Category Archives: diving

Azul y Tranquilidad, Part III: Under the sea.

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I’m winding the calendar back a couple of weeks to where I’m killing time before my flight home, walking the back streets of the little neighborhood where I stayed. Little blue and green lizards are scurrying about. And chickens. And the roosters who have no sense of time. Two sandy but friendly pups come out to say hi with their little wiggle-butts, grateful for the pats on the exceptionally warm morning.

two dogs sitting on a sidewalk

I take a dirt road which appears to go somewhere but really ends up in someone’s yard. In broken Spanglish I tell the lady sitting on her porch that I’m wandering and possibly lost but not really lost-lost. It’s a small place and there aren’t really that many roads. Everyone greets you with a smile.

I wander down to a part of the sidewalk that overlooks a corner of the beach, so I sit and let images of the undersea world dance through my brain as I look out to the sea of 7 colours.

I came down here to dive… and dive I did. I went in without expectations. Reefs across the warming planet are deteriorating and I really had no idea what to expect. Photos I’d seen of Providencia diving looked decent, but as last year’s I can’t even in Costa Rica proved, I didn’t get my hopes up.

Under the sea

I first started diving in this part of the Caribbean in the late 90s. The reefs were healthier, the massive building boom hadn’t gone into full swing yet, and the fishing industry hadn’t entirely decimated fish populations. Fast-forward a couple of decades, and while I still love to dive, it’s more and more a simultaneous feeling of gratitude and loss. The act of blowing bubbles as you explore an alien world is a privilege and an honor. Pretentious, maybe, to barge into this other world and expect a show. The corals are grayer than they used to be; the fish, fewer. But that said, it’s all thriving despite what’s being thrown at it.

There were curious reef sharks, and eels of all shapes and sizes (even a sharptail). Sandy bottoms held stingrays and garden eels, and blennies and those shy little jawfish, remodeling their holes with tiny rocks. The reefs were alive with schools of snappers and chromis. And deeper down, there were lobsters and crabs hiding in the wall, big groupers, and even some Atlantic spadefish looking regal and eerie at the same time. The usual Caribbean suspects: filefish and parrotfish and triggerfish… and some welcome sightings of cowfish (one of my favorites), trumpetfish, and an assortment of butterflyfish and hamlets, even a sighting of the masked hamlet, a species endemic to Providencia.

On a night dive, I watched a giant snapper use the light of our torches to hunt a blue tang (and amazingly eat the thing in 3 bites!). And I saw my first hammerhead, albeit a young one in fairly shallow waters.

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Part of diving is the shared feeling of exploration with your boatmates, and the awe and wonder after each dive. Every dive is magic. Every dive is a gift. You make instant connections in the dive shop, and quite often new friends that remain even after the adrenaline fades.

At the surface

I took a boat to see the land from the sea. It turned out to be a “snorkeling tour”, bouncing from bay to bay to snorkel and sight-see. We visited Fort Bay and Morgan’s Head, then rounded the top of the island, where McBean Lagoon National Park comprises the northeast part of Providencia. The mangroves by the airport, Cayo Cangrejo, and the Tres Hermanos islands are all protected by the park, and that’s what I was really keen on seeing.

Crab Caye is a tiny island ringed by a reef, so it is a snorkeler’s dream (since you aren’t allowed to dive there). There were Portuguese man-o-war sightings that day, so I opted to walk to the lookout tower at the top (said tower was blown off during the hurricane, so it was a walk to the base of the tower), then watch the snorkelers bob in the shallows as I sipped a highly-recommended fresh coconut water. From here we continued on to Tres Hermanos, which is home to a nesting colony of frigatebirds. Later in the trip, I’d ask a different boat captain to take me back there with my big girl camera to capture some shots. We snorkeled in the bay between Tres Hermanos and the mangroves (look, squid!), and looped south and finally back to South West Bay.

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Even though the snorkeling was decidedly “meh” on my tour, the boat ride was super-nice. And so, on the recommendation of one of our divemasters (everyone knows everyone here), I found a guy with a boat who could take me back to Tres Hermanos to do some frigateography.

We ventured as far as we could into the mangrove lagoon before it got too shallow and we had to pole it out of there. Much of the mangroves were destroyed in the hurricane, but they’ve made a huge effort to protect and tag the fledgling mangrove trees. They’ll be back! After the mangrove adventure, we spent quite a bit of time slowly circling one of los hermanos, the island that the frigatebirds call home.

