April 13, 2024

Charlie Rogers

Travel Blog, Travel, Blog

Travel Blog: Bohol, Philippines- Part Three: Let's Play It By Ear...

April 13, 2024

Charlie Rogers

Travel Blog, Travel, Blog

BOHOL, PHILIPPINES

Hiya folks, welcome back to the blog!

This will unfortunately be the last segment of blog from my trip to Bohol. I know, I know, we’re all sad about that. As we should be. Fear not though, we still have several days work of content, as well as a previously heavily hinted at & foreshadowed ailment to discuss in this blog. If you’re joining us here & looking at that big ole ‘Part Three’ at the top in confusion & bewilderment, worry not, the links for the previous two parts of this globetrotting romp will be posted below for your reading & visual pleasure! With all of those pieces of business out of the way I say let us continue along!

Part One

Part Two

PART THREE:

Day Six

We started off our day in the usual way. 6-something AM wake up, pancake with fruit, black coffee, & fresh mango/pinapple juice with ice. Next step; preparing gear/cameras for the day, loading up, & briefing & off we went to our first dive site.

You’ll only get a single photo from me on this dive site. The day prior Cari, Darin, & I had requested a change of pace & asked the guides if it was possible to do a muck dive (silt/sandy bottom, easily stirred up if you’re not careful) to which they obliged with a site just off of Anda town called J. Eden’s Place. No clue where that name came from apparently.

The trip out to J Eden’s was a bit tumultuous with larger waves than we’d experience the entirety of the days before. Evan found himself getting a bit sea sick. Despite the larger surge, we suited up & into the water we went.

I have a set of earplugs that are designed specifically for diving, they have a tiny hole in the middle so that the air inside the concha & external auditory canal creates a seal while still allowing the possibility for equalization. Since my left ear was feeling a little off the day before, I put in the large sized one & attempted the dive.

The large wasn’t big enough apparently & by the time we had gotten down to depth, past the Chocolate Chip Starfish & were starting to sink further to around 35 feet my left ear was screaming at me. I signaled to the group that something was wrong with my ear & that I was headed back to the boat only a short bit aways at this point.

The whole way back to the boat I was clinching my teeth, I could feel tears welling up in my eyes, & I felt a burning sensation in the left side of my throat. I got back to the boat, threw off my gear & began to clear the water from my ear while sitting in the sun awaiting the return of everyone else.

Of course when everyone returned they raved about the dive. My group had worked at one point to free a bunch of fish & a Mantis Shrimp from a dropped fishing net which they brought back on board with them. Additionally they’d seen Seahorses, Bluespotted Stingrays, & all of the other fun things that you find living in the substrate on a muck dive.

We weren’t entirely sure the diagnosis of my ear but as we continued on to the next site it began to feel better so I thought, you know, I’m going to give the larger earplug a try & see if that keeps me from feeling like this. I promise you, I am more intelligent than I seem at times.

The next site was a wall dive ironically named Wonderwall. With my larger earplug installed & a fresh tank we set about trying again.

I went down slower than everyone else, adjusting incrementally as the depth increased. The larger plug worked like a charm, I had no pain, no issue equalizing, I thought I was in the clear & that maybe I was just sporting the beginnings of an ear infection. I also had the team on deck prepared to help in the case that I had trouble equalizing on my way back up from depth. Neither ended up being an issue.

The wall really was a wonder! There were tons & tons of varietals of Nudibranchs, Commensal Shrimp, Arrow Crabs, the largest school of Engineer Gobies I have ever seen (talking like several feet in diameter), & a Marine Betta (Comet)! Additionally the wall house schools of Anthias, Scribbled Boxfish, Porcupine Pufferfish, & even a Stonefish which when JR gave me the signal for, I thought he was indicating that he was low on air. (The indication of stonefish & low on air are both a closed fist, only low on air is a closed at the chest.) Funny enough the signal for stonefish is also the signal for danger as stonefish are highly venomous if stepped on.

I made it back to the boat completely unscathed. The ear plug had worked & I’d had no issues with my ear at all during the dive so I was clearly not dealing with an equalization issue.

For lunch Cari & I had also made a request the night prior. I had raved to Evelyn, the resort manager, about the Filipino stew I’d had at lunch while we were all on our sunset cruise. A few of us, Cari & myself included, then had used that as an opportunity to request more Filipino dishes be served during our stay because why would you fly halfway across the world just to eat the same things you do at home? She had gladly obliged our request & in the morning had given us the option between a saucy beef & peanut dish or a mung bean soup. I chose the beef, as did most people. The thing that I knew, that I refrained from telling the rest of our party, was that the beef dish wasn’t just beef, but was in fact beef skin that had been cooking for almost a day & a half. The dish in question is called Balbacua & was absolutely delicious!

After lunch it was once again time for our afternoon dives. The site in question was called Dapdap & was in fact just off the coast of Magic Oceans to the west. The dive was actually projected to end at the resort itself. JR & I ended up being the only two from our group to go so he & I had a nice little private dive. With my extra large ear plug in place & kit assembled & accounted for we began our decent into the blue.

Dapdap is a site where, yes, you drop in on a wall, but around the last fifteen feet of the wall, from the bottom, is a dome carved out of the rock face. We started our dive in that little alcove. Here I found yet another Marine Betta, another Ornate Ghost Piperfish, & a rather curious little Flatworm cruising along the substrate.

Farther along & out a ways from the wall we found more interesting critters. We found a little grouping of Sexy Shrimp (yes, that’s literally what they’re called & no, I don’t know why), more Eels, two separate types of Mantis Shrimp; one peacock & one the name of which I’m not sure, & yet another Sea Turtle.

Everything was right as rain & business as normal until we came upon it; the largest Sea Turtle I have ever seen! No joke, this thing had to have a shell that was 4-5 feet from top to tail. It was enormous & was doing its best to wedge itself under a rock to sleep away the late afternoon. There was enough room on its back for two full grown Remoras which hung on snug while still leaving ample room for a good 3-4 more of them to nestle in.

We rounded off the dive & made our way back to shore. Along the way we stumbled upon a pair of Banded Pipefish, a big ole Coral Catfish, & a couple of Leopard Wrasse.

The ascent out of the water was an interesting one. We’d come up on the short & were in only about five feet of water when all of the sudden, there in front of us was the boat with its steps extended down into the water. JR de-finned first & climbed up & I followed only to find us at the resort’s dock, parked. We’d gotten out of the water, into the boat, to walk up onto the dock, & into the dive shop. It was a bit of a disorienting feeling.

After I got all of my gear taken care of for the evening I was met by Jamie who told me that he thought I may have a perforated ear drum. He recommended that I do an easy test to check & had me gather Evan & my ear plug & head to the resort pool. In the resort pool I had been told to go underwater, plug my nose, & blow out like I was trying to equalize. Evan had been asked to go in with me & with his mask on look to see if there were bubble evacuating from my ear. Sure enough there were.

With the ear mystery mostly solved we all agreed that is was probably for the best that I be done diving for the week even though there was another day’s worth of dives to go on. It was also recommended from both Jamie & my dive insurance that I go to a local doctor to get checked out & have them confirm our findings. Additionally it was advised that I start a preventative antibiotic as perforated drums often get inner ear infections from the water that has gotten in.

So off I went about the rest of my evening, to dinner & the like, with the newly acquired knowledge & field diagnosis of a perforated ear drum, knowing the following day I would need to find an official, proper diagnosis, & some medication.

End Of Day Six

Day Seven

I changed up my breakfast. With no risk of sea sickness or motion sickness from diving I opted out of my normal Pancake with fruit & instead went for a Ham & Cheese Omelet. It was lovely as well!

After breakfast I walked down to join everyone else while they were preparing to depart. I joined in their briefing, helped people to suit up, etc. etc. & once they were on their way I went & got dressed for my day on the town.

Jamie had already informed the main office that I needed a ride to the clinic. I went in to check on the status of all of that & they informed me that a tuk-tuk had been called & asked me to wait in my room until it arrived. They would send someone to fetch me once it showed. They also informed me that the tuk-tuk would be about 500 NFP (8.84 USD) each way & apologized profusely that I’d have to walk to the top of the hill to get into it, as it couldn’t make the drive down the steep driveway into the resort. I told them it was truly no problem & went back to my room to await my transit.

They had originally quoted me something like 30 minutes to an hour but it ended up only being about 10 I believe. I was retrieved & returned to the head office where I was greeted by Marj, one of the resort staff. She informed me that she would be accompanying me to the clinic, if that was alright, along with Shakka, one of the resort dogs.

We walked up the hill to where the tuk-tuk waited & filed in the back. I’m assuming he already knew the purpose of our trip because no words were exchanged other than ‘hellos’ & off he went.

I had never ridden in a tuk-tuk before. I’m assuming they’re similar world wide, but this one was essentially a motorcycle with a hard shell covering mounted to it.

Our trip took us back the way in which we’d previously gone for the Whale Shark dive. We turned from the peninsula where Anda sits & ended up in Guindulman. After weaving through the side streets a bit we arrived at the clinic.

Liao’s Clinic is a two room operation sat on the end of a strip. When we arrived there were around 10-15 people already sat waiting. The doctor didn’t arrive until 9 AM & I think we were around 20 minutes early so naturally we had to wait. The driver’s booking included him waiting so Marj, Shakka, & I waited outside the clinic in the back of the tuk-tuk.

The time went by quickly. Marj & I struck up conversation. We talked all about each of our separate curiosities about how the other lived & what life was like respectively & I introduced her to the scientific fact that white people can’t do ‘the Asian squat.’ At one point I remarked at the two roosters who were leashed up outside of the store down the street from the clinic. They each had a leash tied to one of their ankles & each time they would reach the end of their cord they would behave as though its existence was entirely unbeknownst to them up until that exact moment. There came a point in which one of the children waiting at the clinic released the CO2 filled balloon he’d been holding & it got picked up by the wind. Unfortunately for one of the roosters, but fortunately for me, the wind eddied & swirled right where the rooster had taken up residence at the end of its leash. I watched for a good 10 seconds as the balloon whirled around & around, smacking into this poor rooster over & over. All the while the rooster did its best to escape, exclusively doing so in the direction opposite of where he was tied. I hate to say I cackled at the poor beast, but nevertheless, I did.

When it was time for me to be checked out Marj accompanied me into the room where the doctor worked. He sat me in a white lawn chair & heard me out. Marj translated any words that were lost in the language divide, he looked in my ear, & sure enough confirmed that I had a lightly perforated ear drum with a hole only about the size of a pin. He prescribed me a preventative weeks worth of antibiotics & steroid drops which I was to do twice a day for two weeks. My total at the clinic with medications included was 2700 NFP or $48 USD. #CriesInAmerican

After I’d paid & acquired my drugs we asked the driver if he wouldn’t mind stopping at the market down the street for us to check on something. I am a lover of Jackfruit, I love it dearly. If you read any of my Indonesian blogs you’ll know that to be true, but anytime I’m in the islands or in Southeast Asia I do my utmost to find out. We went to the market to peruse for one but unfortunately came up empty. Though I’m grateful for the attempt!

We had a quick turn over when we returned to the Oceans of Magic, well relative to the turn overs of the rest of the trip. We were to meet those who had gone out diving on a beach between the resort & Anda for a barbecue. Evan & I departed with the staff & a few other resort guests as the others would arrive by boat.

When we got to Bituon Beach we found the kitchen staff already hard at work. They were grilling marinated meats (Chicken & Pork) & had a whole line of cloth covered tables set up with table settings all along. Ev & I sat & waited for the boats with our party members to arrive which only took about ten minuted before they appeared. Once they were sat we were served the Meats with Soya Sauce, two kinds of Salad (Potato & Garden), & beverages we’d ordered ahead previously in the week.

After a wonderful lunch on a perfect day at the beach we were treated to Ube ‘Dirty Ice Cream’ as the dive staff serenaded us via the Karaoke booth on the other side of the beach.

Don’t worry, I won’t leave you hanging, I’m going to address dirty ice cream & where the moniker originated, or at least what I was told the name came from. Dirty ice cream is so called because it typically comes from a street vendor. That’s not the dirty part. The dirty part stems from the vendors walking around selling their goods with a bell. When kids would ask their parents if they could get ice cream their parents would always say “nah, that’s dirty ice cream” as a way of deterring their children from wanting the vendor’s product. The ice cream & the vendors are perfectly clean, the name just stuck as a way to make children not want it.

