Before we knew it, it was time to journey across the northern tip of Sulawesi to the east coast, and across the Lembeh strait to the island of the same name. The entire journey took less than two hours, and the perks of booking with the same resort in both locations included not having to painstakingly dry out our dive gear, and Tetris it back into our luggage. Yes, I just used Tetris as a verb. Instead, the resort simply loaded each of our crates, labeled with Candy Crush name tags, into the truck, and off we went. They also
On our penultimate day of Manado diving, we dove a site with some crazy current. It was the most fun I’d had being swept along at high speeds since Palau. It kept switching directions too; we’d be flying down the reef in one direction, arms outstretched as if we were flying up in the sky, only to suddenly be kicking into the current and have our guide, clad in snorkel fins, signal for us to go back the other way. We swapped directions three or four times, and I loved every moment of it. The first time I dove in any
And so we fell into a comfortable routine of waking up and going to breakfast each morning for a beautiful selection of fresh, tropical fruits. There would also be an omelette station set up. After breakfast, we would head out on the boat for the two morning dives, venturing into the underwater world, to one colorful wall bursting with healthy corals after another. The state of the thriving reef was a happy sight. There were times when I would look for a bit of rock or dead coral to steady myself with a fingertip while taking a photo, and would
The first few days at Thalassa Dive Resort were a blur as the stress of travel wore off. Fletch and I had left the US four days prior to our arrival, flown 12,000 miles via four different flights, and had jumped ahead sixteen time zones in the process. Tanja and Stefan had their own stress not just from the journey from the Maldives, but from work as well. We attempted to do the two morning dives each morning, but each of us more or less took a turn sitting out for half a day to rest. Fletch and I did the
When I told people that we were going to Indonesia, most of them assumed Bali. That’s fair; Bali is the tourist hotspot that everyone associates with Indonesia. As it turns out, Bali is only one of about 17,000 or 18,000 (depending on which source you refer to) islands that make up the country of Indonesia. Only 6,000 of these are inhabited. The four biggest of these islands are Java (shared with Papua New Guinea), Borneo (shared with Brunei and Malaysia), Sumatra, and Sulawesi. We are on that fourth largest island, which has an area of 67,000 square miles (roughly the