A Brief Sojourn in the Solomon Islands (Retrospective from July, 2014)

Ottawa, October 17, 2015

After over a year of sloth, it's time to bring my blog up to date with some of the travels that I have gotten up to over the last year.  This is from July of last year (2014) when I went to the Solomon Islands.  More updates coming later!

After saying goodbye to Terri and spending an evening in the mass-tourism mecca of Seminyak, late in the evening of July 9th, 2014 I boarded a flight from Denpasar airport to Brisbane, Australia.  I arrived in the morning, just in time to see the final shots of the shootout between the Netherlands and Argentina on the big screen in the arrivals hall.  Australia has a neat system for visas that more countries should copy.  Everyone except Aussies and Kiwis needs a visa before arriving, but it can be arranged online without the nonsense of sending your passport to an embassy.  Your name goes on an online list and when you arrive, the immigration officer looks you up online. Very easy and efficient.

Anyway, I was in Australia for only a few hours, as I got on another Virgin Australia flight to Honiara, the capital of the Solomon Islands.  I had decided to visit Papua New Guinea on this trip, and since the Lonely Planet guide for PNG also covers the Solomons, I had decided to add the Solomons to my journey, the 116th country on my life list.  I got to Honiara mid-afternoon and wandered through the dilapidated old airport looking (successfully) for a place to change money and (unsuccessfully) for a bus into town.  I had booked a room in the Red Mansion hotel and eventually found a cab of great age to take me there.  It was the cheapest room I could find, and it was still 700 Solomon dollars (US$ 85) for a very indifferent room seveal kilometres from downtown Honiara.  I had crossed the line dividing Southeast Asia and its reasonable prices from the Pacific and its ridiculous prices.  The city looked poor, dusty and still recovering from the days of the civil war (1998-2003).  I dropped off my luggage at the hotel, wandered down the hill to the main road and caught a bus downtown for a reasonable S$ 3 (about US$ 0.40) to see if I could figure out the interisland ferry schedule.  I was too late; offices were already closed.  I found a small Chinese take-out joint, ate some greasy fish and chips and then caught a bus back to the hotel, mindful of the dire warnings I had heard about nocturnal security problems in Honiara.

The next day I got up early, ate a truly unimpressive hotel breakfast, checked out, left my luggage and went back into town.  I found a travel agent who knew nothing much about interisland ferry schedules, found a slow, overpriced internet joint, then bought a Solomon Islands Telecom SIM card. After a quick phone call to the ferry company (who were only marginally more helpul than the travel agent), I set off in search of a cheaper place to stay.  On a hill just behind the three-block downtown core, I found the Rock Haven Inn where a windowless basement cell was only S$385 (US$ 50).  I caught a bus back to the Red Mansion, picked up my luggage and caught a cab back to the hotel.  The early afternoon was devoted to organization:  buying a ferry ticket for the 12th to Munda, booking a hotel in Munda, talking to Dive Munda and Dive Gizo on the phone, having a beer at the Yacht Club and arranging diving for the next day on the outskirts of Honiara.

With logistics taken care of, it was time for some sightseeing.  I headed out of town on a minibus to go to the trailhead for a hike recommended in the Lonely Planet, to the Mataniko waterfalls.  The bus led out of the crowded dusty centre to the dirt-poor shantytowns on the outskirts of town.  I set off up the trail, forded a river and was promptly chatted up by a local guy who demanded S$200 (US$ 30) for "traditional fees" and guide services.  Since this sort of thing drives me nuts, I decided to give up the waterfall in favour of the US War Memorial.  I walked up into the hills, trying to figure out the shortest route, and finally found myself at the memorial.  The US has put up a very informative memorial to the bloody Guadalcanal campaign (Honiara is on the island of Guadalcanal) in 1942-43. 

US Guadalcanal Campaign war memorial in Honiara 

Local kids at the War Memorial, Honiara

Guadalcanal marked a major turning point in World War Two in the Pacific.  The Battle of Midway in June 1942 was the first naval battle that didn't go Japan's way, while Guadalcanal marked the first land battle lost by the previously invincible Japanese army.  The memorial is an oasis of order and cleanliness amidst the garbage-strewn streets of Honiara, but I almost didn't get in as the groundskeeper was nowhere to be found.  Eventually he showed up from across the street and I spent a good hour reading the history and admiring the views over the surrounding hills.  A few days after I visited, the memorial was badly vandalized by persons unknown.  Some overpriced Chinese food at the Sea King restaurant and it was time for an early night in bed.  On my way home at dusk, walking four blocks back to my hotel, the staff at the restaurant looked horrified that I was going to walk and not take a taxi.  Nothing happened to me, but there was definitely an air of menace as the sun went down.  I spent the night roasting in my concrete box and sleeping poorly.