The magnificent frigatebird, as I stated in an earlier post, looks (and acts) like a cross between a seagull and a vulture. First of all, they are enormous, with a wingspan of up to 2-1/2 metres (nearly 8’!). Second, they nest communally, and very close to the water, so their nests look like a frenzy of black and white and red feathers. The sky looks like a swirl of small aircraft. The males have this wattle that they expand as a mating ritual, and the females (smaller and way less showy) have a white head and throat. I could have stayed out there for hours just watching the frenzy but feared the captain would get bored out of his mind! While they will fish for their own food, frigatebirds prefer to steal what they can from fishermen and other waterbirds, and they are considered “kleptoparasites” in the scientific world: they pester other birds until they give up their prey.

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Sure, on paper the magnificent frigatebird is kind of a disgusting jerk; but I was mesmerized watching them interact on their island home nonetheless.

As I sat there on the sidewalk that looked out over the beach, frigatebirds and sharks and little magic moments swirled in my mind. A little while later, a lady on a motorbike drove by and stopped to sell home-made ice pops from the cooler on the back. A little while after that, after saying goodbye to the guys at the dive shop and my new diver friends, I stopped by the little blue bakery to get some banana bread for the trip home.

I’m finishing this post after a fresh foot of snow has fallen back at home, and I’m wondering whether I should have just chucked it all and stayed. But I also think that the stories and the feeling of a place remain with you. And it’s these that will warm me in the cold winter months ahead.

I’m already at work on the next adventure, as any girl with a wandering spirit must be. So here’s to sunny days, wide-winged birds, and a large dose of natural wonder and undersea magic!

🤿🐡🪸🐟 Many thanks to the island of Providencia for having me and to the amazing team at Sirius Dive Shop for making every dive an experience to remember. 🐠🫧🪸🦈🏴‍☠

Azul y Tranquilidad, Part II: A Sort of Déjà-vu

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I’m finalising this post on a frigid night in New England, looking out my window to 2 feet of fresh-fallen snow. So I’m writing with a slightly ironic bent about time travel and other worlds and feelings of fernweh and reentry, all simultaneously.

The day I touched down in Bogotá, the wackadoodle leadership of the country that issues my blue-bound passport kidnapped the president of Venezuela and was making googly eyes at Colombia. To be honest, I had zero idea how this trip was going to play out.

See Azul y Tranquilidad, Part I: Transport and Arrival. It ended up being fine… almost too fine – as if everyone around me was also on holiday and couldn’t be bothered to worry about the intercontinental political chaos playing out in the seas and land not so far away. I was here to partially shower off the emotional overload of the past months, and overdose on my much-needed vitamin sea. The ocean cures all.

Vacation mode activated!

So here I was, on a tiny dot in the middle of the Caribbean, an island surrounded by a barrier reef and a sea so sparkly that it over-earns its nickname of The Sea of Seven Colours. [Note: this BBC article was written about a month before Iota, a cat-5 hurricane, flattened Providencia. They are still rebuilding 5 years later.]

Rather than describe a series of days that acquired a comfortable tempo of sameness (wake-up, brekkie, diving, surface interval, more diving, banana bread, hammock, nap, wandering, dinner, sleep), I want to write about the feeling of the place. The déjà-vu spidey-sense I had from the moment I stepped off the San Andrés to Providencia plane and walked across the humid tarmac into the little island airport.

Déjà-vu.

I went to Belize for the first time in 1999. It was a few months after Hurricane Mitch had wrecked parts of Ambergris Caye, so I saw it before the rebuilding and the international tourists wreaked their storm surge on the island. Don’t mess with natural nature, an old Belizean said to me one late night, Belikin in hand, around a fire on the beach. After that first visit, I made a lot of trips to Belize and other parts of Central America. My Spanish was better back then, but that quote floats back to me a lot.

Arrival in Providencia felt like that time and place. The air was salty and warm, like a seaweed-infused hug. Frigatebirds circled in a brilliant blue sky. Motor scooters zoomed by. Palm leaves swayed in the sea breeze. As the taxi shuttled me towards the town of South West Bay (if a 15-sq km place is big enough for “towns”), I noted the lots still roped off and the houses and hotels still semi-smashed from Iota who visited Providencia in Nov of 2020 just as they were just recovering from Covid.

It felt like I needed to write about this place as a string of anecdotes and impressions rather than a rundown of experiences.

Colombian coffee and petrichor.