At a certain point during Evan dipped from lunch to go hunt down a bathroom, as he is one to do. (He’s going to beat me for saying that.) Upon asking to be shown the restroom he was brought over to someone’s home near the beach where he was ushered inside & shown to their personal bathroom. After going about his going abouts he turned around to leave the bathroom & there, on the back of the door, is a 8X10 cut out picture of none other than early 2000s Disney icon Hilary Duff.

With full tummies & sunburnt skin we boarded back on the dive boat & were taken to the resort from there.

Knowing I would be forced to spend my day landlocked I had booked a massage. The resort had a built in spa where you could request services up to an hour before you would like them. I booked a 90 minute Hilot massage.

Hilot is a Filipino type of massage. It is a mix of deep tissue massage & energy healing where the practitioners use their hands to find areas of blocked energy & knead them out. The massage itself, while being deep tissue in nature, is very gentle & is less like the Swedish variety where pressure is applied in long strokes to the muscle fiber & more like the kneading of a cat along the fibers. It was absolutely lovely.

About an hour into my hour & a half of relaxation the Tokay Gecko that I was unaware lives in the room decided to start chirping right above my head. The gecko’s call is loud, very loud & it scared the ever loving hell out of me. Imagine being in a state of total relaxation & having energy work done & out of nowhere you’re ripped from your tranquility by the “EHT EER” of the gecko. Click on the sound files in the wiki link attached to the name if you want to hear what they sound like.

After my massage I found Evan sat at the bar, gossiping it up with Ester. He had let it leak to her that I am a Singer/Songwriter & she had gone through the trouble of pulling up my entire Spotify catalog which she then proceeded to wait to play until I showed up. We made it through all of the songs several times.

Around 7 PM we were all called to dinner where I got to sit & hear the rounding out of everyone else’s week of dive. To be entirely honest though, I had had a fantastic day. Inspire of the injury, inspire of the inability to dive, I got to travel around & do one of my favorite aspects of travel which is connecting with people around the world & submerging myself not in their waters, but in their lives. To once again be entirely honest, this is one of the days of the trip that I remember the most fondly & with the utmost joy in my heart.

End Of Day Seven

Day Eight

Wake up was the normal 6-ish AM natural occurrence. With our last day of activities ahead of us breakfast was again starting a little earlier than the previous day & with no more diving, boat rides, or current in my near future, I opted for what I thought was a Breakfast Sandwich for breakfast. It turned out to just be a sandwich with assorted veggies & no egg. It was my fault for misreading the menu.

After breakfast we all loaded up into the vans with a day bag & a potential change of clothes & off we went to see what the day held. Some of the dive & resort staff joined us, including JR & Lee Ann & after about an hour to an hour & a half we landed at our first stop, the Philippine Tarsier Sanctuary.

The Sanctuary is, as their name suggests, dedicated to protecting the Philippine Tarsier, one of the smallest primates in the world, inhabiting the southeastern most islands in the Philippine Archipelago. The primates are nocturnal & only measure around 3-6 inches in size with an adult weight of between 2.5 & 6 ounces.

The facility itself consists of a parking lot, a placard arched entrance, a set of facilities, & an informational museum which serves as the entrance to the sanctuary as well as an educational center. Once you pass through the museum you find yourself in a chainlink fenced in forest scribbled with meandering trails. Posted all over are signs telling you to please be quiet & refrain from flash photography as the Tarsiers are trying to sleep during visiting hours.

The first of them we encountered was amongst a cluster of short palms. It was tucked up in the foliage about seven or eight feet from the ground. It looked to be clinging to the palm for dear life, hoping to blend in from us, which I would assume it took as predatory. The next couple were in similar predicaments with the farthest we found only being about nine feet off of the ground. Some were more active than others, peaking up from their slumber to watch us, all had ears that reminded me of Yoda.

After we’d pestered the tarsiers enough we all went about our separate activities. Some wandered the museum, watched the informational videos, & asked questions to those who worked there. Evan & I on the other hand went out to the entrance patio where one of the area dogs had brought out her puppy. As I approached she gave me a bit of a snarl but I sat & waited for her approach & approval before giving her a pet & continuing on to see her puppy.

When the others had exhausted their fill of the primates & the dogs had their fill of me we all loaded back up into the vans & headed down the road to what would be lunch.

Lunch was an interesting one. We were only in the van about fifteen minutes before we were dropped in Loboc at the Loboc River Tourist Complex. Once we were checked in we were all shown down the outdoor corridor to the river itself where we were directed down a flight of stairs & onto a series of floating barges each with restaurant seating set up. We were all asked to be seated & were brought Cucumber Lemonade before the boats swiftly departed from shore.

Once we were moving we were then directed to line up at the end of the barge where a table strewn with all sorts of Filipino foods had been set up. We each grabbed ourselves a plate & made our way through selecting the items that looked appealing to each of us. As we began to dine a singer & guitar player took up a mic in the corner & began to serenade us with mostly 80s love songs. It was charming.

A couple of minutes up river the duo stopped & instead we docked right up to a stage that jutted out into the water. There about twenty people were dancing & singing their way through a catalog of assorted traditional Filipino & Spanish songs & dances (the Spanish occupied the Philippines for over 300 years.) After they were done they waved goodbye & we continued up river.

Farther up stream we found ourselves privy to all sorts of activities both in the river & above. There were zipliners darting back & forth from bank to bank in the hills above, there were kids swinging into the river doing the latest trick they dared, & even a few fishermen hauling in their daily catch. All while the duo continued their cantations. We doubled back at a certain point & enjoy the drift downstream before we reconnected with the complex we’d began our journey at & shown through to the gift shop. I’m not going to lie, I purchased a shirt. It’s blue tied dye with the Bohol insignia on it.

Once we’d finished our shopping we were loaded up & back on down the road we went.

I was severely undersold the Chocolate Hills. Severely. When I asked what they were & if they contained chocolate I was told that they’re simply some hills & that no, the do not in fact contain chocolate. While that is somewhat true, calling them “just some hills” is the understatement of the century.

The Chocolate Hills are haystack shaped karst hills. They formed from eroding limestone in the region as well as tectonic activity that thrust them up into the air. Not only are they a geographical monument in the Philippines, they are also a staple of the island of Bohol. There are around 1,200 of these hills in the center of the island & they vary in size from 100 feet tall to the tallest at 390 feet tall. They are referred to as the chocolate hills not because cacao grows there, but because during the dry season the vegetation covering them turns a rich chocolate brown.

They are nothing short of stunning.

We arrived in the region after about an hour drive inland. Turning into the visitor center, we rounded one of the larger hills to a lot where we were once again dropped. Meeting the lot was a set of around 200 steep steps which led to the top of the hill we’d just circumnavigated. It was a bit of a climb but the view from the top was spectacular! Not just the hills, but the valley in which they sit. You could see for miles!

Once we’d all had our fill of the tops of the hills we descended where we drove just around the corner to Graham ATV & Bugcar Rental.

When you arrive at Graham ATV & Bugcar Rental you are handed a helmet, a waiver, & asked to choose between a two person buggy or an ATV. Then, following a briefing, you are shown to your respective vehicle & away you go.

The tour is about an hour long & takes you along muddy trails in-between several of the Chocolate Hills. You dip in & out of forest & meadows going over hills & through streams before looping around to return the basecamp. Evan had a hard time getting into it initially, but once he felt comfortable he was all in. I, on the other hand, was gung ho from the beginning!

After an hour of zipping around the hills we rinsed off our mud soaked selves, changed our clothes, got some ice cream & started to make our way back towards the coast.

Along the way Lee Ann abruptly asked our driver to pull over. She’d caught a Tempura Street Stand as we’d passed through Carmen on our way back. She & one of the other resort staff who’d come along for the day hopped out & immediately started ordering from the stand. Never one to not dive headlong into my curiosities, I joined them. Lee Ann ordered for me & gave me a bag with several tempura items in it. I think one of them was just strips of fried dough, the other was a fried egg. There were also a series of sauces which you dumped directly into the bag. I went for what was warned would be the spiciest, but it was actually a very pleasant sweet chili vibe.

We loaded back into the van & off down the road we went.

The evening was a planned party. They had pulled the tables out from the restaurant & assembled them along the grounds near the dive shop. There was also a band from Manila who had come in to play.

As everything was being set up we were instructed to start emptying our designated spots in the dive shop & change into something a little nicer. I went back to our room, packed up all of my gear, showered, & got my other luggage together.

The party was so nice. They’d pit roasted a Lichon for us & set up long tables filled with food under the sky & the hung ropes of lights above. The whole of the resort staff was there & were able to let loose & celebrate with us. Apparently we were the first large group of the busy season & the resort & its faculty were excited about it!

During dinner the band played 80s covers, clearly a favorite decade of music, as we ate. After we’d finish Ester stepped into the role of MC & started calling up people to sing along with the band…….

The first to sing was the chef! Yes, the resort chef. He had a lovely voice & sang two or three songs. During his set I got a grip on the shoulder & turned to find Ester who looked me dead in the eye & told me “I hope you know I’m not letting you run off for the night without singing something.” To which I laughed & obliged. Next up was Lee Ann, the karaoke queen struck again & did two songs as well as a song with Ester! Then came my moment of doom haha.

Me Doing The Thing
Photo Credit: Evan Michael

Ester, still holding the mic, called me up on stage. I got up & walked on but asked what I should sing. I was told an original. I asked if I could borrow a guitar to which the lead guitar player handed me his. After adjusting the height of the mic stand (I’m a good head or two taller than most of the filipinos I encountered) I went in on “When He Was Me” I was shocked when I got to the pre-chorus & the rest of the band join in with me! They followed the chord changes as best they could & when I finished I was greeted with a standing ovation & a call for more songs. I agreed & decided to play “Just Another Late Night” since the chords were the same throughout & it would allow the band an easier time following along. They crushed it!

After finishing up “Just Another Late Night” I once again got the request for another song, even the band was now requesting more music. So I did the same thing as before, I played “Insomniac” since the chords are the same throughout.

Still the group wanted more songs, but I turned down their request, it wasn’t my show to take over, it was the group who had come in to play, so I passed the microphone & the guitar back to their owners & descended from the stage.

They made me feel like a rock star, I’m not going to lie. I got off stage & JR immediately wanted a picture, then so did Lee Ann, then so did a few others. I thanked them all profusely for their kindness & hospitality & sat to watch the band sing through a few more songs.

When the toll of the day finally came to tax me of my energy I headed off to the bar to pay my tab for the evening. There Ester met me with a hug & a request for a photo to which I happily agreed & we said our good-byes until next time.

End Of Day Eight

END OF PART THREE & END OF BLOG SERIES!!!

March 23, 2024

Charlie Rogers

Travel, Travel Blog, Blog

Travel Blog: Bohol, Philippines- Part One: I Flew To The Other Side Of The World To Go Diving & All You're Getting Is One Singular Mention Of The Ocean In This First Blog

March 23, 2024

Charlie Rogers

Travel, Travel Blog, Blog

BOHOL, PHILIPPINES

Prologue

Hello Fellow Travelers,

Welcome back to one of my absolute favorite blog series that I do here at my beloved site; travel blogs! I know, for a large handful of you all, this is also your favorite series of mine & I think for good reason. This is often the blog that I get to share major passion of mine, travel, as well as a few subsequent others such as food, beverage, dive, & storytelling. Fortunately for all of us, this series will contain all of these aspects & more! So, if you’re along for the ride, buckle in, as the full scope of this trip & its embedded tales will take up a good three weeks worth of space on this blog! With all of that being said & everything else out of the way, let’s dive on in shall we?!

PART ONE:

Day One

Los Angeles, California

Evan & I landed in Los Angeles around 10 AM on March 7th. Our direct flight options for our arrival with Southwest Airlines were either the flight we chose or one that got in around 9:15 PM, which would have cut us far too close to our 10:35 PM departure with EVA Air for Taipei. This naturally left us with around 9 hours worth of time to burn before we had to check-in for the aforementioned flight. Initially our plan was to have our friend Jenna pick us up from LAX & drop us back later but upon looking into the amount of time it would force her into in commutes on our behalf we opted to rent a car for the day instead. Popping on over to Avis we snagged the rental I had booked the evening prior, a Tesla Model 3, of which Avis has an exclusive deal for the rental of. The really nice part about it was that we weren’t responsible for charging it upon its return which really helps save you a bit of cash, especially with LA gas prices being around $5 a gallon.

