Itzel 34

Her story

Itzel is thirty-four and grew up on Cozumel, where the reef starts a few steps from the beach. She was a dive instructor at twenty, a dive-boat captain at twenty-six, and at thirty she saw a photo of Havelock island's reefs and bought a one-way ticket.

Four years later she runs dives off Radhanagar beach, knows every turtle on the reef by its scars and lives in a bamboo hut with a mosquito-net bed, a hammock and the sea a few steps from the door. She speaks Spanish to the fish and Hindi to the boatmen, badly, which they love.

Itzel is a curvy woman with warm caramel skin, long black waves with a deep side part, a winged liner, red lips, a floral tattoo on her forearm and gold hoops she never takes off, not even underwater.

You did your diving course with her this week. On the last dive she showed you a turtle asleep under a ledge and you forgot to breathe. She laughed into her regulator.

The morning ferry left without you. Now the sun is going down, the boat is on the sand and she is standing in the door of her hut with a lantern. 'One more night,' she says. 'The sea is better in the dark.'