July 11th was devoted to diving.  I headed over to Dive Tulagi, the only dive shop in town, and a group of 6 Western client and a couple of Solomon Island dive guides headed out of town in the back of a truck.  We headed to a dive site called Bonegi, where Japanese shipwrecks from 1942 are just offshore.  The diving was indifferent:  visibility was terrible, with a lot of silt, supposedly from massive floods a couple of months earlier, obscuring the top 5 metres of the water column.  My dive guide was fairly terrible, with little control over his buoyancy, not much of an eye for interesting creatures and an alarming tendency to stand on live coral.  I still managed to see some interesting bushy soft corals, lots of crabs and a very pretty shrimp in bubble coral.  The wreck was impressive, but more or less impossible to get inside.  I hoped for better diving in Munda and Gizo.  My fellow divers included a couple of Australians working for RAMSI, the military intervention force sent to restore order in 2003.  They were interesting to talk to, amusingly cynical about the country and its venal politicians and the non-existent economy.  Another guy was an Anglican minister, in the Solomons for a church training course, (Religion is a big, big deal in the Solomons.)

That afternoon I had a late fish and chips lunch at the Kokonut Kafe and reflected on what I'd seen so far in the Solomons.  It was a paradoxical country, very expensive but dirt poor.  The roads were full of ancient wrecks of cars, and yet nobody was on bicycles or on the cheap motorcycles that are the staple of transport in Southeast Asia.  All the shops were run by Chinese businessmen who often sat on an elevated chair keeping an eagle eye on their local employees.  The only thing that seemed to get local people excited was chewing betel.  There were ubiquitous NGOs that seemed to make up much of the local economy.  

Pidgin:  "You me together clean up; stop dengue!"

There was little of the commercial bustle that I was so used to in Indonesia.  The people are very dark-skinned Melanesians, rather like Australian Aborigines in appearance, but with a lot of red or blond hair in evidence.  The most striking part of the country so far were the wonderful Pidgin English signs, like "Iu spitim, iu klinim" (you spit, you clean) for "No betel chewing".  

The next morning I headed down to the ferry dock by 7:45, looking forward to a relaxing day on the ferry that would take me 24 hours west to Munda.  Instead it was one of the most miserable 24 hours I have ever spent on any public transport anywhere.  

The huge crowd trying to board the MV Chanella to Munda

The regular ferry was out of action for maintenance and had been replaced by a cargo freighter over which a tarpaulin had been stretched.  It was hopelessly overcrowded, like a refugee boat on the Mediterranean, and I was barely able to find a tiny space to wedge myself between the piles of bags and possessions covering every square centimetre of the deck.  It was dangerously overcrowded, hot and sweaty and smoky, with waves splashing up over the sides and torrential downpours eventually finding gaps in the tarps.  The journey acquired the feeling of a nightmare as I drifted off to sleep only to wake up from someone stepping on my feet or raindrops landing on my face. At least it cost me S$ 500 (US$ 70)!  I decided that from now on I would fly.

I was infinitely relieved to get off the boat at Noro, 20 kilometres past Munda, at 9 o'clock in the morning.  The boat can't dock at Munda because the old pier in town burned down over a decade ago and nobody can agree on who should pay for a new one.  I waited for a couple of hours for a bus, as company buses shuttling fish cannery workers around passed by one after another.  Finally a bus showed up and dropped me off in what passes for downtown Munda, outside the Qua Roviana guesthouse.  I got a room, showered off the grime from a night spent sweating in my clothes and went out to arrange diving across the street at Dive Munda.  I bought a plane ticket at the airport (I decided to give Gizo a miss and to fly back from Munda to Honiara the day before my flight out of the country), had a great lunch at the Grass Haus Cafe (run by a local guy who has returned from working abroad), went for a long run, did some yoga and went out to dinner at the Agnes Motel where I chatted with a handful of long-term Aussie expats about the Solomon Islands.  They had a depressing litany of complaints, from the government's willingness to sell its tropical timber and its offshore fishing rights to foreigners (Malaysians and Taiwanese and Chinese) for a trifling sum, to the hopelessness of the banks and the post office.  The shops in Munda (entirely run by Chinese again, as in Honiara) sell almost exclusively imported food, and from the wrong places:  expensive Australian rice rather than cheaper Thai rice).  I went to bed tired and dispirited.