Jenna had planned to head over to Pasadena to catch our other friend Rory’s Barry’s Ass & Abs class. She’d suggested dropping our luggage with her in North Hollywood, then carpooling around together, but unfortunately the time it would have taken for such a measure would have forced us to miss Rory’s class. So we opted just to meet there instead. We made it to Pas with about ten minutes to spare & loaded our luggage into the locked trunk & loathsomely named “frunk” (front trunk) of the Tesla.

I think Evan has cursed us, either that or it’s all to do with the timing of when we travel seeing as he is off Wednesdays & Thursdays so we usually end up flying those days. Either way we seem to always do a “leg day” the day prior to large amounts of travel, I guess this time would be no different.

Barry’s has a lower focus class on Tuesdays & an ass & abs class on Thursdays, that usually ends up being the cause of his post-leg day flight woes. Even if we don’t end up at Barry’s we typically end up adhering to their schedule so that we don’t get thrown into a wonky “I’m too sore for this” situation should we decide to hit another of their classes during the week.

After class we were all desperately craving a coffee. Evan & I had wanted to venture into The Burlington Arcade in Pasadena for a while & the Pas Barry’s location just happened to be right within the same block or two, so that’s where our search began & ultimately ended.

The Mandarin Coffee Stand is nestled right in the middle of The Arcade. It is a teeny, tiny coffee shop that has a customer occupancy limit of four guests at a time. The are a local, Asian women owned & operated shop that specializes in Chinese style coffee. I got a latte known as the “Toasty” which consists of Rooibos, Cinnamon, Espresso, Brown Sugar, & Oat Milk. Not typically a fan of the milk of the oat, I tried it anyway at the recommendation of the barista & it was nothing short of bangin’! As we stood around the strip sipping our respective coffees we all decided the next necessary & logical step would be to find food.

If you were to dig into the notes app on either Evan or my phone you’d discover a shared note simply titled “Travel Visits.” In said note you will find lists upon lists of mostly restaurants & bars that we’ve written down over the years to try should we ever find ourselves in any of the locations listed therein. Despite our many years in LA the list for it seems to continue to grow & grow & so we both began to pilfer through in search of what would inevitably be that day’s lunch.

Many of the locations that we found were either evening only, too far from Pasadena, North Hollywood, or LAX, weren’t open that day, or weren’t a type of food we were all feeling, but at the end of our extensive filtering we ended up deciding on a deli in Westlake called Langer’s.

Langer’s Delicatessen-Restaurant was founded in 1947 & has been in the Langer family ever since. They are a member of the LA Times 101 Hall of Fame & have been a staple on the Michelin guide for many years. They are famous for their #19 Pastrami Sandwich which has been voted amongst the world’s best which is exactly what Evan & both ordered. The sandwich was excellent, sporting Pastrami on Rye with Coleslaw, Swiss Cheese & Russian Dressing. Jenna ordered a simple sliced Salami on a Hoagie it Provolone which was simple & delightful in its own way. After lunch we ended LA’s early afternoon traffic & made our way towards Jenna’s place in North Hollywood. Once we’d gotten to North Hollywood we pulled off into the CVS to grab a few provisions.

Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles
Photo Credit: Evan Michael

Anytime I fly overseas or on a flight that is longer than 4-5 hours I bring the cabin crew a sack of goodies just to say “thank you” & help ease their time on the job in even the slightest of ways. I typically pick up some family sized packs of chocolates, candies, & snacky things to give out. In addition to our care package we also picked up some Zzzquil for the flight, since it was an over nighter. After acquiring our items we continued onto Jenna’s to recharge for a bit; both for ourselves & our devices which had already made it through a morning of travel & a day of light exploration.

With our time in LA coming to an end & our need to head off to the airport approaching, we popped into a quick shower, refreshed deodorants & the like, & swapped over into our travel clothes before packing everything back up, bidding Jenna a fond farewell, & beginning the hour+ commute to the airport.

Once we’d dropped the car back at Avis we headed into LAX to check-in for our EVA Air flight to Taipei with continued service to Manilla. Once we got to Manilla we’d have to go through immigration & customs before rechecking our bags & continuing on. We met the rest of our group from Midwest Aquatics that were headed to Bohol at the check-in gate & after greetings & hugs we all headed through security.

The process was lighter than usual so we found ourselves incredibly early for our flight, so much so that the British Airways flight occupying our gate hadn’t even received their plane. We wandered around the international terminal before settling in on something to eat. After some truly mid fish tacos, I found a secluded corner in which to write two weeks ago’s blog & awaited the boarding process.

We boarded right on time & once we’d taken off, & eaten our in-flight meal, we took the Zzzquils & attempted to get some sleep.

End Of Day One

Day Two

Taipei, Taiwan

We arrived in Taipei around 5:15 AM, local time. I managed to sleep for about a half or so of the duration of the fourteen & a half hour flight, Evan managed about two thirds. That was when he wasn’t attempting to shut off our sleeping neighbor’s over head light.

We had booked ahead online & gotten ourselves the exit row. I’m a rather tall gent at 6’4” & definitely need the extra leg room that the exit row or premium economy provide, especially on airlines based out of parts of the world where people tend to be on the shorter side. I had the “window” (there was no window) & Evan had the middle. At the time of our booking the aisle seat was already occupied, we actually assumed that it was Deb, a member of our group. It wasn’t, it was a gentlemen we had no relation to. When you’re in the exit row all of the buttons for your seat are located on the arm rest to your left about thigh high. Strangely enough, in EVA Air Economy Class, the reading light for the aisle seat illuminates the middle seat. No joke. Like each of the other buttons illuminate each of their respective seats, except for the aisle which basically doubles up on the middle. Additionally, the man on the end’s button for his over head light seemed to be a little on the sensitive side & every time he shifted in his seat it lit up the light over Evan’s head. I legitimately thought it was his own light until I noticed him slyly reaching over, across the man’s lap, trying to tap his light button. In his words “I had no issue with the light itself, it was the heat that it generated that was keeping me awake.” When he finally got around to turning off the light the man shifted in his seat thirty seconds later, immediately reigniting Evan’s personal warming bulb. Later when he got up to use the restroom, Evan positioned the man’s blanked so as to block any accidental bumping of the button from occurring.

We had about a three-ish hour layover in Taipei & we’d arrived before any of the shops & restaurants had opened. So, we as a group, decided to stretch out collective legs & walk the length of the terminal. By the time we’d made it all the way down shops had begun to open. Several members of our group took special interest in the Sanrio shop but I had my eyes set on a bakery that was beginning their prep as we initially walked by. The bakery in question is called Mazu Village, it’s half wheel pies & half boba stand. The boba & wheels pies are presented in a combo format so Evan & I opted for the one that would let us each have one of each of the two flavors; Salted Custard & Salted Custard with Peanut Butter, & also gave us each a Taro Boba Tea. The rest of the group ended up with something similar & while the two of us had decided that we favored just the custard pie over the one with peanut butter, as we found it too rich, the others disagreed.

After our saccharine breakfast we sat around making calls for a bit. Evan called his family & I called my sister, whose birthday it still was in the states. At this point we’d crossed the international date line & were a half a day ahead of everyone back home. We waited around a bit longer before I went to a booth to buy some Taiwanese Beef Noodle Soup which Evan & I split. I actually think one of the best parts of the soup was the Sauced Cabbage that came with it & the hyper sweet Cold Assam Tea. We wandered around the airport for a bit after we finished our food, flitting in & out of the assorted duty free shops before we descended to our gate to wait to board.

In the Taoyuan International Airport all of the gates are situated a level below the main parts of the concourse so you have to ascend a flight of stairs/take an elevator up when you arrive & descend the stairs/elevator when you plan to depart. It’s nice because it keeps the waiting areas separate from the hustle & bustle of the main terminal. The EVA Air Gods saw fit to grace us with the Sanrio plane for our trip from Taipei to Manila. I was actually surprised to see how many of us in the group were excited about that, but the plane was cute! Even once we’d boarded the plane was full of little Sanrio easter eggs such as the Hello Kitty air freshener holder in the lavatories.

We departed Taipei at around 9:10 AM local time & began our two hours & thirty minute flight across the Luzon Strait to the Philippines & Manila.

Manila

Our flight landed in Manila at 11:45 & we were immediately ushered off the plane to immigration. Evan somehow made it through the passport check without filling out the online application for a visa, the rest of us weren’t so lucky. We were all handed a QR code to scan & fill out a digital form before we could get our stamp. Pretty standard procedure, just thought it was odd Evan got through without it, he must just have one of those faces.

He did fill out his visa application retroactively as we sat waiting for our baggage to come through. Figured it was better to have it done & entered in, especially if it ended up being needed upon our departure. Once we all had our luggage collected we headed out to the transfer area where we booked the transfer shuttle to the local departures terminal & exchange USD for Filipino Peso.

The man running the shuttle kiosk at the international terminal told us that it would be about a forty-five minute wait before we would have a transfer & it wasn’t guaranteed that we would all fit, in which case they would have us wait an additional 30-45 minutes for the next shuttle. I’m not really sure how or why the transfer times on the shuttles are so long, especially since the walk time between the two terminals was only about 5-10 minutes. We all opted for that.

The walk was a bit of a system shock. Most of us changed into lighter clothing before hand, but coming from LA & then Taipei where the weather was sitting in the mid to upper 50s, the shift into the 80s felt like much more drastic a change. By the end of our walk to the other terminal we were all sweating. Each of us reapplied deodorant & proceeded to the Philippine Airlines ticketing counter where we were met with one of the more common annoyances when it comes to checking baggage internationally across different carriers; entirely different baggage rules. We made it work & got everything figured out without the need for any extra dollars being exchanged.

By the time we made it through security we only had about an hour to an hour & a half left over in what was our four hour layover. We camped the bags & we went out exploring in waves to see what the airport terminal had to offer. Two party members came back with some rather tantalizing looking Boba Tea & Evan & me, & two others set out to find & claim our own.

Once the teas were acquired we returned to our gate & waited to board. Around 3 PM we all started lining up to board & before long we were off on our way to the island of Bohol.

Bohol

Bohol-Panglao International Airport is a bit on the smaller size, boasting around five or six gates in total. We arrived after our brief hour & a half flight just before 5 PM where we descended the escalator to the single baggage carousel, collected our belongings, & were greeted by the Magic Oceans transfer crew with water bottled & some bomb ass banana chips. We all climbed into the two vans they’d provided, with out luggage occupying a third vehicle, & off we went towards Anda.

The drive to the dive resort was a long one, not going to lie. We’re talking like two & a half to three hours long. After being in planes for a total of 22 hours off & on & laying over, I think all of us were ready to be done & there. The benefit of these far out locations & trips is that once you’re there, you’re there for a while! They also certainly drive different in the Philippines than we do here in the states. For starters there’s no speed limits, at least not in Bohol, unless designated by a work or school zone. They also don’t necessarily abide by the lanes. Evan & I got sat on the front bench of the van & I think we both regretted it as there were many times that each of us was slamming down our foot on the imaginary brake that we each wish we had. At the end of the day though the driver DID deliver us safely to Magic Oceans, even though I though we were going to hit dogs or those going out on the then Saturday evening who were walking along the side of the road.

I did manage to sleep the last hour & some change in the car, mostly because I had to pee & it seemed the only solution to avoiding that issue. We arrived in the darkness to Magic Ocean where we were all guided to the dining area for dinner, which was in full swing. Dinner at Magic Oceans is served family style with an exquisite chef preparing an appetizer course, a main course with around five dishes, & a dessert. I made it about halfway through the trip before I realized that I’d forgotten to write down the nightly menus so unfortunately they will be absent from this series despite their amazing quality in nature & the chef who prepared them’s lovely singing voice (we’ll get to that in later installments).

Once we were all situated with food, Evelyn, the resort manager gave us a quick briefing regarding our rooms & the plan for the morning in which we planned to start our diving. Once she had finished we were each escorted privately to our rooms where our luggage awaited us & promptly showered & went to bed so as to be ready & refreshed for the adventures that awaited us the following day!…but not before I went out the door of our room to the sandy overlook where I sat listening to the rush of the ocean for a few minutes.