I don’t drink coffee, but the wonderful guest house I stayed at [South West Bay Cabañas] made a perfectly simple breakfast every morning, complete with a pot of freshly-brewed Colombian coffee and a side of steamed milk. I mean, how could one not indulge. The hotel was simple but comfortable and it didn’t even occur to me that my room didn’t have TV or cable until I re-read their website… apparently if you want that, you book a fancier room on the 2nd floor. But the hammock on my veranda, their resident iguanas, and the constant birdsong (hello, bananaquit!) helped me settle into a routine of afternoon siestas and walks to and from the dive shop on South West Beach. The accommodation was “just enough” and just what I needed… well, after I remembered that it’s hard to find a hot water tap in this part of the world, and that showers are best taken in the late afternoon to give the sun god time to warm up the rainwater in the basin.

And it rained, almost daily: those fierce tropical showers that last for 20 minutes and leave the air feeling thoroughly laundered and the greenery greener, depositing in its wake a rainforest-y petrichor that permeates the senses.

I took a walk one afternoon to see what I could find. About 7 minutes into my walk, the giant drops started to fall. “¡Ven aquí!” “Come up!” I heard shouted from a house. A little man invited me to his porch to sit with him and his family while we watched the rain come down. We watched the drops land as small water balloons. We looked at iguanas in the trees across the way. Wafts of spice emanated from the little kitchen. He told me stories about how the family hid in the bathroom for 12 hours while the hurricane blew the house down around them.

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Exploring a pirate island.

Santa Catalina is a small island offshoot on the north end of Providencia. You can only get there by foot, over the “lovers bridge”, which welcomes you to the island with a colorful pirate greeting. Privateer Henry Morgan (THE Captain Morgan) was said to have used Santa Catalina as a hideaway, and some even believe that a portion of his treasure is still hidden there. So I took a day and wandered from Providencia’s “downtown”, through the remnant holiday decorations, and over the bridge to Santa Catalina. After a short walk along the water, you go up a steep staircase to a viewpoint with some cannons that date back to the 1600s and the pirates who occupied the island. Is the loot buried up here? Another staircase takes you down to Fort Beach and a view out to Morgan’s Head, a rock formation named for Santa Catalina’s illustrious buccaneer. I would end up snorkeling in these waters a few days later, getting views from all sides. It was quiet and lush…as I looked out across the water from next to a cannon, a pirate voice rumbled in my head, “arrr…that’s a great view!”

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Where the birds go in winter.

On the walk where I got caught in the rain, I ended up taking a path that led behind a school and to a cove where fishermen tie up their boats for the evening. The last fisherman was throwing some fish guts for the frigatebirds to snack on. In the fray, I spotted some locals. By locals, I mean my locals: semipalmated plovers and sanderlings and ruddy turnstones. I stayed in that cove for a while, like bird paparazzi, and watched the frigatebirds and shorebirds mix and mingle. Frigatebirds are like a cross between a seagull and a vulture, with neck wattles that expand like balloons to impress the ladies during courtship rituals. So of course I was mesmerized…I mean, who wouldn’t be? The day turned into a bird-watching adventure… I logged some new birds, took too many photos, and fulfilled some of my bird-geek needs for the week. There were even a couple of our warblers there, like me, to warm their feathers.

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And the best food is…

There’s a lady who sets up an empanada stand on the little road that goes up to the little supermarket, off the (only slightly less-little) road that goes down to the beach. The stand opens at some point in the late afternoon each day and closes when all of her goodies are gone. She sells empanadas filled with langosta (lobster), cangrejo (crab), pescado (fish), and sometimes pollo (chicken) as well as these little croquetas (fish balls). I stumbled upon her stand one evening, half-way into my trip and ended up eating her empanadas for dinner 3x in a week! And when I mentioned her stand to one of the divemasters at the dive shop, opining that she sells maybe the best empanadas on the planet, all he said back was, oh yeah. It’s funny when you discover a local gem that the locals (or guidebooks) didn’t even have to recommend.

I was on a mission to find a favorite ceviche de caracol (conch ceviche) while I was there. Even though I only tried 4 different iterations (every chef has their own twist on the classic), there was a hands-down winner: the “first restaurant on the beach” at South West Beach. They add a little tomato paste, and what tastes like tamarind, to make it unique. Of course I need to try to recreate it at home (though will probably try with shrimp!).

Every meal or snack felt like fiction: The empanadas. The coconut ice pop from a cooler on the back of a lady’s motor scooter. The ceviche. A coconut lemonade while watching the sunset. The banana bread from the panadería on the road to South West Beach…hot from the oven and served in tin foil, which keeps it warm an hour later. If there were awards given for simple, pure, magical food, the empanadas and banana bread would win the gold.

