We're back from our tropical adventure in Indonesia — with about 700 underwater photos and 400 more freckles in tow.
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I have to confess that I even enjoyed the parts of the trip that were supposed to be painful, like the 12-hour flight from Amsterdam to Singapore. Buckled in front of a 6x6-inch personal entertainment screen, I was ecstatic (and I really do mean ecstatic) to find more than 50 English-language movies and TV shows upon which to binge.
It's not like we're living in Bhutan. But we haven't yet tackled the project of getting a membership at our local Videoland, and we don't yet have a digital TV antenna, so our couch-based entertainment options have been a little limited. (Insert deep sigh of longing for Netflix here...)
As a side note, even though it explicitly mocks people who use their travel experiences as fodder for blog entries, I can't help but recommend a terrific Japanese movie set in Hawai'i that we saw on the plane: Honokaa Boy. It's definitely one of the best movies I've seen in the last year.
Relative to our other far-flung vacations, the rest of the itinerary for this one was pretty straightforward: a 3-hour flight from Singapore to Manado, which is on the island of Sulawesi (during which I was completely unconscious due to the aforementioned TV bingeing in place of sleeping), then a car ride to the port of Bitung, then a 10-minute boat trip across Lembeh Strait to the dive resort.
When I say "dive resort", what I mean is a cluster of 6 very basic cabins, 3,000 geckos, a pair of bare-bones dive boats, a communicative rooster, and — with three long dives and three square meals each day and a semi-motley crew of divers from all over the world — a schedule and atmosphere remarkably similar to summer camp.
We also had a spidery friend lurking in our bathroom. Who happened to be 4 inches across!
Of the 8 other guests, roughly half were Dutch, so I was able to get a tiny bit of language practice, as well. John was not especially overjoyed when I suggested that we situate ourselves at a Dutch-speaking dinner table (aka "Nederlandse Tafel"), and things went from bad to worse when he was called upon to explain his physics research.
In the interest of defending John's honor, I have two disclaimers: one is that considering how little time he's spent studying and practicing it, John's Dutch is quite good. The other is that I would (still) be hard-pressed to explain his research project to anyone in English.
But a rough translation of his answer that night goes something like this: "So, there are these little particles from outer space that are very little, and they have high energy, and the little particles are coming, and coming down and...uhhhhh..."
At which point John's face telegraphed a desperate plea for help and the Dutch shouted in unison, "Say it in English!"
Needless to say, that was the end of Nederlandse Tafel for John and Autumn!
But our time spent underwater, where we communicated only with creature-identifying hand signals, was delightful. I think it was my favorite diving trip ever.
As I mentioned in my last post, the diving in Lembeh Strait is "muck diving", which means there aren't huge gardens of colorful coral in a crystal-clear sea. Instead, much of the diving resembles a dark moonscape, with thick, murky black sand beneath thick, murky water.
At some of the sites, there's a fair amount of trash in the water, which, while not ideal from an ecological standpoint, keeps things interesting. Everything looks 33 percent bigger underwater, so seeing a man's leather shoe crusted with colorful algae makes it seem like you've found the footwear of a larger-than-life King Neptune.
Now, some people like to dive because they like to hang around in lush, tropical underwater paradise. I like to dive because it's a big treasure hunt for critters, and finding bizarre camouflaged life forms hiding in the rubble is one of the best ways I can think of to spend an hour. Gorging myself on delicious Indonesian food is another, so you can see why this was an easy choice for us!
A small subset of our photos doesn't do justice to the diversity of underwater life in Lembeh, but here are a few for your viewing pleasure:
Muck diving is cephalopod heaven, which is good for people like us who are in heaven anytime they find cephalopods. On one dive alone, we saw a squid, two octopi and two cuttlefish!
There are also a number of dive sites crawling with nudibranchs, which are sea slugs (usually just a couple of inches long) that come in all varieties of shapes and colors.
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Lembeh is also famous for its frogfish, which are sponge-shaped bottom dwellers that "walk" on their pectoral fins instead of swimming. They attract prey by dangling a fleshy lobe like bait in front of their gaping maws. Luckily, we kept our wits about us and didn't fall for the trick. This one was so cute and grumpy looking, and he was only about 2 inches long!
John took all of the photos (using an older model digital Olympus and an underwater housing), which is great for me because my only responsibilities were keeping track of John and looking for creatures in the muck.
After seven straight days of diving (and eating, and sleeping, and changing in and out of dive gear, and showering in between dives, and avoiding ear infections, and identifying nudibranchs, and reviewing photos, and writing detailed dive logs...), we were pretty wiped out. Wiped out in a good way, but still wiped out!
