Into Beijing's deep
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Unlikely as it may sound, China's capital is a great place to swim with sharks, as Steve Hubrecht finds out.
Beijing, more than 100 km from the nearest coastline, with no major natural bodies of water and an arid climate, is home to a sizable community of scuba divers, some of whom spend their recreational time in the city splashing around with sharks.
"It doesn't seem like an obvious choice for diving but the key ingredient to diving is not water, but divers, people who want to go diving. Any place can have water, but if nobody wants to go diving, there's no diving," says Stephen Schwankert, president of SinoScuba, an international standard scuba school in Beijing.
The school celebrated its seventh anniversary on Jan 1 and since it started Schwankert, an American expatriate, has introduced 700 people to diving, most of them in Beijing's Blue Zoo aquarium. SinoScuba, which teaches in English and Chinese, also offers scuba diving lessons to students as an extra-curricular activity at some international schools in Beijing, including Beijing City International School and Harrow.
The Blue Zoo, 50-m long, 35-m wide, 3-m deep and filled with 100 species of fish, including seven kinds of sharks, is an ideal scuba classroom, according to Schwankert. It's a good place to learn basic skills, with the added bonus of marine life.
"We were completely thrilled. It was so much fun because unlike most other people's first dive in a pool, in the Blue Zoo you have a lot of fish," says Michael Hakel, a German expatriate, who learned to dive with SinoScuba a year and a half ago along with his wife.
"You're surrounded by a totally different world; water, fish, different colors," adds Hakel. "It's very quiet, you are, yourself, floating. You don't feeling any pressure on anything, so you're just gliding through the water. It's a very nice feeling, it's a cool feeling."
Fish are not the only thing that makes learning to dive in the Blue Zoo interesting, according to Michael Joyce, an American expatriate who began diving more than a year ago. During Joyce's first lesson tourists outside the aquarium watched him with mouths agape.
"I had an audience, there might have been a dozen people or more tapping on the glass and snapping photos," says Joyce. "It was great fun though."
Even experienced scuba divers get a kick out of the Blue Zoo, says Will Moss, an American expatriate who lived in Singapore for more than a decade and was an avid diver before moving to Beijing.
"Diving in an aquarium is not the same as diving in the open ocean," says Moss. "But if you like being in the water and you like watching fish, which is why many people get into diving in the first place, it can still be a lot of fun."
The sharks, in particular, garner a lot of attention, some of it excitement, some of it fear. But the fear is misplaced, says Schwankert.
"We've never had a shark injury here. I don't think we'll ever have a shark injury here. Part of it is just the nature of the environment," he says. "They're used to us, we're used to them. We don't do stupid things with them, we don't grab them by the tail and swing them around."
Some beginners are so afraid they almost refuse to go in the water, he adds. But often just 15 minutes after getting in they are gently stroking a shark.
"It is a fantastic opportunity to be able to change people's views on the underwater world," he says.
Even though the sharks are nothing to be scared of and scuba diving is generally safe, it's not totally risk free, says Schwankert.
Equipment maintenance and safety standards tend to be somewhat lacking across China, which was the impetus for SinoScuba, the first dive school in Beijing to use professional teaching methods and a full-time instructor, he adds.
Despite all the enthusiasm for the Blue Zoo, the confined and shallow waters available in Beijing can be limiting. Even completing a basic dive course requires four open water dives. Beginners taking the course with SinoScuba usually do those four dives elsewhere after completing everything else. And just skipping over to Tianjin to jump in the Pacific is not really an easy option, according to Schwankert.
A tight regulatory environment means going offshore in Chinese waters, unless you are a fisherman, can be as complicated as filing a flight plan in the US and involves spending weekends slogging through paperwork, he says. There is even more red tape if divers want to use sonar equipment, which is useful for finding good diving sites.
This tight control is one of the main reasons scuba diving in China is just beginning to take off, according to Schwankert. The other is that swimming as a recreational sport has only relatively recently become as popular and widespread in China as it is in North America,
"This is why it's a great time to be diving in China, because it's a time of discovery," he says.
Freshwater scuba diving in China has none of the hassle of diving in the ocean and the country already has some great dive sites, including an underwater section of the Great Wall at a reservoir in Tangshan, a few hours from Beijing, and a sunken ancient walled village in Qiandaohu in Zhejiang province.
Scuba diving on the underwater section of the Great Wall, which includes a guard tower and an archway, is almost like make believe and the sunken city, 30 m down in a murky reservoir, far below the reach of daylight, contains things, such as an ornate 8-m tall imperial tablet, rarely seen on land, says Schwankert.
"These are fascinating experiences, because for me, the moment something is underwater, the moment something is sunken, it takes on an aura of romance or mystery that you don't get when it's above ground," says Moss, who dove the sunken city and Great Wall with Schwankert.
Looking at something such as the Great Wall or an ancient village underwater, particularly when there is little daylight, makes people rethink the way they experience an object, adds Moss. There are no grand vistas, but details, textures and intricacies stand out more.
"Not only does that add a general layer of mystery because things are shrouded in darkness, but it also forces you to focus on what's right in front of you. So it's a different kind of experience. For me, I find that really enjoyable," he says.
Schwankert's interest in literally diving into China's past will soon result in a book. A few years ago he started researching a submarine, the HMS Poseidon, which sank off the coast of China after an accidental collision almost 80 years ago. The accident generated headlines around the world, and dramatically altered submarine design, since it was the first time trapped mariners used escape compartments to get out of a downed submarine without assistance from a boat on the surface. But apparently nobody had seen the wreck. Schwankert wanted to dive and spent two years trying to locate it.
"I didn't find it because it wasn't there to find, which is in many ways more interesting, because then history is officially changed. I thought I would get to go find history, I didn't think I'd get to change it," he says.
It turned out the Chinese government salvaged the submarine in the 1970s, unbeknownst to the rest of the world, says Schwankert. He spent the next few years piecing together the full story, including the stories of the crew members who survived the accident and is writing a book, scheduled to be published this year.
"I just wanted to go dive this thing and it turned into this amazing story that I wasn't expecting," he says. "When you get into the dusty corners of history and you start sweeping things off, it's amazing what you find.".
Schwankert's penchant for discovery and diving in remote locations that, at first glance, appear poor places to bring scuba gear goes beyond Beijing. He has mounted diving expeditions to Mongolia, finding an old shipwreck in Lake Khovsgol, and Siberia, ice diving in Lake Baikal. He plans to dive in Afghanistan, to catalogue the marine environment in the Band-e-Amir lakes, which became the country's first national park in 2009, and in Nepal, which has a sizable lake at an altitude of 3,000 m and another one at 5,000 m.
"Doing that kind of high-altitude safari really appeals," says Schwankert. "To go out there and do these things, that's a ballbuster."
The Asia-Pacific area is the best in the world for diving and many people flock to dive in the warm, sandy waters in the region's south, he adds. But it also is rife with the kind of spots that, although far afield and filled with cold, dark water, interest Schwankert more, because nobody has dived them yet.
"A lot of people think our world is entirely explored. Considering that two-third of our planet is covered by water, that means that at least two-third of the world is entirely unexplored," he says. "Just because we've stood on top of the tallest mountain doesn't mean there isn't anything left to do."
Even after diving in Mongolia, in Siberia and at the Great Wall, Schwankert says his favorite scuba experience is still taking beginners for their first breath underwater at the Blue Zoo. "I remember exactly what my first dive was like, I remember exactly what it felt like, so to be able to bring that to other people and share that with other people and hopefully start them on their own path of exploration is a really unique opportunity and one that I really relish," he says.
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