…see, I mentioned it, once…& yes, that did happen, seriously. There were Dwarf Zebra Hermit Crabs in the sand fighting over a scrap of food. Evan even took a picture of me headed there! (See Below)

Path Outside Our Room At Magic Oceans
Photo Credit: Evan Michael

End Of Day Two

END OF PART ONE

Part Two

December 3, 2022

Charlie Rogers

Travel Blog, Travel, Blog

Travel Blog: Indonesia: Part Three- Another Day, Another Nat Geo Experience

December 3, 2022

Charlie Rogers

Travel Blog, Travel, Blog

Welcome back world travelers! We’ve made it, this is the final entry in my Indonesia series revolving around the Lembeh Strait! I hope you’ve enjoyed the journey thus far & are ready to dive (see what I did there) into our final segment today! If you’re not all caught up on my escapades, no worries, I’ll link the other two installments right below this introductory paragraph! Enough of the pretext, shall we continue?

PART ONE

PART TWO

INDONESIA

PART THREE:

Day Five

Woke to another lovely day on Lembeh. The rain that rolled in over night had cooled the morning leisurely to somewhere in the low 80s. My breakfast consisted of my same morning staples; Jasmine Tea, Raspberry, Nutella Toast, Eggs, Bacon or Sausage, Fruit, & Fresh Juice. I think this is the morning I subbed one of the aforementioned items out for Granola topped in Yogurt, Honey, & Chopped Fruit, but that’s neither here nor there. No interesting creatures came out to play either while dinning or while making our way down the dock, however, that’s not to say the day wasn’t interesting. Far from it!

Remember in the last blog when I mentioned that I lost track of our dive sites at a certain point. Well folks, we’ve reached the pinnacle of it as, in my dive log, the next two days are full of sites that were already programed into the SSI app so I didn’t have to deal with the grueling entry process for each site. There are a few, especially the last couple days that I have written down, so we shall return to form when we get there!

Dive #1 of the day was a muck dive & deep one at that. Set at off the shore from Makawide, I remember descending the slope with Sam & Puri (if you don’t know who these people are at this point, you haven’t been paying attention) & feeling like we were fairly deep. The thing about muck diving is that most of the critters typically are fairly muted in their color pallet & if they aren’t, you’re usually using a flashlight to spot them anyway which restores their full color. This is much more noticeable on reefs where the many colored corals seem to all fade to shades of blues & blacks. All of that being a round about way of saying that I didn’t notice we’d dropped down to almost 107ft until I looked at my dive computer & was immediately aghast at what I saw. I even got Sam’s attention to show her & she gave me a “shocked eye” stare back at my readings. Was the depth worth it? Absolutely.

I’m going to sidebar again, sorry you’re dealing with an ADHD riddled writer here, but when I was in Fiji I got my deep water certification & remember telling my father later that I didn’t really have much of a desire to dive that deep again. It drastically cuts your dive time &, in Fiji at least, there wasn’t much to see & all the coloration was gone. Muck diving is truly a different animal I guess!

So what did we find at that depth? We found one of the rarer Lembeh creatures. Not only that, but we sat & watched it hunt.

At a depth of around 90 feet we found the highly sought after Rhinoceros Scorpionfish. The Rhinoceros is a marvelous creature that is uncharacteristically colorful compared to the rest of the Scorpion/Stonefish family. Having evolved to look like a dead leaf, they sway back & forth on modified pectoral fins as they inch across the substrate mimicking the movement of a leaf caught in the sway of the tides. Our Rhinoceros was bright orange & was in the process of hunting a cardinal fish. So, of course we had to sit & watch!

We sat, anchored to the bottom for around ten minutes just watching this fish play coy as it gained footing on its prey inchmeal. We gingerly made our way along with it, being sure to keep it in frame & in light so that we would catch the end of its successful hunt on camera, & that’s exactly what we did! Finally after coming within two inches of the cardinal the scorpion struck. It did so at a rate that my camera, running 120 frames per second, only managed to snag one or two frames of its extended jaws.

Funny enough, while we were pursuing the scorpionfish another ambush predator decided to wriggle its way between Sam & I. A massive Lionfish decided it had had enough of us scaring off any further perspective prey & made its complaints known as it grumpily swam between us.

This dive was a gold mine, in addition to the Scorpionfish we saw another Gurnard skidding across the bottom & two massive Titan Triggerfish, which we were sure to steer well clear of. They bite. Hard.

The most exciting find of the dive, especially for Puri, was the gigantic Sea Turtle we came across resting on the bottom around 40 feet. This turtle was one of the largest I’d seen in the wild & Puri was overjoyed as apparently they hadn’t seen any turtles in a good long while. We tried not to disturb it but it took off as soon as we got within 10-15 feet of it.

Farther up the slope, towards the beginning was a reef that sat just under the water line. Here we found the typical Anemones & Clowns, Damsels, Tangs, etc., but we also found another Sea Crete & several large Yellow Trumpetfish.

For the next dive we headed back towards the resort to a small archipelago of islands. Apparently their name in Indonesian roughly translated to something along the lines of “The Broken Islands” because they used to be a part of one singular mass of land, instead of their own separate entities. We loaded up on our typical rest food & drink items (tea, coffee, water, milo, cake, & fruit) & were just about to get back in the water when I was handed a guitar.

Apparently someone let it slip that I am a singer & the crew had brought a guitar to get me to perform for them. I reluctantly agreed & sat tuning the instrument for a minute before I played them one of my originals which they absolutely adored. I felt so honored & handed back the guitar before I got all of my gear on & was once again down in the blue.

Dive #2 was part reef & part rubble which meant high possibilities for octopus which we did in fact end up finding in the aptly named site, Critter Hunt! What’s our octopus count at this point? Three? Well, this was number four if that’s the case! It was also another unique species from the other three & another highly sought after Lembeh animal. We had stumbled upon a Wonderpus.

Yes, that’s its real name, the Wonderpus which happened to also be the name of our boat for the week. What makes the wonderpus so wonderful you ask? For that I want to divert to a short anecdote that Kim, the resort manager, told us. Kim is a Danish gent who has lived in the Lembeh area for well over 15-20 years. He said that the first time he saw a wonderpus he didn’t think anything of it, in fact, he thought it was a lion fish. How does one confuse an octopus with a lion fish? Well the wonderpus, similar to the mimic, another Lembeh favorite, can do exactly that. It can mimic. Only the wonderpus has the keen ability to alter the texture of its skin along with the length, shape, etc. of its arms & body. Our wonderpus presented to us as white & black striped with big arching brows.

I was, unfortunately, once again pulled away from my Garden Eels to come look at the octopus, but I think it was an acceptable replacement. They did let me sit & watch the garden eels afterwards for a few minutes, so I truly can’t be mad.

Additionally we came across some lovely clusters of Frogspawn Coral, some Snowflake Eels, Coral Gobies, Cowfish, Fingered Dragonettes, Panther Grouper, & I once again attempted to get a Cleaner Wrasse to clean my mouth. It didn’t work, sadly. One of these day, one of these days.

Back to shore we went where I grabbed another Pocari Sweat & sat editing til it was time for lunch & then until it was time to hit dive #3.

Dive #3 at Pintu Colada started at a sparse reef with some monumental mounds of coral. However, that’s not where we spent the majority of this dive. We spent the majority of this dive pestering Male Ribbon Eels.

For whatever reason Ribbon Eels seem to be very curious creatures. I noticed, as I was filming one of the electric blue males that he was very interested in my pointer that I had buried in the ground. I unmoored myself & passed the baton closer to the eel so that it could investigate. The eel would come pretty far out of its den to ‘smell’ the titanium stick I was using, I would get it close & then slowly inch it backwards to see just how far out they were wiling to chase the blue rod & the answer seemed pretty damn far!

Additionally this site had many Chocolate Chip Starfish, several rather aggressive Maroon Clownfish in their Bubbletip Anemones, & some type of buried Moray that I have scoured the internet for but come up blank on its identification.

Our afternoon, post dive, was fairly uneventful. I most likely spent the entirety of it, you guessed it, editing but that’s not to say the interesting parts of the day were over. Oh how wrong that assumption would be because folks, this was a four dive day. We still have the black water dive to talk about.

Now a black water dive comes in a variety of forms. Some where you’re out in the middle of the water attached to a line, letting the little critters come up to you, some where you are sat on the bottom around a light referred to as a “bonfire,” ours was a version of the latter. You see, typically the crew would go out before hand & plant the “bonfire” around 20-30 minutes in advance so that it has time to draw everything in. The problem with this is that it has the high tendency to lead to boredom. We hybridized our black water with just your standard night dive, deciding to plant & ignite the bonfire, the let it set for a while while we went around exploring & poking around in the dark.

We found ourselves some Fuzzy Dwarf Lionfish, a Gorilla Crab or two, large quantities of Pipefish, a Blue Spotted Ray, an Orange Blotch Rabbitfish, some Porcupine Puffers, Banded Coral Shrimp, & a baby Barramundi (Sweet Lips). The real prize of the dive, however, were the squid.

We were back out at Aer Prang where we’d dove a few times before & done our previous night dive. Just off the clusters of Trumpet Coral Puri spotted them, two Squid suspended in the water. As we got closer their colors began to shift & change & each of the pigment cells along their body began to light up. One of the squid decided it best to try & gfto & inked, though it didn’t then attempt to flee. We swam around filming these two squid for a good 10-15 minutes before we decided it was best to leave them be & return to the bonfire. However, on the way we encountered a hand made fish trap teeming with captured fish. We all had the same thought in wanting to set the fish go, especially since the trap didn’t seem to have a line or anything attached to it, but we felt it best to leave it incase it was a local’s meal.

I mentioned briefly in the previous blog about night diving the tiny little plankton & organisms that you find while night diving. At one point, after returning to the bonfire, I held my flashlight straight upright & just watched the different varieties of life dancing in & out of the beam. We came across several free swimming crustaceans & Puri found some kind of mostly translucent organism that looked not dissimilar to the double helix of DNA.

We returned to the resort after another bulging day of diving, showered, scarfed down an incredible dinner, & were out before our heads hit the pillows.

End Of Day Five

Day Six

It was time to start winding down, after a full week of diving at this point our dives were starting to become a little more sparse on these our last two days. If you’re unaware, when diving, you need an 18-24 hour period between the time of your last dive & the time of your flight. This is to help prevent the bends. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I assume you know the drill at this point? Wake up, breakfast of eggs, fruit, bacon or sausage, toast, fresh juice, etc. I suppose I forgot to mention that earlier in the week the kitchen staff had found me a fresh Jackfruit, of which they continued to serve at any meal they knew I’d be at because I was one of the only few dining upon it. Most meals would end with a bowl full of jackfruit, covered in Calamansi Juice. After breakie & gathering the dive gear & camera I took with me off of the boat, it was once again time to dive. Today’s dock creature was a Spadefish, bobbing along the surface in-between the dock & the Wonderpus, our boat.

Our first dive of the day was a rubbly coral spot called Nudi Retread. It was home to many Blue-Spotted Stingrays, some beautiful Maze Corals, many Giant Clams, & even a few big ole Leopard Sea Cucumbers. It’s here where we found a pair of Tozeuma Shrimp but, you guessed it, my camera said “Tozeuma Shrimp who? I’m more interested in this plain old background behind them.”

The site also, of course, had its fair share of Bubble Coral, Anemones con Clowns, Sea Fans, & even a Miniatus Grouper with its bright blue spotted red body.

After we surfaced we headed off to dive #2, set off the island chain in the middle of Lembeh.

Dive two was a reef dive, Sarena Patah. Amongst the reef I once again tried my hand at getting Cleaner Wrasse to excavate my mouth to no avail, found many Tiger Jawfish popping their heads out of the sand, a mating pair of Singapore Angelfish, a school of Pajama Cardinal fish, some Moorish Idols & a Mosaic Pufferfish. After our time below the surface it was time to head back to NAD Lembeh for lunch & my daily ritual of editing over a Pocari Sweat.

