap, planning an outbound within 6 months of your previous overboard budget trip is super difficult. I had huge list of cheap places to Scuba; on the top was Cambodia, somewhere in between Bali and in...