Arrival

Greetings from Mexico. It's taken a while to start this blog. What I thought would be a quick entry into Yucatan life became a long and sometimes frustrating hunt for somewhere decent to live. I planned on using my first three days here to find an apartment but it took me ten, and during that time I saw some really terrible places, for outrageous sums, and met at least one dodgy dealer (an American expat whose reputation I now know better). But last Friday, I moved into a nice studio, a couple of blocks off Tulum's main street, with two double beds, a little kitchen, a nice bathroom and a balcony. And downstairs there's a space for my bicycle.

I'm here to learn to be a PADI scuba divemaster. Ever since Pedro introduced me to scuba diving in Thailand in 2002, I have been intrigued by the way we can take ourselves down underwater, an achievement as amazing as flying and one of the very few times on Earth you can feel genuinely weightless. Last year, when I was working on The Wired World in 2013, Richard Branson wrote us a piece on how 2013 will be the year of the ocean and it made me realise how little I know about what goes on below the waves.

As well as getting the chance to do a lot of diving, I'm liking the fact the most of what I do here is physical. I'm interning in a dive shop and, shockingly for someone whose work usually involves little more than typing, that means assembling, carrying, loading and unloading a lot of heavy equipment. As anyone who has been scuba diving knows, those tanks weigh a tonne (well, 17kg actually, or 20kg when they are full of air – I have just looked this up in my How To Be A Divemaster book). And here you get to combine that with sun and sea air, which is just lovely.

There are plenty of places in the world to dive and plenty to learn how to be a divemaster. I chose Tulum because, when Charles, Neil and I came here on holiday last November, I did a lot of diving with an Argentinian instructor called Pablo Perotti, who turned out to be a great teacher. I had lost my scuba confidence in Egypt in 2008 in a series of badly managed and scary dives and, when we arrived in Tulum, I hadn't dived for four years and had no real desire to. I told Pablo this and he immediately understood, contained me (to use a psychological word) and helped me get back in the water and build up my confidence again. We went on seven dives together and I knew then I would like to learn more from him.

Pablo's company – which comprises him, another instructor called Tullio, from Milan (there are lots of Italians, Argentinians and Italian-Argentinians here), and Sarah, from the UK – is based in a resort called Papaya Playa, which has a nice hippy/Ibiza vibe, though, like Ibiza, and in fact like most of Tulum, it's not cheap. From the little wooden hut that functions as the office, storeroom, admin department and place to keep your beach clothes, we look out over palm trees and white sand to the beautifully blue Caribbean sea. Today it is a little windy – and we have had some rainy days – but even when the weather isn't calm the place is eye-catching. Here's a picture I took just now.

I came to be taught by Pablo but, in fact, now I am back, I have two good teachers. In his mid-30s, Tullio manages to combine laid-back beachiness and an ultra-professional attitude towards diving and teaching, which I'm impressed by (and trying to imitate). We have been working together for a week now and I have been diving with him and Pablo almost every day.

Learning to be a divemaster is a full-time activity (I'll write more about it later) and when I signed up to do it, I didn't really think through what it would in entail. If/when I qualify I will be able to take people out on dives myself and that's obviously a big responsibility. Scuba diving is pretty safe (as in London, you are at much greater risk here cycling down the street, and Tulum's streets are a lot safer than London's). But no one wants to have the kind of experience I had in Egypt and that is very much up to the divemaster. I guess I realised the magnitude of the leap I am attempting when I was given a new folder for my diving logbook which, on the outside, says PADI PRO.

I'm a bit tired – the house hunting annoyed me after a while – but obviously I'm happy I am here, and in fact the course has already turned out to be the kind of challenge – stretching, rewarding, surprising – that at The School of Life we try to encourage others to build in to their lives. I like my new place and I am excited about what lies ahead. And, of course, it's lovely being in the sun.