Our third dive was at Tanjung Kusu-Kusu or Cape Kusu-Kusu as it would be in Ingles. It was another muck dive location with sparse reef near the two. Immediately upon our decent we discovered a pair of Spiny Tiger Shrimp hiding in a cup sponge. Puri was very excited at the find & wrote on his tablet “Tiger Shrimp” followed by “a very special shrimp.” The shrimp were about an inch in length & were covered in white spikes. The white body of the shrimp had orange spots on it surrounded by smaller black spots & while the resemblance to a tiger is iffy, I can understand why it was so named to a degree.

The dive was also full of many Lionfish & Scorpionfish though the coolest thing we discovered PSTS (Post Spiny Tiger Shrimp) was a rock covered in a microcosm of predator & prey.

All along this little portion of reef, about the size of a Fiat, were schools & schools of Cardinalfish. I’m talking hundreds if not thousands of them, all tucked in the rock & poking out just a tad. Below the school, patiently waiting was a Stonefish blending perfectly into the rock work where it perched, just waiting for one of the cardinals to dip a little bit too close. Just around the rock, under where the stonefish sat was a White Mouth Moray Eel, farther around on the other side of the rocks there was a Ribbon Eel, & amongst the rock there were assorted Dwarf Lionfish & Scorpions.

Though we didn’t end up doing a dive in the evening, that doesn’t mean I was done with aquatic life for the day. In fact, I got a glimpse of some aquatic wildlife on the shore during our leave. No, that’s not a typo, ‘on’ is the correct use here.

Along the beach of our little bay I started to notice little pricks of movement. My initial thought was that it was crabs or some other burrowing crustacean but I was wrong & was so excited to find what it actually was. All along the shore line, on the beach, were about ten Mudskippers. Mudskippers are a type of goby that has evolved to move, in a limited capacity, on land. They come out of the water to feed on the insects that congregate near the shoreline & can be out of water for around two days! Funny enough the Indonesian name for the mudskipper is ‘Ikan Tambio’ which means “prostitute fish” though I can’t for the life of me figure out why they are so named.

Darin, our trip guide & owner of Midwest Aquatics, the dive shop I went through for my certification, Fiji, & Indonesia, had asked previously if we could do a village excursion or something of the like on land. He & Simon came to the conclusion that it probably wasn’t for the best of the group & instead decided on a sunset cruise for the lot of us! The Wonderpus had been stripped of our gear, wiped down, dried out, & instead was packed with coolers with drinks & bowls of snacks

We went all the way up the strait to a village where the locals were farming pearls, the children rushed out into the water yelling any english phrases they could think of to get our attention & we affectionately waved back & yelled “hello” to them on the shore. Once we passed the lighthouse into the mouth of the strait it was revealed that it was Darin’s birthday & his lovely wife & incredibly talented photographer, Cari had requested a cake from the kitchen to bring aboard. We all sang “Happy Birthday” & slices of the cake were passed around before we turned back & headed towards the south end of the strait.

Along the way I was once again passed the guitar but I opted for soft covers & what I call “call to prayer” guitar just to fill the space with something atmospheric & not make it the “Charlie Rogers Show” on someone else’s day.

As we neared Bitung we began to hear & see the music festival that had been going on throughout the week. Spotlights scraped the clouds & music ricocheted across the water with thunderous bass that was soon replaced by actual thunder as a storm rolled in. We all ducked for shelter as if we hadn’t just spent the last week completely drenched & the boat made its way back to shore where showers, dinner, & beds awaited us all.

End Of Day Six

Day Seven

Well, we’re here, the last day of dives for this trip. Have we had fun? Have we enjoyed the ride? I promise you it’s not over yet! Like I said, we still have one more day of diving!

The morning started unceremoniously with the typical wake & break…fast, followed by the morning pack up, & walk down to the dock. There weren’t any dock critters of interest this morning, but we’ll get back to that in the afternoon! Our first dive was Hairy Larry, so named, apparently, because of the hairy diver guide that “discovered” & named it. One thing is for sure, Mr. Larry had found himself a gorgeous reef & wall dive.

The afternoon prior we’d been asked by the guides what we wanted our last day of diving to look like, the general consensus was something a little more reef forward but still balanced with muck & rubble, so that’s what the guides delivered!

We were dropped into the site at the top of the reef. Immediately we were greeted by Honeycomb Grouper, tons of Clowns & Anemones with Benggai Cardinalfish hovering near by, Squirrelfish, Bicolored Angelfish, & even another Day Octopus!

The wall portion of the dive was at around 60-70 feet. It was stacked corals overlooking a sandy forever with a multitude of fish, nudibranchs, & other invertebrates ducking in & out of their high rise hovels. The wall was home to hundreds of varieties of Torch Corals, a Blue Spiny Lobster, & large Granulated Seastars.

As we made our way from the wall, through the rubble downslope from the reef, Puri started picking through the dead coral in search of a very specific score. Puri was searching for Mosaic Boxer/Pompom Crabs. A boxer crab is a wee crustacean about the size of your thumb nail. Their name is derived from the itty bitty anemones they carry in their claws & use to sweep the water for microscopic food, which they then pilfer from the anemones. As Puri was scouting the rock a very interested, very large Sunset Wrasse came over to see if we kicked up anything edible for him. He didn’t seem at all afraid of us divers & in fact was very keen to hang out & remained very close to us the entirety of our search.

Puri eventually did find a boxer crab which he brought over to a large rock on the branch of deceased coral it had been occupying. We three gathered around the rock & Deb & her guide even joined us. We all sat watching the pompom swipe the water & feed. As we were watching it another of the guides cut through us & placed a second pompom crab on the rock with the one we were observing.

I’m still beyond amazed at the eyes on these Indonesian guides. All week they were able to find the smallest of creatures in often the dimmest of lighting. Each of them would point out things that it would often take my eyes thirty seconds to a minute to focus on. The crabs are a great example of this.

After we left the crustaceans to their filter feeding I ran into a Foxface, a few massive schools of Green Chromis, a Naso Tang, many more Bubbletip Anemones.

Once we were back on the reef we immediately noticed the innumerable Giant Clams that dotted the coralscape. Blues, browns, greens, any color, variety, & size you can think of, they were there. I found a Common Egg Cowry feeding on some Leather Coral, which if you remember from my Fiji blog was one of my favorite finds simply because of the striking nature of its deep, black pigment.

The reef was mostly stoney corals & leathers; Birds Nest, Antler Coral, Trumpet Coral, Maze Coral, etc. Amongst these I found a Scopas Tang, two big ole Lobsters, a brown Trumpetfish, Hawkfish, & a Triangle Butterflyfish. I had a really had time returning to the surface because I felt everywhere I turned there were new things to see.

Dive #2 took us back near the site of the previous to a site called Makawidey Pier. The other dive boat, the Mimic, joined us at the site where we sat side by side enjoying the surface interval. About halfway through it I was once again handed the guitar. This time the crew was asking that I perform a mini set for them of anywhere from 3-5 songs. It’s always funny to me how when you’re put on the spot your mind completely blanks on what songs you have available in your catalog, but I did manage to pull out a few more songs for the crew that had worked so hard on our behalf throughout the week.

Makawidey was half reef & half muck. Once we were down we immediately began to find incredible creatures!

We almost landed right on top of a Blue-Spotted Stingray when we entered. It hightailed it out of our vicinity, literally. We headed down father & found three separate Seahorses all within 100 ft of each other; one white & one a light grey, & one with red stripes. Additionally I spend a little more time pestering Ribbon Eels.

The muck eventually gave way to reef where we found a pair of Scissortail Gobies, a Golden Rabbitfish, Benggai Cardinals with babies in their mouthes, a White Mouth Moray Eel, a gigantic field of Pulsing Xenia, & Hammer Coral as far as the eye can see.

I mean that last bit literally, the hammer coral must have covered the length of a football field, it took my breath away. I kept thinking back to the aquarium hobbyists who would kill for just a single head of it. Typically a small head of hammer coral starts are $50 & that’s for something the size of a nickel.

After our second dive we were off to the resort for, what would be the rest of the time for a lot of people. There was no afternoon dive on this day but that didn’t stop me from feeding my saltwater soul a few more times before we left.

In lieu of a dive I took myself snorkeling/freediving. NAD Lembeh Resort has a lovely little house reef that I felt I needed to explore before we departed. I’d spent my week peering into the water & remarking at the wildlife from the dock so I decided to get a closer look.

I didn’t find much on the south end of the reef, but when I got closer to the dock my luck started to change. The dock itself was covered in Long Spine Sea Urchins. As I was (cautiously) passing through the legs of the pier I saw a Triggerfish that I still have yet to identify. The reef on the north end of the resort was flourishing; Clams, schools of Pipefish, Trumpetfish, & Anthias all dotted the rock work. When I got back towards the dock I found an Angelfish upside down picking at the floatation devices, a school of Batfish, & even a few little Boxfish. All just from hopping in the water 100 feet from where I’d been sleeping the last week. Around 4:30 we loaded up the dive boat one last time & headed out.

Yes, I said there was no afternoon dive BUT there was an early evening one! This was a dive I’d been looking forward to all week long. We were going on a Mandarin Goby dive!

Mandarin Gobies, Seahorses, Garden Eels, Cleaner Wrasse, all my obsession. I hadn’t seen a single mandarin the entirety of our trip & it was really starting to bum me out because they’re one of my all time favorite fish & there we were about to do a whole dive dedicated to them.

The mandarin dive takes place in a bay called Bianca, it’s named after the boat, The Bianca, that has been anchored there for a few decades now. The dive is a stationary dive, meaning that you sit on the bottom & wait for the things to come to you. So sit & wait we did.

The dive takes place at twilight, right when the sun has sunk below the horizon. We were all kneeling around a cluster of broken coral waiting. You aren’t allowed to use the full brightness of your torch & red light is mandatory.

So there we sat, waiting on mandarin gobies. Then, almost all at once, they started to pop out of the coral debris, they seemed to come from everywhere. The larger females would come out, flare up a little bit, & the smaller males would come pouring out in an attempt to gain her affections. Once she’d found one she liked they’d do a courtship dance where they rose up in the water, hooked together side by side. Then on cue they’d both release (& release) & depart from one another. The largest female in the area did this with around six different males.

As the light faded more & more fish began to emerge from the rubble including an assortment of Clown Gobies. They perched on the rock watching us watch the mandarins. There were green ones & black ones & one very large Citron one. I went to point them out to the people to my right but their guide had motioned for them to leave & they ended up decimating the rubble bed in their wake sending the clown gobies scattering in all directions.

Upon our return we were greeted by a barbecue, the staff had taken the tables & chairs from the dinning hall & arranged them in a line between the entrance & the bar. In the middle of the table were several plates of sashimi fresh caught that day & at the end were an arrangement of grills & griddles all boasting different assortments of meats & vegetables.

We enjoyed the food in mixed company, mingling with a group of snorkelers out of England who had come to the resort on a snorkel tour, something I was unaware was a thing. We all dined & exchanged stories, us at the end of our week, them just a few days into theirs. After we supped a cake was passed around the table.

With bursting bellies & smiling faces we adjourned to bed where we drifted off to sleep before the next day’s conquest home began.

End Of Day Seven

Day Eight

I debated on whether or not I wanted to include “day eight” as if was a travel day. Then upon reflection I found myself remembering many interesting things about the day. The odd part about writing this is that it will butt up into my Singapore Blog which I actually decided to publish in advance before going back to do the dive blogs. You can find a link to it at the very end of this blog.

We slept in a little on this day. Not having to beat the clock to get breakfast in before our dive time, we enjoyed a leisurely morning. After we had our fill of breakfast we all went back to our separate abodes to pack & make sure our electronics were charged for the return trip back. I was the only member of my group separating from the rest of them & the anxiety of 20+ hours of travel was palpable amongst my compatriots.

We left the resort begrudgingly, just short of noon. The tide was out at the time of our ferry across the strait so when we reached the cement dock on the other side we had to all climb onto the roof of The Wonderpus to get back on land. We all were escorted down the dock where locals came out in droves to observe the foreigners. The children yelled “hi” over & over at us & it was explained that it was probably the only english words they knew. We returned each “hi” in kind, accompanied by a smile of appreciation.

Our convoy to the Manado Airport was a series of minivans driven rambunctiously down the roads. We passed the festival grounds, several markets, & many curious locals who waved or peered into the windows at us. My car was the first to reach the terminal by a long shot & we sat for around 15-20 minutes waiting for the others to arrive with out gear so we could tip our driver.