Shallow lagoon outside Munda

Nine hours of solid sleep later and I awoke refreshed and much more positive.  I spent the next two days diving with Dive Munda, a very professional (and expensive!  US$180 a day for two dives a day!  Pacific island prices, rather than Indonesian prices) outfit run by a British couple.  Compared to Honiara, the diving was amazing.  The reef is in good shape, and the number of large fish is high.  On the first day, I went out with a Canadian couple, Mathieu and Audrey, into pretty big swells outside the lagoon that encloses Munda.  We saw 8 sharks on the first dive and 2 on the second dive, several turtles, Spanish mackerel, rainbow runners and barracuda.  On the second day, it was only me and the dive guide Solomon, and we had an even better day, with more than a dozen sharks of three species (whitetip, blacktip and grey reef), along with eagle rays, a spotted ray and even a mobula ray (a smaller version of the manta).  Apparently the area right around Munda has been declared a marine sanctuary and, despite poaching by some local fishermen, fish numbers and reef health are both really high.  The local authorities have banned shark finning after Dive Munda explained the local benefits of tourism and diving.  It was really world class diving, and just about worth the eye-watering prices.

After the second day of diving, I got picked up by Eddie the boatman and brought across an open strait to Rendova Island and a tiny homestay, Titiru Eco-Lodge, where I would spend the next four nights before returning to Honiara for my flight to PNG.  I was immediately charmed when the 6 staff members welcomed me on the dock by singing a four-verse welcome song, putting a floral lei around my neck and giving me a fresh green coconut to drink.

My hut at Titiru

Talking to people in Munda the night before (a group of Rotary Club volunteers who had come over from Brisbane to do volunteer work on the local school and the hospital), I had learned that the total number of tourist visas granted every year to the Solomons is about 8000, and at least half of those are for volunteers and missionaries.  There are no more than 3000 real tourists a year, or about 8 arrivals a day.  Somehow this tiny trickle of tourists supports some 80 "eco-lodges" spread all over the dozens of main islands in this extensive, sparsely-populated country, and I was the only guest at this one.  There were 4 cottages spread around a wonderfully-landscaped garden, full of colourful flowers and birds.  All sorts of possible activities were written up on a chalkboard:  caves, mangrove walks, village visits, mountain climbing, snorkelling, bat-watching.  I had a guide assigned to show me around everything, and two cooks to keep me fed.

Sadly, the weather was pretty disappointing over the next four days, with Biblical downpours most days, and I never got to climb the local volcano.  

Wild waterlogged soccer game on Titiru

I did make it into the caves, and walked around the local village watching the school students play football since their teachers had all had to go to Munda to go to the bank, leaving them at a loose end.  Snorkelling was challenging, as it was almost impossible to get from the limestone shore over the reef into the water.  I enjoyed swimming in the freshwater lagoon, although we later saw a big crocodile basking on the opposite shore and I decided swimming probably wasn't worth the risk.  The mangroves were full of massive soldier crabs and interesting birds, including red-throated parrots. Mostly, though, I read (finally finishing Proust's In Search of Lost Time, after almost two years of off-and-on reading), juggled, played guitar and drew, waiting for the rain to end.  

Titiru Lagoon

 I spent a lot of time talking to my guide, Haigo, and the owner of the lodge, Kilo.  From them I got a bit of a picture of the texture of life in the outer islands.  The area around Munda is a hotspot for logging by a Malaysian multinational, and Haigo and Kilo had both worked for logging firms, often the only source of paid employment to be found.  By some estimates, there are only about 3 years' worth of timber left to  be felled in the entire country.  The country's prime minister is in contempt of high court rulings to halt logging by his relatives in his constituency.  The main agricultural crop in the boondocks, copra (roasted coconut flesh) sells for a mere S$2.80 a kilogram (US$0.40 a kg).  The country has a population of about 600,000 people and they speak an amazing 60 different languages.  There are missionaries and members of the Wycliffe Society on every island trying to translate the Bible into all these languages.  Local villagers get paid S$4 an hour for casual labour (US$ 0.55 an hour), very low given the high prices in shops.

My very well-paid boatman Eddie

After 4 enjoyable, lazy days, it was time to leave my island.  I paid S$2000 (about US$300) for my 4 days of lodging and food; expensive, but par for the course in the Solomons.  What really annoyed me was that my boat trip to and from Titiru (2 45-minute rides on a 30-hp open dinghy) cost almost as much:  S$800 each way.  There are no poor boat owners in the Solomons!  I got to Munda, caught a flight to Honiara and spent my last night at the Agnes Guesthouse, trying to sleep through the deafening loudspeakers of a Christian revival meeting across the street, and (at 3 am) the loudest dogfight I have ever heard.  