I went to Providencia seeking escape from the cold and immersion in the warm…in culture and water and food and welcome. It worked…and I could go back tomorrow.

I’m going to save the waterplay for Part III, as I’m still curating photos.

Azul y Tranquilidad, Part I: Getting to Providencia, a little island in the middle of the blue.

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19 Jan 2026: I am channelling blue. Or, more precisely, the 7 (+/- 3) shades of blue that surround a little island I didn’t know existed 8 weeks ago.

Rewind to the beginning of December: I needed a break from my computer. My inner mermaid was screaming to return to her home planet. My bones were cold. I needed to tune out work and the real world and the endless blather from every form of media. I needed a return to the blue.

A plan is hatched.

A conversation with an old friend put me in touch with a dive instructor on a little-known island called Providencia; part of Colombia, but geographically closer to Nicaragua. Its history is that of pirate island, and an English, then Spanish, territory before Colombia’s independence in the 1800s. Privateering was Providencia’s chief business for a while, and rumours abound of treasure still hidden on the tiny island to this day. In 2007 UNESCO incorporated the archipelago of San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina into their network of Caribbean biosphere reserves, calling it Seaflower.

Before the dot-com boom and bust and well before online travel blogs were really a thing, I spent a lot of my vacation time diving in Belize and Honduras. This was also before the hordes of tourists and the warming of the waters and the multi-story luxury resorts built on the edge of atolls that really can’t support the growth. The pristine reefs in that part of the Caribbean have grayed and crumbled over the years; apparently capitalism is an exemption in environmental protection.

So when I read about Providencia, it resonated like a glimmer of hopeful azul in a long, cold, gray December. It was small enough to be overlooked by the masses, cherished just so by its denizens, and hard enough to get to that most of the cringey tourists wouldn’t bother. Also, aside from beaching and diving and snorkeling and climbing The Peak, there wasn’t a heck of a lot to do there. I booked flights as soon as I saw photos.

Rusty Spanish and a small glitch.

To get to Providencia, you need to go through San Andrés. Luckily Avianca flies direct to Bogotá from Boston; and while it feels like a world away, Colombia is in the same time zone as the Eastern US. So the flight from Bogotá to San Andrés was also relatively straightforward. The small oopsie: In the chaos of work-holiday-family-new year before the trip, I had completely forgotten to apply for my Check-MIG (tourist visa). So as the BOS-BOG flight taxied to the gate in Bogotá, I furiously entered my info into the web form then held my breath. Exhale: The acceptance email arrived as I was walking to the immigration line. This level of stress is not highly recommended. The other thing that nobody tells you unless you dig for the info (which I didn’t), is that you need a tourist card to enter the reserve area, so with rusty Spanish I navigated to the kiosk to get mine just in time to board the flight to San Andrés.

I stayed in an eco-hostel on San Andrés for a night, a quirky little hotel built into an ancient coral reef, before waking to take the final hop to Providencia (The Rock House: I highly recommend!). Even though I only spent one short night there, I felt welcomed and safe from the moment I arrived. As solo female travellers know, this is such a relief…one less thing to stress over, giving back some emotional energy to focus on that last leg.

Note to travellers: always check and re-check flight times… the flight was changed to leave 20 minutes early! But I made the flight, understood enough of the in-flight announcements (100% en Español), found a taxi, and made it to my little hotel in South West Bay in time to unpack, find the dive shop, and take a small nap in my hammock before sunset.

I hadn’t intended on writing a whole post on just the getting there process, pero aqui estamos (but here we are). Thanks for coming along on the beginning of this journey with me.

In Part II we’ll dive into Providencia. Literally.

Costa Rica parte tres: The ocean redeems itself.

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They say the ideal holiday length is 10 days. You need 4 days to decompress from the real world, a few days to deep dive into the present, and a day or so to get ready to go back to reality. By dia cuatro, I felt a shift, whether it was the whales, a surrender to the humidity, or the fauna, I felt like I was on a proper escape from the real world.

My last day of diving was a Friday. The currents were shifting with the moon, bringing higher tides and more surge, which could mean lower visibility. But as we were getting ready for our first dive, a manta ray swam directly under the boat, chasing plankton on top of the reef at the el Diablo dive site.

I’ve dived in Thailand, Burma, Zanzibar…but I’ve never seen a manta underwater. These creatures are as graceful as they are massive (giant manta ray wingspans can be nearly 9 metres or almost 30ft!), yet they eat the tiny stuff: krill and plankton. This was going to be an interesting dive!

