Mud Volcano and Scuba Diving in Taganga

Before we left Cartagena, we went to a ¨mud volcano¨. It was like a small volcano but instead of lava, it was filled with mud. We climbed stairs to the top of it and then submerged ourselves in the mud pit. It was really interesting as the mud was really thick but liquid and it was hard to sink down very far. After we had played around and were covered in mud, we went to the nearby lagoon and washed ourselves off. It was a very different experience but super cool. Now our skin is nice and mineraly! We spent our fourth anniversary traveling to Taganga. We stayed in a nicer place and went to dinner and had some yummy passion fruit daiquiris. It was a nice, semi-relaxing day. We are in Taganga now, on the Carribean Coast of Colombia and just completed a three day scuba ¨safari¨ which included our advanced certification. It was all in Spanish too so it was good practice for us. We stayed two nights in hammocks on a deserted beach and dove during the days. It was an awesome experience! There were ten of us that went and three of us in our course. All of the others were Israeli and Shannon was the only female. It was interesting to learn more about Israel. The course consisted of eight dives which we did over three days. We had to do a navegation dive where we had to use a compass to go in a line and back, make a square, a triangle, and go to a rocky point and back. We got to do that dive totally alone without our instructor and it was cool since it was the first time we were on our own. We also did a night dive which was really awesome! Shannon was of course really scared to do it as she doesn´t like to be in the water when she cannot see, but once she was in the water she realized that it was not scary at all. Everything is totally different at night as you use a flashlight which shows you the real colors of all the fish and the coral. These colors are not always visible during the day because the deeper you go, the less light there is. The first color to go is red so it was cool to see all the red fish and coral at night that look black during the day. The corals are also open at night and not during the day so a lot of them looked like little flowers. Crabs, eels, and lobsters also come out at night so we saw a lot more of those as well. The company we went with has a coral station where they are growing some of the types of corals that are the most endangered so they can replant them. We got to go there and help clean off the nets and corals (really hard when there is current and you are trying to stay still underwater). It was cool to be able to see this and help a little. All in all the trip was amazing! It was a lot different than our previous diving as the water was not as clear and there was a current, but it was interesting to see different things. Now we´re off to Medellín and the zona cafetería.