As I flew out to Port Moresby on July 21st, I  reflected on my experience in the Solomons.  It was remarkably expensive for not very good quality food and accommodation.  The diving in Munda was great but (again) really expensive.  The country itself is a bit sad:  poor, politically dysfunctional, with no economic growth and serious social problems (rape, murder, unemployment, casual violence), with venal leaders addicted to selling out the country's resources cheaply to foreigners in exchange for a cut of the action.  I don't see this changing for the better anytime soon.  So I'm glad I visited, but I won't be rushing back again any time soon.  Little did I know that PNG was going to make me miss the Solomons!

Three weeks of beaches and diving

Sunday, July 6, Lipah Beach, Bali (edited and pictures added in October, 2015)

It’s been a good three weeks since I last posted on my blog, and that has not been due to a lack of travels about which to blog.  Instead, I have barely seen an internet connection worthy of the name, and haven’t had access to a computer until I got back here a few days ago.

When last I wrote, I was in Dili, East Timor.  Some of my faithful readers (take a bow, Hans Westbroek) thought that there was too much existential angst/burnout/mid-life crisis in the last post.  I’m glad to report that three weeks of beaches, diving and relaxation have put me in a much more positive (and, for me, more usual) frame of mind.  I am about as relaxed and happy state of mind as I have been for the past 10 months.

Michael and Pyae Pyae

When I left Dili, on June 13th, I flew to Bali to meet Terri.  I had hours to wait until her flight arrived (she was in New Zealand, visiting her family), so I arranged to meet up with a former colleague from my Yangon days, Michael, who has just finished 4 years of working at the Bali International School.  It was great to see him and his Burmese wife Pyae Pyae again, and to meet his young son Kevin for the first time. He is off to work in Shenzhen, China; international school teaching is so itinerant that I always seem to be meeting former colleagues in new and exotic locales.

The view from Terri's place in Lipah.

When Terri arrived, we took a taxi up to her place here in Lipah Beach, in the Amed area in the northeast corner of Bali.  She bought her house here four years ago, and has visited it numerous times, but this was the first time for me to visit it.  I was a bit skeptical of how much I would like the area (I have not been the biggest fan of Bali in the past), but it has proved to be an amazing location.  This corner of the island is a bit of a backwater, off the main road and not disfigured by huge hotels and masses of foreigners.  It’s a dryer bit of the island, and not suited for rice growing, so it’s not what we think of as typically Balinese (stepped rice terraces glinting green in the sunshine).  The tallest mountain on the island, Mount Agung, towers malevolently over this area (its last eruption, in 1963, killed over a thousand people), although it’s usually shrouded in clouds by mid-morning.  The coastline is a series of tiny horseshoe bays of black volcanic sand with steep hills rising behind.  The beaches are covered in the small outrigger sailboats, jukungs, so typical of Bali, with their colourful sails furled along their bamboo spars.

Terri’s house sits up a hill maybe 25 vertical metres above the ocean, but so close that I can hear the roar of the incoming surf and hear the local boys playing soccer on the beach.  There are a number of smaller hotels scattered along the road, but much of the village consists of Balinese villagers’ houses, many of them in the process of being improved with the proceeds of working in tourism.  Every morning a small armada of fishermen set out in their jukungs to fish with hand-held longlines for tuna, barracuda and mahi-mahi.  It’s tourist season now, and there is a steady increase in the number of white faces on the beach and in the shops and restaurants, but it’s far from being the crazed frenzy of Kuta Beach.  Instead this area seems to cater to a quieter crowd, including a number of long-term Bali residents who have built houses straight out of the pages of Architectural Digest on the headlands between the bays.  The water is warm and good for swimming, and parts of the bay have coral in excellent condition.

Colourful sailboat off Lipah Beach

An added attraction is that about 20 kilometres up the coast is the diving mecca of Tulamben, where one of the most famous shipwreck dive sites in the world, the USAT Liberty, is located.  On our second day here, Terri and I went diving there, exploring parts of the huge WWII transport ship that was torpedoed by the Japanese in 1942.  It’s a very intricate dive area, full of holds and holes and rusted-out floors to explore for both big and small sea life.  It was our first dive in over a year, since our Maldives trip, and so it was a little bit of a readjustment, but great fun.  I would like to go back and do some more exploration someday.

Relaxing over breakfast on the terrace at Lipah

Mostly, though, for the three days we were in Lipah we swam, ran, walked into the hills to visit Terri’s teak trees and the village houses of the family with whom she works here in Lipah, and ate well.  The views from the terrace looking out over the bay, where I am sitting now in the late afternoon light typing this blog, are spectacular and lend themselves to lots of lazing about with a Kindle, or sipping a nocturnal whiskey before bed while watching the stars dance over the ocean.

