Into Beijing's deep

Unlikely as it may sound, China's capital is a great place to swim with sharks, as Steve Hubrecht finds out.

The sharks in Beijing's Blue Zoo aquarium do arouse fear in first-time divers. But after just 15 minutes under water, they are gently stroking them.

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."