The ocean did not disappoint: we were graced by 3 giant mantas in total, an aloof pair travelling together and a solo one who seemed to really enjoy swimming over our bubbles. The sheer size of these animals is breathtaking; absolutely enormous, yet they fly overhead like chubby kites.

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This day made up for every other thus far!

And I had 2 days left for wandering, birdwatching, critter-finding, and hammock lolling before needing to wrap up and get back to reality.

The Bahìa Drake trail is a path that follows the line where the sea meets the jungle, and runs many kilometres from Drake Bay down the coast towards Corcovado National Park. It was brutally hot out, so I walked about 30 minutes, landing on a beach inhabited by a fleet of college spring breakers. I quickly retreated to another little beach, completely quiet save a few thousand hermit crabs skittering around the sand.

I spent my remaining time in Drake Bay trying to slow down time. I knew that when I got back, the pressures of an impending product launch would be all-consuming. So I sat and watched while a small company of scarlet macaws amassed in a mango tree to gorge on the unripe fruit. I watched as giant iguanas appeared out of nowhere to slowly yet lithely scamper up trees. I stalked hummingbirds and a handful of different kinds of tanagers.

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And like that, the week was up. The trip back was without issue, though I felt more nervous travelling back into the US than I did leaving it. My passport has a somewhat chequered history, and the current news cycle didn’t make me feel any more comfortable. This too shall pass.

Awesome souvenirs.

I got a text message from one of the French guys on the dive boat a couple of days after I got home. “Awesome souvenirs,” he texted. I had sent some of the manta photos and videos to the group. And it made me smile. I think we have it all wrong here…the word souvenirs in French means memories.

And a picture is worth a thousand words.

Madagascar marvels part II: Idyllic islands and land-based critters

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As if spending a week spotting whale sharks wasn’t enough!

Another aspect of the first half of the itinerary was to experience some of the other flora and fauna in and around Nosy Be. So one morning we set off to see Nosy Tanikely, a marine reserve with a lovely, preserved reef. We snorkeled there for a bit before heading farther out to look for more whale sharks.

Back at Sakatia, afternoons were for napping or swimming with giant green sea turtles in the sea grasses by the lodge. Alternately, there was a lot of nothing to do if one was so inclined. In hindsight, I’m meshing together days here and calling out highlights because I stopped trying to keep track of sightings and particulars as the days melted into one under the hot sun. There was the afternoon I was sitting on the porch of my bungalow when two chickens very deliberately climbed the steps to have some water from my foot pail. There were brilliant sunsets overlooking the little sacred forest. There were early morning walks in the mangroves at low tide.

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On another morning, we were up and out early to get to a remote island called Nosy Iranja, a 3-hour boat ride out into the waters of the Mozambique Channel. We spotted fewer whale sharks as we entered the deeper (and choppier) water, but as we travelled, a pod of spinner dolphins joined us to play in the boat’s wake. And as we approached Iranja, we watched as a humpback whale family (mom, brand new calf, and dad) slowly cruised through the water, making their way out to sea (and apparently towards Antarctica); the baby getting used to its giant fins, slapping and playing in the water as they swam.

As if the magic of the sea creatures wasn’t sublime enough, we approached the beach where we were to spend the night in beachside “tents”. Pictures cannot do the setting justice, but close your eyes and imagine the whitest sand beach you can conjure, the warm turquoise waters painted in a rainbow of blues. We walked through a small village, up to the phare (lighthouse) at the top of the island, then down the other side to watch the sunset by a spit where at low tide one could walk across to yet another teeny island to hide away from the world. The mojito on the beach felt like an indulgent cherry on top.

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Our last day was spent on dry land, taking a walk through the paths in Parc National de Lokobe. Lokobe occupies most of the southern tip of Nosy Be and is home to 72 species of amphibians and reptiles, 48 species of birds, and even 2 species of lemurs that are considered microendemic to Nosy Be: the Nosy Be sportive lemur (you can see them in the photos below), and the Nosy Be mouse lemur.

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After a (frankly, unexpectedly hard) paddle out to the entrance via local wooden canoe called a pirogue, we entered the park to find more flora and fauna. Here, we saw a tree boa and other snakes, a variety of chameleons, and lemurs – including the very little and very adorable mouse lemur, who we saw curled up and sleeping in some palm fronds. Plied with a local lunch and plenty of fresh, ripe, mangoes (and jackfruit!), the group unanimously determined the outing (as well as the sea tow back to where we started) a roaring success.

Did you miss Part I of this adventure? Click here. Next stop: the mainland!