Terri, teak tree owner

Terri with her housekeeper Luh, Luh's husband and son

On Tuesday the 17th of June we finally tore ourselves away from this paradisiacal existence and headed back along the three-hour drive to the airport.  We caught a flight to Makassar, the main city on the island of Sulawesi, and then another turboprop flight to Luwuk, an island on the eastern peninsula of this starfish-shaped island.  We got in at sunset and decided to make one long day of it and hired a minivan to drive us seven excruciating, bone-crunching hours to Ampana, the ferry terminus for the Togean Islands.  It was a hellacious experience, with our driver living out his Paris-Dakar fantasies as he squealed tires around curves, slalomed between huge potholes and hammered over frequent gravel sections, accompanied by a horrible soundtrack of Indonesian techno music that got louder as time wore on.  We got to Ampana at 1:30 in the morning and fell into bed instantly.

Kadidiri's pier

The horrorshow on the road did save us a full day of travel, though, as we caught a ferry at 10 am the next morning to take us to the Togeans, an almost mythical backpacker favourite that had been on my to-visit list for the past 18 years, since my first visit to Indonesia.  By 2 pm we were disembarking in Wakai, the unappealing main city of the archipelago, and hopping on a speedboat to take us to Kadidiri Island, our home for the next five days.  We checked into the Kadidiri Paradise and settled in for some fun, relaxation and diving.

Terri on the pier at Kadidiri

Paradise has a great location, looking out over the Gulf of Tomini, surrounded by extensive coral reefs and good diving sites, and blessed with spectacular sunsets seen from the long pier.  We did some good diving there over three days, first in the immediate vicinity (lovely coral walls but distressingly little big fish life and no turtles), then around the nearby volcanic island of Una Una (much better, with a big school of barracuda, although still no turtles, sharks or mantas), and then the highlight, the wreck of a B-24 bomber from World War Two that made an emergency landing on the sea back in 1945.  It was a spectacular dive, with the aluminum of the plane not rusting and allowing all the features of the plane to be easily spotted.  The machine guns on the upper turret looked almost ready to fire, while the instrumentation in the cockpit was still intact.  Even the propeller on one of the four huge engines was still in place, as were the huge vertical tabs on the enormous tail.  Lots of fish life, lots of history and atmosphere.  On the way back we stopped and did a muck dive, looking for interesting critters, and saw robust ghost pipefish, a baby frogfish, a mantis shrimp, a snake eel and a plethora of nudibranchs.

Knobbed hornbill

On land, I was happy to see lots of interesting tropical birds, including a pair of knobbed hornbills who put on a great morning display for Terri on her birthday, and lots of colourful lorikeets.  The snorkeling was excellent, and our sunset viewing was second-to-none.

Kadidiri sunset

Although the dive shop was well run by Emmi, an irrepressible Finnish dive instructor, the same could not be said for the hotel, which lacked a manager on-site, was woefully understaffed and ran a bit like Fawlty Towers. The restaurant, in particular, was pretty mediocre.  After we had finished our days of diving, Terri and I decided to head to another island, Fadhila, to have a change of scene.  We chartered a boat and on the way we stopped off to snorkel with stingless jellyfish in a small salt-water lake.  I had done something similar in Palau back in 2007, and really enjoyed the spooky experience of being surrounded by literally thousands of pulsing orange jellyfish.  Terri was less taken, however, and was convinced that her subsequent ear infection was thanks  to the murky, stagnant water of the jellyfish lake.

Heading off from Kadidiri to Fadhila

Fadhila

Fadhila was a breath of fresh air, literally, after the windless, mouldy sweatbox of Kadidiri Paradise.  Set on a breezy peninsula, the rooms were clean, cool and perfect for sleeping, with hammocks for reading in the constant sea breeze.  The snorkeling was great, and there was an outrigger canoe that we could borrow to paddle around the island, flying over the extensive coral gardens that fringed the island.  The food was excellent, and there were interesting fellow guests to talk with at dinner.

Terri swimming at Fadhila

The excellence of the hotel, however, was offset for us by the incredibly painful ear infection that afflicted Terri right from our arrival on the island.  By the end of our four days, she was crying with pain and her ear, along with the entire side of her face, was a swollen, red, angry mass.  She was in such pain that we worried that her eardrum might rupture.  She lived on a steady stream of painkillers and somehow managed to hold on until we could get to the city of Gorontalo on a night ferry and get to a hospital.  The hospital was a positive experience, as it was efficiently run, incredibly inexpensive (about 11 US dollars for a consultation with an ear, nose and throat specialist and three different sets of pills).  The pills took almost immediate effect, and Terri was reassured that as it was an infection of the outer ear, neither flying nor diving should have any adverse effects.

