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
In no time at all, our vacation was half gone and it was our last day of diving in the Bunaken area. For our last day of diving, we requested two of our favorite spots we had been to during the week: Sachiko’s Point and Mandolin. Sachiko’s Point proved that no two dives are ever the same. You simply cannot repeat an experience. There is always something new waiting for you in the ocean. In this case, the plethora of dogtooth tuna that had been cruising the reef previously, were now nowhere to be found. On to Mandolin for our final
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