Descending between the waves opens up a new paradise around the Indian Ocean island.
Taking up scuba diving while on holiday seems at once brilliantly exciting and a bit too much work to fit into a schedule clogged with sunbathing, swimming, eating and lying down. At Constance Tsarabanjina, however, there are a few factors that will help overcome your happy inertia.
For one, it’s on a small island, so the empty ocean in every direction is a giant playground. For another, there’s the superb, fully equipped PADI Blue Wave dive centre in the middle of the resort – not an add-on feature and literally halfway between the dining area and the villas. Third, and probably most compellingly, is the luxury no developer can add to any hotel or resort. Here, this takes the form of an experience that makes you feel rich every time you do it: walking out of your villa, across a few metres of white sand, into the warm water and falling forward – at the start of the reef. This isn’t just a few rocks and a couple of baby bream or similar. This is, merely seconds from where you woke up, world-class diving and a better-equipped classroom than any Ivy League student could wish for.
Handy with knowledge
Surrounded by racks of wetsuits, fins and masks, instructor Martina is a woman who likes to speak using her hands. “I’m Italian,” she grins, waggling some fingers for no reason whatsoever. “This is what we do!”
With her passion for her job, the area in which she does it, and the creatures that inhabit that space sitting right on the surface, Martina does the basics of the theory and training in the dive centre. But as you sit and listen, you’re aware – if you’re sensible – that you have no idea how your body and brain will react once you’re underwater. Great gear makes a big difference – it all fits beautifully and is easy to adjust.
The first session with the buoyancy control device is in the shallow turquoise sea, inflating and deflating the jacket, sinking to the sand and discovering how breathing affects how you’re dropping or rising as you swim forward. It takes a while to get the urgency or force of inhalations and exhalations right, but here you can simply stand up if you’re not yet sure of your abilities.
Once Martina is happy you can safely control your progress, she leads you to the start of the reef – large table and brain corals, enormous buttresses and standalone towers. As the practice of the skills you’ve learnt becomes more comfortable and natural, you suddenly find yourself at a depth of five metres, then eight, with the swirling life around you sparkling like an animated rainbow.
There are schools of small fish – blue, white, some with yellow stripes. A small group of barracuda glides by, allowing a shift of focus to a large pufferfish, several species of starfish and then a blue-spotted ribbontail ray. Following it around leads to an even more special bonus – a large black stingray, half-hidden under a coral outcrop.
Delight in the details
Returning to the beach as a now enormously accomplished scuba diver, there is more time to focus on the details. Here is a small squirrelfish weaving its way between finger corals. There is a needlefish, almost disappearing in the space between the top of your mask and the sultry silver of the water’s surface. Below is a large clam with a royal purple membrane that clenches as the current changes with the kicking of Martina’s passing fins.
The experience overall is dreamlike. And unless you’re claustrophobic or conditions are rough (in which case the dive might have been postponed anyway), it’s easy, relaxing and fun in this location. Arriving back in the shadows, there’s a feeling of joy and privilege at having been in that space and seeing what you’ve seen in the past hour or so.
The considerable weight of the scuba tank kicks in immediately as you stand up. It’s a return to reality and an immediate exit from the submarine fantasy you’ve been in, but the smile on your face remains as you wade out and are relieved of the heavy stuff by capable staff, who spirit it away so that doing chores like rinsing it off doesn’t even have to enter your brain.
Back at the dive centre, the bits and pieces you’ve carried back – fins and mask – go into a sink of clean water, and Martina helps you begin the process of peeling off the wetsuit. “I always get to undress my clients at the end of our first date,” she smiles, with a wink.
Marine magic
For divers of any experience level, Tsarabanjina and its surrounds are a wonderland of undersea life, with nearby sites including Mitsio Island, Four Brothers and Les Tétôns offering different and exciting options to see (depending on the season and the depth of the water):
- Humpback whales
- Whale sharks
- Dolphins
- Manta rays
- Turtles
- Butterflyfish
- Clownfish
- Angelfish
- Moray eels
- Surgeonfish
- …and many other species
Text | Bruce Dennill
Photography | Bruce Dennill and Shutterstock
For more information or to book a stay, go to constancehotels.com.