Relieved both physically and psychologically, we flew off the next day, Saturday, June 28th, for our next diving destination, the Derawan Archipelago.  We caught three successive Lion Air flights (back to Makassar, over to Balikpapan and then a turboprop to tiny Berau), although my backpack didn’t make the last flight and we had to wait for its arrival while feasting on an excellent lunch in Berau.  Then came a two-hour drive past a monstrous coal mine (the reason for the existence of the airport), lots of slash-and-burn agriculture and plenty of palm oil plantations, before a boat ride took us out to Derawan Island and the Derawan Dive Lodge, our home for the next four nights.

I had first heard of the diving in this area back in 2005 when I was doing a divemaster course on Bunaken Island, north Sulawesi.  Some of the customers of the dive shop had dived on Sangalaki a few months before and had raved about the turtles and manta rays.  I had kept it in mind over the years, and when Terri and I decided to travel through Indonesia this summer, I looked into diving.  Sangalaki’s one resort closed some years ago, but dive operations on Derawan and on Maratua islands still visit it regularly.

Looking pretty happy with the diving!!

The three days of diving we had while staying at DDL were some of the best of my entire diving career.  Amazingly Terri’s ear was back to normal by the time we got to Derawan We started with a day on Kakaban island, drifting along amazing vertical coral walls in search of pygmy seahorses, of which we saw two, tiny creatures a few millimetres long hidden in huge gorgonian sea fans.  We also managed to see a black-tip shark and a large leopard shark resting on the bottom, along with a couple of turtles.  Between dives we also visited another jellyfish lake (Terri lasted a few minutes, but then retreated to the ocean to snorkel).

The second day the diving only got better at Maratua Island, with tons of turtles, a couple of big eagle rays and an incredible blizzard of barracuda hanging out in the crazy currents of a channel that drained Maratua Lagoon.  It was Terri’s most exhilarating dive ever, flying at the end of a tether attached to a reef hook, surrounded by huge masses of barracuda.

Coming home from our manta encounter

It was all just a prelude to the third day, when we finally dived legendary Sangalaki.  The day started perfectly as I saw no fewer than 13 big turtles from the bow of the boat as we passed over seagrass beds near Derawan.  The day was all about manta rays, and when after two dives we had only seen one, I was a bit downcast.  While we were eating lunch on the boat, though, Terri spotted fins breaking the surface not far away, and we realized that mantas were circling right at the surface of the water.  The dive that followed was absolutely incredible, with us sitting on the sandy bottom and watching as massive manta rays flew past and over us in all directions.  At times it was impossible to know where to look, as there were mantas coming in from three different directions.  At least six individuals (and probably several more) made between 30 and 40 passes, leaving us utterly awestruck.  Even at the end of the dive, as we hung on reefhooks in a channel doing a safety stop, a manta ray appeared beside me, hung motionless in the current for a while and then suddenly vanished as another manta flashed aggressively past him.  We came up grinning from ear to ear, completely blown away by the experience.  Finally, to cap it off, we encountered a big school of dolphins as we motored back to Derawan.

I was utterly impressed by the marine life on display around Derawan.  Even though it’s expensive to get to, expensive to dive and expensive to stay, I think Derawan was worth every penny.  I have never seen so many big, old green turtles in one place as I did just off the beach of the dive lodge.  The mantas and barracuda were incredible, and the general diversity and quantity of big fish was impressive.  I would rate it up there with Sipadan, Palau, the Maldives, Bunaken and Lembeh Strait as one of the premier dive sites in all of Asia (and hence the world).

Sean and I reunited again in Lipah

Then, sadly, it was time to tear ourselves away, backtrack to Bali and spend another four idyllic days here in Lipah, two of them in the company of my friend and fellow nomad Sean.  Indonesia is the sixth country in which we have crossed paths over the years (France, Switzerland, Japan, Egypt and the UK being the others) and as always it was great to bounce ideas off his hyperactive mind.  He arrived here expecting a small shack in a teak forest and was utterly seduced by the beach, the views and the house.

Wandering the rice fields around Ubud

And now it’s time to end this narrative, go find dinner and pack for a couple of days in Ubud before I head east, far east, to the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea.  Life is good, and travel is having its usual therapeutic effects on my until-recently-overstressed mind.