The waiting game then began as our ticketing agents had not yet shown up. I went out in search of food, finding a Starbucks & a convenience store to satiate me. It was well over an hour & a half before someone showed up to check us in & we were all starting to get nervous that we were going to miss our flight.

Though I was the first in, I was the last out. I had to pay an extra baggage fee for my gear which took a while to process & I ended up being the last member of our group through security which didn’t end up mattering because our flight was delayed.

Ever the curious pallet I wandered into another convenience store while waiting to board & was met by many different Durian products. For the unaware, durian is a type of custardy fruit whose aroma is so pungent it’s often outlawed from Southeast Asian public transport. I was curious, as I always am, & opted for the durian ice cream with fresh durian in it. Y’all. No shame, truly. I regretted it. I kid you not, to my westernized pallet durian tasted like a mix between smelly feet (just assuming that flavor) & gasoline (that one too) with just the slightest banana & mango taste thrown in. The worst part of it was that it then spent the next several hours fighting me & I could not, for whatever reason, clear the taste of it out of my mouth.

Our flight finally departed & we were given a sealed cup of water & a literal entire package of cookies upon boarding.

When we got to Jakarta night had fallen & we all gathered our things before boarding the shuttle that had been arranged to take us to our hotel.

The hotel was around 15 minutes away from the airport & the journey there brought up a rather large discrepancy in the life of the people of Jakarta. From the terminal we were taken on highways, beautiful highways before turning into what I can only describe as shanty towns. We maneuvered around these shanty towns until we came to what had to be a seven or eight foot wall. We traced the wall, dotted with shacks, around to a gate where armed guards let us through two separate gates where the surroundings intently went from impoverished to glistening in excess. If I’m being honest it made me feel icky. We had arranged to stay at the FM7 Resort Hotel for the evening.

The resort was stunning. Modern artwork, pristine flora, exquisite lighting & cleanliness. It was a very sharp contrast to the world just outside of its massive walls. The resort was also a complex, an entire network of buildings & roads spread over a large number of acres. We all checked in & were given our room keys where we all went our separate ways to sleep for only a few hours before our flight from Jakarta departed to Singapore.

End Of Day Eight

END OF PART THREE

END OF BLOG

Singapore Blog

November 13, 2022

Charlie Rogers

Travel, Travel Blog, Blog

Travel Blog: Indonesia: Part Two- Why Do All Of The Good Stories Start Next To A Carpet Anemone?

November 13, 2022

Charlie Rogers

Travel, Travel Blog, Blog

Selamet Siang!

Welcome back curious reader! If you’re new here the class has officially moved on to part two of this specific adventure, but if you’d like to be caught up I’ll link part one just below this little bit of conversational pretext! Be sure to give that a read before continuing on here, context & establishment are important to storytelling after all!

Part One

INDONESIA

PART TWO:

Day Three

We start out this day in the usual way, rising early, grabbing brekkie, then going off to pack up for the full day of diving ahead. The only noticeable difference about this day’s breakfast was that I created my new obsession for the week; Toast with Raspberry Jam & Nutella, & I made a little Jumping Spider friend. I found her first climbing on my shoulder where I gently gathered her & set her aside on my chair, but no matter what I did she kept coming back to me in one form or another. Finally I just gave in & let her sit on my arm & watch me eat breakfast.

For all of you out there freaked out by this notion, Jumping Spiders are actually very personable creatures that have very interesting personalities about them. They will often even appear to look you in the eye & will, as witnessed above, watch people do things out of what seems like nothing more than curiosity. Though now that I’m thinking about it she may have been using me as a trap for the insects potentially drawn in by either my food or my blood. Either way, at the end of my meal, I set her on a leaf just off the dining pavilion & went about collecting my gear.

Our first dive site of the day was lovingly named “Hairball #2.” Why? Well, as it was explained to us, there are two separate explanations, the first is that the balls of netting/rope & the flora growing on the seabed resemble balls of hair, the second explanation was due to the abundance of Hairy Frogfish, of which we did see one, but apparently my camera did not. #MinimumFocalLength

This dive had an abundance, & I mean an abundance, of Mantis Shrimp of all sizes. Not only that, but you didn't really have to search for them, they were just kind of out, cruising along the sand or, in my case, attacking you. We’ll get there, we’ll get there.

I’m going to assume it was the scenery that lent itself to the plethora of decorators in the area as well, from Decorator Crabs & Hermits to Gorilla Crabs, it seemed every few feet near the top of our dive we’d find a new one. Additionally the Seahorse/Pipefish family came out to play as well.

Many of you know how much of a love for Seahorses I have, I used to raise them in my tank at home including, at one point, having an Erectus Male get pregnant & birth a clutch of fry in my tank! I’ve actually been flirting with the idea of setting up a specialty tank for them somewhere in my house as they don’t do well in big tanks with more aggressive eaters, but enough about my aquarium hobbies. All of that was a massively round about way of saying that I saw the. cutest. seahorse. I have ever seen. He had a bit of red macro algae growing just above his left pectoral fin which made it look like he had a flower in his hair. Simply adorable.

The site was truly a masterclass in what muck diving has to offer between the (in my personal opinion) horrifying Snake Eels with their heads popping out of the substrate, the pairs of Cardinal Waspfish, the numerous varieties of Shrimp Goby with their hovels in the sand, Lionfish, Trumpetfish, Carpet Anemones, & Snapper. But, let’s back up one step to one of those Carpet Anemones for a moment shall we?

Here is where I shall lay the chronicle of the viscous, subaquatic affront I received at the punchy mits of the afforementioned Peacock Mantis Shrimp:

So, I’m sitting there, filming a colony of Clownfish & Ghost Shrimp, doing my best to get the Porcelain Crabs as the current rolls up the sides of the anemone. I have my pointer buried around half a foot in the sand when all the sudden a hear a “thwack” & get a sharp pain in the hand holding onto my substrate anchor. I look over & there, puffed up in the sand, is about a three to four inch long Peacock Mantis Shrimp. It is presenting its antennal scales to me & keeps leaning in to go for another strike. What has gotten this Mantis so worked up over my presence? Well, I guess the fact that I’m a good meter+ from its burrow. It had come out a fairly long distance for an itty bitty shrimp from its defenses to smack my out of territorial spite. You can actually hear the smack, as well as my yelp, when it hit me on my GoPro footage. I was however fortunate with my Mantis encounter for two reasons. One, it was a little one, they can grown about a foot & a half in length. Two, it was a “punchy” variety, meaning that its raptorial appendages were blunted, not sharp like the alternatively “stabby” variety with their sharp appendages.

On our way back up we encountered a Male Ornate Ghost Pipefish, a Napoleon Snake Eel, several more Cardinal Wasps, & a Flamboyant Cuttlefish!

Our surface interval was once again supplemented by Tea, Coffee, Milo, Water, Papaya, Pineapple, & Cake. Dive spot number two was Jahir #1. I guess it’s worth noting at this point that a lot of the dive sites in Lembeh had numerical quantifiers as well. This is because a lot of them are the same towns, villages, islands, or locations, just different mooring sites & thus different entrance/exit points & therefore different dives.

Jahir was another muck dive that leans a little more on the sandy side. Here we found a whole host of Flamboyant Cuttlefish (including some eggs), Scorpionfish, Pillow Starfish, Blue Spotted Rays, Black Lionfish, Banded Pipefish, & the like. However there were two very distinct things that happened on this dive & I’m so excited to share them with you all!

The first made me absolutely geek out.

Maybe it’s the fish lover in me or my fascination with marine life in general, maybe you’ll also find this as cool as I did, please let me know if you do. Anyway, I was planted near yet another Carpet Anemone teeming with Clowns. Slightly above the anemone were a school of Cardinal Fish. Y’all I am literally geeking out typing this story simply because of the insinuations it carries. All of the sudden the largest of the clowns, the female, departs the anemone & makes for a piece of debris laying on the sand bed, It was just under a foot in size & looked kind of like a piece of cardboard or maybe a patch of dutch tape. Puri, our guide, immediately grabs my attention & motions to me to start filming, so I do. The clown drags the debris over to the anemone & stashes it right in the middle of it. She then proceeds to duck under it. After a few seconds she picks it up again & does the same, over & over. What was she doing? Y’all. This clownfish was fishing. It was upholding its portion of the symbiotic biological agreement between clowns & nems & trying to feed its home. It was using us, three big, scary, bubble making beings in the water next to the anemone as a tool implying she understands the basic nature of fish, specifically cardinal fish, & was trying to get them to swim under the debris & use it as “shelter” to hide from us, all the while luring them to their inevitable death. Wild. I guess it’s true what they say, the best stories happen around a carpet anemone.

The second thing that happened was actually something I’d discussed with Simon, the resort owner, the night prior. I had inquired as to what Simon’s favorite Lembeh creature was, to which he said something along the lines of “it’s always changing. However, this time of year the Fire Urchins make an appearance & I think they’re something truly spectacular.” That they are. Towards the end of our dive we came up the slope back towards the boat & were immediately met by about twenty or so massive Fire Urchins! I wish the photos & video I took did them justice but they unfortunately don’t. They’re iridescent, they genuinely look to be ablaze with their dark red spines & bright red & blue bodies so luminous they appear almost like LED strips. A breathtaking species of Urchin to say the least! The way their spines move across their bodies offsetting the view of the farther parts of their body makes them truly look aflame.

Following dive two it was time for lunch. We headed back to NAD Lembeh where we were met with a lovely spread once again provided by Tommy, the resort’s excellent chef. Following our exquisite sustenance it was time, once again, to head back out for another dive.

Dive three was Nudibranch Falls. For those of you dear readers that do not know what a Nudibranch is, they are a family or shell-less mollusks with exterior gills that often feed on corals & sponges. They are often poisonous & thus come rather brightly colored to ward off predators & blend into their lunch. As for the name of the site, Nudibranch Falls is a wall dive meaning you’re diving along side a wall, pretty self explanatory. It is named as such because the ascending bubbles from the divers often knock the Nudies from their place of munch & send them cascading to the depths below. Thus the nudibranch falls.

While exploring the first bits of this site it became extremely dark out of nowhere & I’m talking like ‘felt like we should be in a cave or passthrough’ dark, therefore a lot of the pictures that will accompany this section will probably make heavy use of my flashlight, as will the following, but we’ll get there when we get there.

Around Nudibranch Falls is primarily rubbly reef; waves, creatures, boats,…divers…, etc crash against the corals causing them to break & fall to the bottom below where they either expire or continue growing, hence the rubble. The venue had many of your typical reef fish as well as, yes, many a variety of Nudibranch & Flatworm. The coolest incision of the reef however where the Sea Fans that played host to Pygmy Seahorses.

You shan’t be seeing any picture of Pygmy Seahorses from me seeing how the are, as the name implies, Pygmy & my camera could not for the life of it figure out what the hell I was trying to film. When I say these boogers are small, I mean it. I would say the largest was no bigger than the nail of your little finger.

I’m going to throw Sam under the bus a little here just because I find the story to be a tad humorous & it comes back around later. Sorry Sam if you’re reading this.

After viewing the seahorses Sam, my dive buddy & roomie, set about exploring the rest of the reef wall. Little had we all notice but the current had started to pick up because, as we’d come to find out, it was pouring rain above us, hence the darkness. Sam, having been blown backwards by current & not entirely realizing, was mere inches away from running her fins right through the sea fan containing the entire colony of pygmy seahorses. We all motioned frantically to get her to stop moving, which she did & Gigs, another guide, & I came over & pulled her away from the coral wall manually all the while she remained posed like an astronaut freshly sucked into space. She later had to save me from a similar situation where I was blown into a bunch of coral & could not move for fear of damaging them. In either case there was no harm, no foul. No corals or sea life were harmed in the making of this blog…by us anyway.

Another cool discovery on this dive was a Lembeh Sea Dragon, which looked like a mess of hair until we got close to it. Yet another thing my camera said “Focus? Who’s she?” to, the Lembeh Sea Dragon was truly no larger than a bit of wire & about the length of the pad of your thumb. They are apparently rather rare, hadn’t been seen by Puri in a very long time, & are exclusive to the Lembeh Strait. Even Googling pictures of them they’re barely in focus in each instance.

