Fuelled by Nasi Goreng and fruit salad we walked into Sanur for our first day at Scuba School. Our instructor was a quietly diligent Balinese guy called Farish who introduced us to the third member of our group, Christopher, a stereotypically enthusiastic West Coast American school leaver on vacation who was super-awesomely keen to become PADI certified open water diver.

We settled down the floor cushions of the classroom and the brain bashing began. We watched as a diverse group of smug actors demonstrating the numerous drills, procedures and theory that PADI felt we should know, all played out somewhere in the Caribbean and voiced over by an equally smug omnipotent American narrator. Each module was followed by a series of group questions and finally a mini ‘exam’ which made sure we were well aware of our lack of understanding of the subject before we moved on. After 3 such sessions our brains were melting from the number of TLA’s (Three letter acronyms) we had been bombarded with so we took a break to get sized up for the gear which we would be using the pool the next day. This involved stretching dry wetsuits over slightly sweaty, marginally irritable students and the end result must have been amusing for somebody else to watch, but not for those of us sweating on the poolside.

We headed back to the classroom after a Balinese lunch of rice, fried noodles, chicken satay and an odd mini pomegranate-looking fruit called a ‘Mangish’ which, when forcibly opened liberated segments of white juicy fruit tasting like a cross between a lychee and a fig. The theory got deeper, involving charts and codes which we needed to understand to prevent us from floating away full of nitrogen bubbles upon surfacing. The narrator carefully reiterated just what a dangerous sport we had signed up for and slowly things began to fall into place. After 5 modules we were dismissed with a serious amount of homework to complete, and we mindlessly wandered back to our hotel where we lay on the bed and tried to assimilate what we had learned.

We ate early and returned to our suite to try and complete some of the homework before collapsing, mentally exhausted, but excited about spending tomorrow in the pool as real life frogmen.