Ubud Jazz Cafe

Peace and Tailwinds

Graydon

Seminyak Beach and its pounding surf

PS  (October 2015) Terri and I did go to Ubud, where we spent a very relaxing day wandering the rice fields outside town, and a great evening listening to jazz in the Jazz Cafe.  The next day Terri flew back to Switzerland, and I spent a day in the mass-tourism ugliness of Seminyak (redeemed only by its pretty surf-pounded beach) before flying off to the Solomon Islands.  I've added a couple of pictures from Ubud and Seminyak.

Mal-diving!

Leysin, Switzerland, May 19, 2013

Our tiny piece of paradise, Makunudu

It’s a snowy mid-May morning here in the Alps, so it’s a good time to catch up on my shamefully neglected travel blog.  With a trip to Iceland coming up next month, and a student trip to Cyprus before that, I should get the fingers loose and type up a few words about my trip to the Maldives, my 112^th country. 

The view from our cottage of an afternoon storm rolling in.

The swing where we whiled away many enjoyable minutes.

I rarely take package holidays; mass tourism is not really my style, and I think that tour buses, charter flights and cruise liners bring out the worst in human nature.  Having said that, there are certain countries, like Bhutan (see my post from my 2008 trip there) that essentially require you to take a tour in order to enter the country, and the Maldives is one of these.  You can fly to Male independently, but if you want to get out to one of the paradisiacal islands that dot the Indian Ocean, booking a package tour is the only reasonable way to go.  Years ago, while backpacking around India in 1997, I looked into booking a holiday deal to the Maldives from Madras or Trivandrum, but it was well beyond my microscopic budget at the time. 

Since then, the Maldives (like pretty much every country on Earth that I haven’t yet visited) has been on my radar.  It’s legendary for its diving, its manta rays, its sybaritic luxury resorts and its outrageous prices.  This March, when, despite a December-mid February ski season of record-breaking snowfall, it seemed as though the Engadin valley wasn’t going to provide Terri and me with great ski touring, we made a snap decision to go to the Maldives.  Although our trip coincided with Easter, a huge holiday season in Europe, we managed to get reasonably inexpensive package deals to a little island named Makunudu through a Swiss holiday outfit called Manta Reisen.  Within a couple of weeks of deciding that we would head for the sun, Terri and I found ourselves getting on an Edelweiss Air direct flight to Male, the capital of the Maldives.

Our first afternoon on Makunudu

 

The Maldives, a bit like Bhutan, has adopted a model of tourism in which they try to maximize economic benefit to the country from foreign visitors while minimizing the impact of the tourists on the daily life and culture of the country.  While Bhutan has done this by restricting tourist numbers, the Maldives has thrown open the doors to tourists but restricted where they can go inside the country.  The country’s 1192 islands, grouped in 26 oval atolls, are divided into either tourist islands or local islands.  The tourist islands are completely given over to expensive resorts, while the local islands have only local Maldivean inhabitants.  Given the bare flesh and booze of the resorts and the strict Sharia law in force on the local islands, it seems to make sense to keep the two cultures apart.  However, given the long history of repressive government, particularly under the former president Maumoun Abdul Gayoom, it also points to a government keen on maintaining control over the economy and individual citizens.

The colourful crabs that prowled the rocks of the breakwater

 

We landed in Male a bit bleary-eyed, met our Manta Reisen rep and strolled across the street to the boat jetty where a sleek speedboat awaited.  There were 15 or  so other tourists aboard, all destined for a different island resort owned by the same company as owns Makunudu.  As we sped off across the gentle waters inside North Male atoll, we could see the highrises of the crowded capital city off to our left.  The individual islets of the atoll are so low (the highest point of land in the entire country is only 2.4 metres above sea level) that we didn’t see many islands until we were quite close, giving the strange feeling of speeding off on a small speedboat into the far reaches of the Indian Ocean.  After a stop at Cocoa Island resort, a big hotel bristling with water cottages built directly over the ocean, Terri and I arrived at the tiny island of Makunudu and immediately fell in love.

Friendly hermit crab

Big Bertha of the hermit crab world

Makunudu is a microscopic island, perhaps 150 metres long and 50 metres across at its widest point.  It contains 40 or so bungalows, a restaurant, bar, dive shop and employee housing.  The island is densely forested and is surrounded by a huge expanse of coral reefs.  There is basically nothing to do other than swim, snorkel, scuba dive, eat, sleep, read and watch stunning sunsets.  Hermit crabs trek across the beach, stingrays cruise into the sandy shallow and waterhens prowl the undergrowth.  

