Taking the Plunge

by James Kolacz (Australia)

I didn't expect to find Fiji

When your face is covered by water, don’t breathe in. It’s a pretty innate rule we’ve lived by for thousands of generations, on a par with ‘fire is hot’ and ‘falling hurts’. Without it, that particular branch of the family tree would cease to exist (although, let’s be honest, we’ve all sat through enough family Christmases to know that might not be a bad thing.) This was the thought that filled my head, squatting on the bottom of a grimy pool, convinced I was about to wipe a whole lineage of future Jameses as I took in air in short, sharp breaths, staring wide-eyed at the flurry of bubbles from the likewise novice divers around me. What a difference 2 weeks can make. One by one, the torches flicker out and complete darkness settles over us. I wouldn’t say I’m scared of the dark, but there’s something particularly unsettling about suddenly losing the last of your five senses. Without warning, a ribbon of light erupts in front of me, briefly illuminating the sharp angles of my instructor’s dive mask, but none of the face beneath. I suppose it’s a little disingenuous to claim I was down to one sense; I could hear and feel the breath rasping through my regulator, I could taste the metallic tang to the air rushing from my tank – air that, if I’m honest, started rushing a little faster once the lights went out. But at the bottom of the sea, all these senses are attuned inwards, the only perception I had of my outside world was now suddenly entirely reliant on one of the simplest organisms on the planet; bioluminescent plankton. I follow my instructor’s lead and wave my hand through the water, watching it light up like a budget Christmas tree. As everyone else joined in and the ghostly glow briefly illuminated their faces, it began to look a little more like the Northern Lights, except 15m underwater I think typically at the point I’m supposed to write about where I was, why I was diving, why I chose this location and why it’s one of the ‘Top 10 Unmissable Dive sites in the world!’ Really though, all of this is entirely beside the point. Under the water, surrounded by blackness, you could be anywhere in the world –Thailand, Australia, Mexico – it doesn’t matter. It’s an incredibly freeing feeling. You’re entirely alone, even if you’re surrounded by a dozen other people. You’re alone, in the dark, with nothing but your own thoughts and beating heart for company. It’s liberating. As much as I enjoy travel, there’s always been a lingering feeling that I’m just experiencing something because I’m supposed to; thousands of people have been there before, looked at the same sites, stepped on the same soil and then thrown a tacky filter over it and popped it on Instagram. Born a few hundred years too late to explore new lands and a few hundred to thousand years too early to experience new worlds, I felt there was nothing left to discover and, by virtue of that, everything I did experience was through the lens of someone else. You’re supposed to feel a certain way looking at Machu Picchu, or the Pyramids of Egypt, and part of that feeling is dictated by people that felt that way before you. Being isolated under water forced me to experience that world through nobody’s perception but my own. Finally I came to a rather basic realisation, but one that felt, at the time, profound. It doesn’t matter that people have experienced something before us, it doesn’t matter that there is nothing ‘new’ to discover, if everything is filtered through our own perception it’s new to us, and that’s all that really matters. Having travelled over the last few years, this has become an almost embarrassing revelation. Of course nothing is our own. Across human history we've shared this planet with nearly 110 billion other people. Having the opportunity to share it with them is special in itself. This, for me, was just the first time that a 20 year-old me had I'd gained the perspective to appreciate it.