We made our way back through the rain, which I’ve got to admit was kind of fun to dive in. I took a shower to warm up, started downloading my footage, & took a wee nap. Post nap I hit the coffee bar for what would be one of my only coffees the whole trip. I went the LA Australian Cafe route & made myself an Iced Milo Latte, basically an iced mocha sub chocolate sauce for Milo! I took my concoction back to the patio of my room & continued to edit.

While I sat there a squat little crab scuttled out of the burrow it had made under our neighbor’s steps & began picking through the dirt for food. Once it noticed me watching it immediately retreated though not all the way back into the burrow. I sat & watched it remoisten its eyes & trying to decide whether to continue its forage or hide for a good while.

This would be the first day in which we had four dives planned instead of the previous days of three. Well, our boat did anyway. I guess, I forgot to mention that our group was so large they’d split us in two, each boat containing eight people & four guides along with the captain & the deck hand. Our boat went back out to Aer Prang around 5:45 PM when the sun had begun to set. By the time we arrived a mere ten to fifteen minutes later the light was minimal at best & the sun was all but gone from our view. This was to be our first night dive.

Now I’d never been on a night dive before & if you recall from my pre-Fiji blog, in which I thought we were going to do a night dive, I was just as nervous about it as I was my shark dive. Now I’m craving both. I’m far from being a Thalassophobiak, but there’s something about the inky black of the ocean at night that I found rather off putting. My fears were misguided both in this instance & in my nervousness around sharks.

If you don’t know how a night dive works you’re basically plopped into a dive site in the pitch black. The lights on the boat are set to red as to not mess with the wild life below & each person brings along a torch to light their way. Additionally different methods of communication are used.

In normal light circumstances you give different hand signals to communicate with your fellow divers. In the blackness those signals are far from visible so they move from being off the body to being over your flashlight. Simple enough. Additionally when you want to get another diver’s attention in the light of day you make noise; bang your tank, carry a rattle, blow a whistle, click a carabiner, etc. Here when you hear a noise reverberation from the dark you have no idea what direction its coming from, who it’s coming from, or even if it’s a member of your party or another dive party. The solution? Wave your flashlight back & forth like a maniac in front of your fellow diver’s line of sight. I think this method often actually works better than the sound alternative.

So down we go, lights aglow searching for critters what dine on marine snow.

I’m once again going the throw Sam under the bus here, I promise this won’t be a trend in the remainder of this blog, nor part three to follow.

We get down to the bottom, I’m following Puri, Sam is following behind me, & I notice the light from her torch flash then disappear so naturally I think she’s trying to get our attention. I whirl around in search of her & she is no where to be found, lost to the darkened maw of the ocean.

I can hear some of you saying “check please, she got snatched” in your head, mine however didn’t go there until just now when I was typing this.

I continue searching for her, looking all around from the ocean floor to the water’s surface, no luck. Next thing I know I feel fingertips & a hand fiddling around the back of my neck trying to grasp the handle of my BCD (Buoyancy Compensator/Control Device). I look up from the arm now attached to me & there is Sam waving back at me extinguished light in hand.

So what happened? Well, Sam forgot to charge her dive light with full confidence in it & ironically it had decided to crap out at almost the exact moment we were all like “All ready? Okay, let’s go exploring.” Sam’s solution, which I’ve got to say was a smart one, was to grab ahold of my gear & basically hitch a ride with me the duration of the dive, which is the exact thing you’re supposed to do. Only I didn’t know that. So while I’m whirling around in search of her, she was whirling around trying to grab the back of my BCD to continue the dive. Fortunately the Eagle Scout in me came prepared & I had a second, smaller light, to give her so she didn’t have to play Remora with me the whole time.

Night diving is an interesting experience, it’s a completely different world. We’d dove the site during the day so I knew what to expect in terms of terrain & fauna but it truly is something to behold when the lights go out. A lot of the fish in the reef enter a form of sleep drastically reducing their metabolism while still technically staying awake to keep them alert from predators but during this state of stasis they basically go into a less reactive & mobile state. You find a lot of the fish that you would see during the day resting & they don’t stir or depart nearly as quickly at night. Sometimes you end up right up on them without them paying you much mind.

We stumbled upon many ‘sleeping’ Dwarf Lionfish, Pipefish, Crustaceans & Starfish that had come out to eat. We found our first Octopus of the trip, a long tentacle that would splay its arms out, following each divot of the sea bed, then retract them once it came up dry with nothing to grab onto & snack on. Additionally we ran into many snoozing Cuttlefish & a massive, meaty looking Blue Crab swimming about the shallows, hunting fish. You also get the microscopic critters that you miss during the day who are drawn to the light, darting in & out of the beam as you cruise along. (We’ll get more into them on the Black Water Dive in part three next week).

With our night dive concluded we made our way back to base where it was now dinner time. The groups who’d stay’d behind were already digging in by the time we returned but we were assured dinner would wait for us to return from our showering. The Tomato Soup & Indonesian Chicken Curry that were on the evening’s menu really helped to warm the bones as well & it wasn’t long before we were all sound asleep, zonked by the many adventures of the day, ready to face the next.

End Of Day Three

Day Four

Day four felt ripped right out of the archives of a nature documentary. There were so many observed happenings on this day that I don’t think for the entirety of the remainder of my days as a diver I will find another jam packed day such as this, at least where the circle of life is concerned. The day started out early, with breakfast. One thing I really appreciate about diving Lembeh is that you actually get to have the breakfast of your choosing because you’re not dealing with massive swells on the way to your dive site. I think, in this case, it was an egg sandwich day with bacon.

The first of the day’s animal encounters happened without even having to leave the shore. You see, each morning, on my way to the boat I’d stop to see which sea creatures had gathered around the dock over night. Day one it had been a Batfish just off the end of the pier, day two; schools of butterflyfish, but I think this morning took the case of coolest things spotted. Just off the main part of the dock there were a few schools of fish, that wasn’t the cool part. Amongst these shoals was a singular Cuttlefish, cool on its own, sure, only this Cuttlefish was hunting. It was pulsing dark & light colors over its body in an attempt to hypnotize the fish belonging to the schools. When it got closer it would extend out its two harpoon-like tentacles & snag one of fish. I watched it do this over & over until it had successfully snagged two or three fish & it was now time to depart from the shore to head out into the strait for the day’s dives. I promise you, this Nat Geo/Discovery Channel/Animal Plant-esque day was far from over as the remainder of this segment will surely show! Buckle up kids, it’s gonna get wild!

As the week moved on & my editing work began piling up more & more I began to get lazy with logging my dives. At least that’s the excuse I’m going to be using going forward for the fact that I lost track of some of the names of the dive sites going forward because the online log book required me to make a new entry with address (um…ocean?) & coordinates as well. So if I can’t give you the name of any of the dive sites on this here day we shall be referring to them here numerically.

Dive #1 popped off immediately & actually ended up being one of my favorite dives of the whole trip. This one, fortunately to us, dear reader, does have a name. It’s called Angel’s Window. Similar to the Cathedral of Lanai, Angel’s Window is the remnants of an old lava tube, supplying it with a number of pass throughs & caves. The “window” is a massive, 100 foot tall rock, that rests just below the surface of the water & is covered in beautiful reef. Where deep diving is concerned you always start the day off with your deepest dive & always start said dive off with the deepest depth, working your way back up.

Slowly we began our decent down the side of the rock, taking in the fish & corals before we reached the first cave. There a school of Squirrelfish had taken up residence & their reflective silver & red scales flashed the light of our torches back at us lighting up the cavern. Directly below us the rock had a vertical pass through that let out right at the entrance to the actual window of which an Angel, either by name or title, possess. I should mention, the above pass through is where Sam had to save me from bumping into the reef, so we’re square. On the other side of the window we came our to find sand bed waiting for us. Much to my joy, off in the distance I could see the ‘sway & snag’ of a colony of Garden Eels.

I love garden eels, I absolutely adore them. They burrow in the sand in clusters, popping their heads & a good portion of their bodies out, & collecting zooplankton as it drifts by. They’re very, very shy & this group of Spotted Garden Eels was no exception. I did my best to sneak up on them to no avail, but that still didn’t stop me from squealing at the glimpse of them that I had been fortunate enough to gather.

Back to the rock we went where we began to spiral our way up & around. I did glimpse another cluster of garden eels down on the other side of the rock but I ended up distracted by Octopus #2 of the trip.

This was a Day Octopus, a close relative to the GPO or Giant Pacific Octopus. You know, that octopus that comes to mind when we all think of them. Solving puzzles, squeezing through tiny spaces, tucked up by the glass in your local aquarium? Yeah, that one!

It was tucked & hiding away so we moved on quickly running into a rather large Moray Eel, several schools of Box Anthias whose colors seemed to glow neon at depth, & a rather aggressive Damselfish who came careening off the reef to attack my fins. Though after what happened next, I’m not surprised that it wasn’t a fan of divers.

On up the rock we found a rather large school of Klein’s Butterflyfish pecking at the rock. Puri pointed out that they were eating fish eggs, specifically the fish eggs of the Damsels on the reef. I was fascinated by them swarming the rocks but Puri urged me on. Noticing me watching them as we swam away he wrote on his pad “they will follow us.” A little lost I chose to trust & continued on after him. Sure enough here they came, the entirely of the school of Butterflyfish was now following us. The damsel below was just a precursor, a foreshadowing of events to come it you will because the butterflies had learned that the damsels would much rather defend their clutch from something large, more likely to wipe out the spawn, than a school of fish. They used our being there to draw the damsels off of the reef & would then swoop in & pick off the eggs left behind leaving the damsels to fight off the butterfly fish frenzy.

Don’t feel bad for the damselfish, please. The entirety of this trip I had probably a dozen or more damselfish try to pick fights with me just for swimming by. Even in my own home aquarium I had to evict my Staghorn Damsels because they were killing my corals to lay eggs in the middle of the tank & then would fight all of the other fish the came within feet of the nest. They’re a-holes.

The butterflies followed us for a good while, feeding along the way, taking the piss out of the damsels but departed from us when we swung around the north side of the rock & found the current.

I’ve always kind of enjoyed a slight current while diving, the sway back & forth reminds you just how small you are & its exhilarating to start in one spot, kick to ride the current where you want to go, & then sweep back just a little bit. I was distracted by the immaculately vivacious Sun Coral colonies to notice that Sam had completely disappeared. I signaled to Puri asking where our dive buddy was & he simply gave me the gesture of “the boat.'“ Turns out while I was reveling in the current, Sam was developing sea sickness. I scouted the reef for a few more minutes before returning to find Sam applying Dramamine patches behind her ears.

Angel’s Window sits near the top of Lembeh Strait, hence its oceanic influences. That meant we had a bit longer of a trek back south to get to our next dive site. Just off the shore from a small town, dive #2 was a full on muck dive, hard contrast to the morning dip. We sat & watched a small Indonesian girl & her father training their dog how to swim while we loaded up on warm beverages, water, fruit, & once more, cake. Once it was time to dive & Sam’s Dramamine (Samamine) had begun to kick it was time to dive once more.

We spent a good while doing simple observational tasks on this dive. We found a set of Sea Slugs ‘racing’ towards one another & sat to watch them & see what they’d do. Initially we were all taking votes on mating but it ended up being only coincidence & the slugs recoiled immediately when they finally made connection with one another.

I managed to film my second “feeding” of the day as we descended down farther when a Lionfish chased a Boxfish off the mooring line where it was perched & consumed it out in open water above me. Probably was that Lionfish’s last meal as Boxfish are poisonous.

Our dive into the muck included many Hi Hats, a massive school of Shrimpfish, Sand Divers (yes, they are as the name suggests), Porcupine Puffers, several types of Frogfish (Hairy & Painted), a Seahorse, several live Sand Dollars, & a Queen Conch. We even found another set of the same variety of Sea Slugs inching their way towards one another, only this time, they ended up mating! Post dive it was once again time to head back to the resort for lunch.

After lunch I sat editing, milking a Pacori Sweat while editing. All of the sudden I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. There, above me, pilfering through the rafters was a slender brown & grey snake. It was darting around looking for food amongst the roofing. I asked one of the staff what kind of snake it was & I was informed it was a Brown Coconut Snake, probably looking for geckos to eat up there, though normally they stick to the trees. I sat there editing & watching the snake for a good while before it was time, once again to go dive.