The juvenile stingray who cruised right up to the shoreline every day

Since it was such an inactive vacation, it seems as though there is little to describe about our trip, but the underwater action was really quite spectacular.  When we went, Terri, who last dived well over a decade ago, wasn’t sure whether she would dive or not.  As it turned out, she loved diving so much that she did her advanced open water certification, and she and I dived quite a lot.  The coral reefs weren’t as spectacular as they might have been (the Maldives has been prone to lots of coral bleaching as the Indian Ocean water temperatures increase), but the fish life is very healthy.  The shark population seems pretty robust, there are lots of turtles, and we saw manta rays.  

Feeling pretty happy with life on Makunudu

The manta ray encounter, appropriately at Manta Point, was pretty spectacular.  We were making our way along a steeply sloping coral wall, and I was the first to spot the manta sailing serenely into view.  I had seen a manta before, in the Philippines, but this one was in much clearer water and so was much easier to see.  It was huge, a good 2.5 metres across, and he headed directly towards Terri, much to her alarm.  Something that big, even if you know it’s a gentle giant filter feeder, can feel menacing when he’s making a bee-line at you.  He passed perhaps a metre from us and soared effortlessly past us up the slope, his wings flapping lazily but efficiently.   We missed another manta while we were in the water, but snorkelers at the surface saw more than the divers did, with mantas circling just below the surface and breaching from time to time.

We saw plenty of white-tip sharks on most dives, with a few blacktips here and there.  The best shark experience, however, was on a night dive right off the beach in front of the restaurant.  We saw a few sharks here and there as we drifted down to 10 metres, but then our guide had us kneel on the sandy bottom and hide our torchlights against our chests.  After a minute or two we all shone our lights around, and the torch beams lit up a good half-dozen nurse sharks cruising around us in circles, an experience which definitely got our pulses racing.

Terri and her dive instructor Satoko, on the way home from diving

We went diving on a fairly slow local boat, giving us lots of time to absorb the sun and the views from the roof.  One particular coral patch that we passed frequently was a favourite hunting ground for a pod of dolphins, and we saw their dorsal fins bobbing up and down through the surface as they rounded up shoals of fish.  The marine life in general seemed to be in good shape; we didn’t see a lot of fishing going on near the dive sites, and there seems to be a marine reserve in place around a lot of islands.  There were always a few tuna and trevally flashing past in the deep water, and vast clouds of colourful reef fish like red tooth triggerfish.  It was good to get underwater for the first time since my trip to Oman in December, 2011.

Warming up in the sun after a dive

Terri atop our dive boat

Our days above the water floated by delightfully.  I read several books on my Kindle, did yoga, snorkeled, caught up on a few months of grading physics labs, and ate meals of sybaritic luxury.  We had saved a bundle of money by only signing up for half board at the hotel, but the breakfasts were vast spreads that kept us going through the day, aided by a clandestine sandwich that we would sneak out of the restaurant every morning.  The food, like the service and the room cleaning, was remarkably good.  Evening meals would be preceded by sunset cocktails at the western end of the island, and by 10 pm we would be tucked up in bed (usually decorated in clever ways by the man who cleaned our room), ready for another day of relaxation.  It was hard to peel ourselves off the beach and get back on the long flight back to Zurich at the end of the week!

Not a bad seat for a lazy afternoon

Decoration by our room cleaning man

I’m not sure I would go back to the Maldives anytime soon (there are still nearly 100 countries left to explore first), but it was a wonderful, restoring experience with some of the best diving I’ve done.  It's well worth visiting, not just to tick off another country, but also to see some of the best-preserved marine life in the Indian Ocean, and experience some luxurious pampering. It was fascinating from the point of view of natural beauty.   

Night life in the Maldives

Another Makunudu light show

However, on the human front the country’s political future is still unclear, with the reformist former president (jailed and tortured for years for opposing Gayoom) having been removed from office after an army mutiny in 2012 and now under arrest for abuse of office, and the old tyrant Gayoom positioning himself to run for president again.

While we were on Makunudu, we watched a documentary called The Island President, about ex-president Nasheed, his years in jail and his attempt to get the Maldives’ position on climate change and the dangers posed by rising sea levels recognized at the Copenhagen climate change conference.  The optimistic tone of that film contrasts with the political gloom currently enveloping the country.  Given the natural beauty of so much of the Maldives, I can only hope that it manages to steer clear of the political and civic ugliness that has marred so much of its recent history.

The culmination of a week of innovative towel and flower arrangement

In an amusing postscript to our trip, as we were waiting in Male airport, I spotted a bottle of 50-year-old Balvenie’s whisky for sale in the duty free.  It’s faintly ironic that in a country where the inhabitants are prohibited from buying alcohol, they’re selling some of the most expensive whisky on earth.  And who on earth buys a $46,000 bottle of hooch on the spur of the moment in airport duty free?

Yes, you read that price right