open water diver!

its official! woo hoo, i now have my open water diver certification and can dive to a whole 18m anywhere i want. the course was good fun and i enjoyed being underwater as you feel totally weightless and can do silly things like back flips etc but one thing you can't do underwater that i really struggled with, is talk or in fact even smile. Your whole face is covered by a huge and fairly uncomfortable mask and you have a big tube stuck in your mouth, so facial communication is rather difficult. The fish you see look cool, lots of bright colours, strange shapes and interesting coral but i don't know anything about fish and so with noone able to point out the different species or give me information on them after 50 minutes or so its quite enough time for me to come back to the surface and start talking again. thats enough of my little whinge, i'm actually glad that i did it and will probably do it some more if i go somewhere with cool underwater things to see or do- i think more than just looking at fish i would prefer to have a task or little challenge; my favourite dive on the course had really strong currents which it was difficult to navigate through and you could feel the water rushing past, sort of frightening but exhilarating at the same time!
Apart from the dive course i haven't done much else over the last few days, the weather here is so hot and i'm discovering i'm not really a beach person- there's just too much sand everywhere! The coast here is beautiful, the mountains rise almost straight out of the sea and range from being covered in deep rainforest to sparse tall cacti, the whole area here is a natural park and its easy to see why. (the internet connection is far to slow to put photos on here though, sorry)
Tomorrow i set out on possibly my biggest challenge yet- 6 days of trekking through the rainforest in about 80% humidity to some pre-columbian ruins called the lost city. wish me luck, i'll let you know how i get on.