Our next stop was Tangkoko National Park, home of tarsiers and black-crested macaques. It also turned out to be home of more chickens, pigs and other livestock than my mother could shake a flu vaccination syringe at.
We were especially entertained by the drove of pigs that we found rooting around in the sand at the beach near our village.
As some of our Dutch (quasi-) compatriots explained, there's an expression for when tourists visit a place and take photos of the surroundings and/or people without actually interacting with them or having a meaningful experience: apen kijken. As in, apen = monkeys and kijken = looking at.
(As a side note, I can't help but think that there is something fundamentally politically incorrect in this saying, but we're learning that there's absolutely no preoccupation with political correctness among the Dutch. When in Rome, I suppose, shudder with discomfort and do as the Romans do...)
But apen kijken was the order of the day in Tangkoko, where first we set out in the evening to observe tarsiers and then woke up early the next morning to go find the macaques.
The park uses a network of local guides to bring visitors in and observe wildlife, and so we marched in at 5:30 in the morning (after an unfortunate incident of me — ever the morning person! — putting my pants on inside out) with a friendly if hung-over guide from the village where we were staying.
We later met up with another couple and their guide, and learned that the standard practice was for the guides to dispatch someone to keep track of the monkeys and make sure that the guides can actually locate the animals.
As we got deeper into the jungle, the guides started a call-and-response with the macaque babysitter. It sounded to us like the sitter was off to our left, but the guides insisted on heading to the right. The sitter called out, the guides responded, but we kept getting further and further away...until finally the guides gave up and called the sitter's cell phone.
Macaque Hotline, how can I help you?!
Having plunged into the undergrowth in pursuit of the sitter's calls, we proceeded to bushwhack our way toward the macaques. Never have I felt like a lesser ape than while crashing like an elephant through the jungle in clumsy pursuit of a monkey with a brain half the size of mine!
Eventually we did find a group of 15 to 20 macaques, which were really fun to watch as they ate and climbed trees and squabbled and groomed each other and tried to urinate on us. We were also amused to learn that the guides had named the alpha male "Rambo."
A day and a half in the blistering heat and the (even more) basic accommodation near Tangkoko was enough for us, so we then headed to the city of Manado (population: 500,000) for the last three days of our vacation.
Parental advisory! If you are our parents, you probably don't want to know that for us to get to Manado, our taxi driver had to drive us through a forest fire in which the edges of our one-lane road were in flames.
I have to confess that a key factor in our decision to head to Manado was the possibility of an air-conditioned hotel room, which we felt guilty about but not guilty enough to not purchase. As it turns out, our hotel room was a lovely, cool oasis from the heat, though we learned that even a medium-to-high-end accommodation is not immune to rats scratching ardently in the ceiling!
Manado is an interesting place: as the main transit hub for dive centers in Lembeh and nearby Bunaken, it gets a lot of visitors, but to say that our Lonely Planet guidebook had few kind words for it would be a grave understatement. Our impression was that few tourists stay for more than one night, and even fewer venture out into the shops.
But we had a great time exploring the malls and grocery stores, picking up hard-to-find Indonesian ingredients to smuggle back to the Netherlands, and dodging the ubiquitous aqua-blue, van-sized taxis called mikrolets and the off-brand SUVs that everyone who is not in a mikrolet seemed to be driving.
For the record, Indonesian traffic laws appeared to be fairly...fluid.
Most of the time, we were the only people dumb enough to be walking around in the scorching heat of the afternoon, and we were certainly the only white (or in my case, reddish pink) people we encountered while out and about.
We also had fun exchanging greetings in English with kids we met on the street. "HELLO MISTER! HOW DO YOU DO?!" was a frequent salutation to both me and John. Manado doesn't get a lot of American tourists, and everyone we talked with was heartily pro-American. Thanks, President Obama!
Perhaps it goes without saying that we also ate our way through Manado, starting with a utensil-free dinner at a local restaurant where there was only one dish on the menu. Thanks to a hefty language barrier, we ended up with four red-flavored Fantas as our beverage of choice. The whole experience was exceptionally fun and the food (other than the red Fanta, which tastes like cough syrup) was delicious.
We also ate several great meals at the mall...though it was a very discouraging to find that mall food in Manado was significantly better than any Indonesian food we've found in the Netherlands.
Speaking of SUVs, we saw about 400 billboards advertising a new type of Suzuki SUV called the Vaganza. I don't know about you, but to me, that sounds like a glaring combination of two words, one of which is a part of the female anatomy and the other of which is "extravaganza."