Our afternoon dive was at the Island just across the strait from the resort. In the water we went, ears adjusted, down through the muck where I excited discovered a large Crete, or Sea Snake below us. We all gathered around but found ourselves a bit puzzled as it wasn’t really moving. Our collective though seemed to be that maybe it was snoozing, resting, or trying to burrow after food, but upon closer inspection the snake was missing its head. 40 feet below the surface, a quarter mile off the coast of an unsettled island this discovery still perplexes me.

Abandoning the dearly departed we continued down the island’s slope til I came upon a Black Ribbon Eel. Many of you saw the moment I’m about to describe on my Instagram or TikTok but I’ll be more than happy to describe it to you all here! This Juvenile Eel was buried deep in the substrate, swaying patiently in the currents, passing the water through their specialized nostrils that act as antennae picking up the scent of any passing prey. P.S. I knew it was a juvenile because it was black. The adult males are blue, the females, yellow. In our passing we had startled a small cluster of Cardinal Fish close to the eel’s den. (Truly we are a terror to the safety & security of the cardinal fish). The eel immediately stopped its swaying & closed its mouth, looking now more like a blade of seagrass sticking out of the ground. Puri noticed this & motioned for me to lay low, stake down, & start filling, which I did. The group of cardinals, disoriented by us, had scattered a bit & were still paying much more attention to the three black clad monsters in the water with them than the seemingly innocuous blade of grass at their rear.

The fish population of Lembeh are clearly opportunists, many adapting to use human influence to their advantage, case in point. This eel used our presence to hone in one a singular cardinal that had drifted a little too far from the flock & had found itself very much in line for an easy lunch. However, the cardinal was not entirely unwise. It narrowly avoided the strike of the eel but, I guess stuck between a rock & a hard place of us or the eel it wrongly chose to stay in the proximity of the eel who creeped in for a second strike, landed it, & drug the wriggling fish back into its hovel.

Farther down the slope we encountered a pair of Chocolate Chip Starfish before Gigs, one of the other guides started banging his tank to get us to come over to see what he & his group had discovered. Enter octopus #3.

Gigs had found a Blue-Ringed Octopus, only about the size of your thumb, the Blue-Ring is one of the most venomous animals on the planet & it isn’t afraid to show you that it is not to be messed with. This blue-ring, in the typical fashion, was fairly mundane looking, that was until it decided we were a threat & it was in danger. These octopuses, as the name implies, are covered in a series of blue rings. What the name doesn’t tell you is that these blue rings aren’t always there but instead are used in mating & as a way to flash at predators, or in this case us, to back the eff off. The electric blue rings are extraordinary almost appearing to have a turquoise luminescence to them. Never one to waste its venom, the blue ring quickly slinked away to a hidey hole after it realized we weren't going to watch it & that we weren’t fooled by it pretending to be bubble algae or just another rock so we let it be & departed as well.

Farther up the slope was came across a reef with some of the most amazing Bubble-Tipped Anemones I’ve ever seen, massive mounds of Galaxia, huge Feather-Duster Worm colonies, Maze, Bird’s Nest, & Torch Corals. We found Juvenile Sweetlips squiggling around the bottom, a colony of Venomous Coral Catfish dive bombing the sand, & many a Filefish, Cleaner Wrasse, & Puffer tucked in the rock along with a Crete, only this one was alive.

The rest of the evening played out as usual; shower, editing, dinner, more editing, bed. I kept finding myself reminiscing about just how incredible the day had been & couldn’t fathom how Lembeh was going to out do herself, boy was I wrong.

See you all in part three! Have a great weekend!

Much Love Always,

-C

End Of Day Four

End Of Part Two

November 4, 2022

Charlie Rogers

Travel, Travel Blog, Blog

Travel Blog: Indonesia: Part One-A Plane, A Boat, A Truck, & Diving in the Muck

November 4, 2022

Charlie Rogers

Travel, Travel Blog, Blog

INDONESIA

PART ONE:

Prologue/Day One

Singapore

We’re starting day one off in the airport, specifically the Singapore Airport where my eighteen hour LA to Singapore leg had come to an end at 1:30 on Monday morning. Regrettable I was unable to get much sleep one the flight so I was dragging. I found an open street food stall in the airport & got a bowl of Wonton Noodle Soup with Veggies. Before finding a spot to crash I stopped at the in airport 7/11 for something to drink & some candy as well as the airport Butterfly Garden & Cactus Garden. I found a spot behind a row of seats to bunk down for a few hours before my flight to Jakarta was set to take off at 6 am. By the time I’d setting in for my nap the time was around 3 am.

It was, unfortunately, short lived. Apparently a section full of people napping is the perfect place to take a phone call & play with your toddler, as the woman who loudly sad beside me somehow discerned. Having slept only around 30-45 minutes I begrudgingly gathered my things & went in search of caffeine.

I’d switched from coffee to tea a few weeks prior so when I ordered a lemon black iced tea at what was now just short of 5 AM, the sleepy barista looked at me like I had three heads. It truly didn't cross my brain until I’d left the region entirely that I was smack in the center of part of the coffee world, literally about to board a flight to the island of Java. Hindsight is 20/20 as they say & next time I’ll be sure to scout coffee options.

The rest of my dive crew joined me just after I downed my tea & right around the time our gate & security opened to let us through to the gate waiting area. The Singapore Airport does this interesting thing where there is minimal security when simply entering the terminal, but each gate is glassed off with its own private security line that you can reserve a specific time to be in if you plan in advance. We all got through security, I paid Deb the $3 I owed her still from Fiji & we promptly boarded shortly there after.

Indonesia

I had managed to book a window seat into Jakarta though it was in the far back of the Singapore Airlines plane, the seats get more & more narrow the farther back you go. I slept majority of the hour long flight but woke in time for the in flight meal of Chicken Congee, which made me question why I don’t make Congee more often.

Once we began our decent into Jakarta I noticed something interesting, rows & rows of something out in the ocean just off shore. Later I would find out that those were pearl farms after boating by a few in Lembeh Strait.

We had a four hour layover in Jakarta & while we thought it would be a casual stroll through the airpark, we ended up needing every minute of it.

The first hurtle was immigration, we got in one line just to be told it was wrong once we got up to the front, then we went over to buy a 30-day visa for $30 USD, which then had the be taken back to the original line. Our baggage took a while to collect, coming out in spurts in ten minute intervals, though Joe & my dive partner/roomie, Sam’s, bags didn’t end up making it entirely. We waited while they filled out the missing bag reports, then we started to make our way through customs.

I don’t know why I found the immigration/customs process in Indonesia so intimidating, but it was. Everything was taken very seriously, each little form had to be filled out precisely or the officer viewing it would throw a fit, the only other similar customs experience I’ve had was entering The US at BNA from The UK.

Once we were all through customs we had to board a monorail to a different terminal, of which, the directions for use were very confusing, but we made it, though half of our group got separated trying to figure out the sky rail system.

The local terminal was overwhelming with, once again, little to no direction on where exactly you’re supposed to go. Have you ever seen the pictures of Kathmandu, Nepal where the streets are just wall to wall people, buggies, & vehicles? That’s what the local terminal at Jakarta International felt like. It was especially overwhelming trying to roll suitcases & bags through in addition to everyone basically being in the same attire from the soccer/football match the evening prior.

We finally found where we needed to be & stood in line to check in for Batik Airways. This took some time. The problem was that everyone in the group, with the exception of Sam & I were on a singular booking, so we had to assemble & check in each of those people as a group, paying the baggages fees individually as they went. The acceptable baggage weight fluctuated between 20 kg & 17 kg depending upon which ticketing agent you asked so some people ended up having to go halfway across the terminal to pay their baggage fee & others ended up getting off scot-free. Once we were all paid & bags were dropped we made our way to our gate.

The gate situation here was similar to Singapore with the gates being the security check point but had more in common with MCI where there were 5-10 gates behind each security check point. Our flight was slightly delayed so I went in search of food. I landed on a coffee stall that had Thai Tea Boba & Coconut Steam buns.

Once we were boarded I’d been resorted to a middle seat in the very back of the aircraft. For the two & a half-three hour flight I sat watching Shang-Chi & passively enjoying the Curried Chicken I’d been given.

Once we’d landed in Manado & gathered our belongings we were shown to cars where our stuff was packed in & two-three of us were shoved in & off we went.

I’ll say this about the Indonesian drivers as a whole, the lane markers seem to only be a suggestion. We cruised across the country side past Gunung Klabat to Bitung where we disembarked from the vans & we ushered through the village to a pier with a small overhead cover where we sat with our gear waiting for a boat, we’d finally made it to Lembeh Strait.

Our chariot was, ironically, one of the dive boats from the resort. We all got in, our bags were passed down & placed in the non-seated areas. The ride across the strait only took around ten minutes & we were greeted at the dock by Simon, the owner of NAD Lembeh Resort.

We were instructed to leave our bags on the boat & head into the bar area where we were meant to fill out the resort & dive paperwork. We were met there by some of the resort staff & a Calamansi beverage of the resort’s creation. While we filled out our paper work our bags were being brought to our rooms & we were briefed on the resort, its amenities, & our dives.

I retired back to my shared room with Sam & we got ourselves sorted before it was time to go back to the main part of the resort for dinner.

NAD has a resort chef named Tommy. Tommy’s job extends not only to evening meals but also includes lunch, breakfast is handled by several of the women on the resort staff. Each meal, no matter the maker, is served buffet style with dessert or fruit being brought out around twenty minutes into the designated meal time. Dinner was always a soup, a salad, several entree options & at least one veggie dish. Our first night Chicken in Yellow Curry was the main course.

Over dinner I remarked to Simon about the various species of “rare” plants scattered around the facilities; A Variegated Philodendron Burle Marks on the check-in desk, several species of rare Monstera, Hoyas, & Pothos & he explained that their gardener is world renowned for going out into the jungle of Indonesia & even discovering new species of plants! He even offered his contact info & told me to contact him about shipping some to The US!

After a delicious dinner we seemed to be reaching our individual points of expiration so we called it an early night, each of us heading off to bed by 8:30 at the latest. I took a rinse off shower in our room’s “shower room” (a literal room whose only purpose was to house the shower) & was out like a light as soon as my head hit the pillow.

End Of Day One

Day Two

Our boat call was 7:30 AM. Breakfast each morning began service at 6 which consisted of Toast with Jams, Cereal, Fruit, Yogurt, Eggs, Bacon or Sausage, Fresh Juice, & occasionally Nasi Goreng (Indonesia’s National Dish of Fried Rice) or Fried Noodles. I opted for Two Eggs Over Easy on Wheat Toast w/ Chicken Sausage, Fresh Papaya, & Pineapple, along with a Jasmine Tea.

After breakfast it was time to assemble the gear. The staff had come the night prior to retrieve our BCDs (Buoyancy Compensator Device), Dive Computers, Fins, Wetsuits, & Regulators, along with anything else we didn’t want to carry down ourselves the next day. That left me with my Mesh Scuba Bag filled with my Dive Socks, GoPro Kit, Bits & Bobs that I Dive with (Pointer, Torch, Etc.), & my out of suit Swimwear. I topped off my water & climbed into the boat where Sam & I were introduced to Puri, our would-be guide for the week ahead.

Now Puri is an Indonesian gent from just outside of Bitung that I’d place somewhere in his 30s. Whether through natural occurrence or corrective lenses he has dark blue eyes that sit cheerfully atop his stout, dark build. From what I gathered from Puri in the week’s time we spent together he can be a bit of a jokester which is fortunate because his laugh is both cacophonous & infectious.

NAD Lembeh has the benefit of being positioned almost smack dab in the middle of the Lembeh Strait, meaning that a lot of the dive sites were only around a 10-15 minute boat trip from the resort. Our first of which was Pantaic Parigi 1, which translates to Parigi Beach 1.

We started our week of dives off, appropriately, with a muck dive. For those unaware a muck dive differs from other dives by the substrate. A muck dive consists of a soft, muddy bottom & it requires one to have a true handle on their buoyancy because one false kick or move & you kick up the silt ruining the visibility. A lot of muck dives also take place on a slope as you’re on the banks of the strait & could easily swim all the way up on shore if you weren’t careful.

We were briefed & entered at around fifteen feet of water, we hung out there for a minute while we all got used to being submerged again then descended down the slope. I was immediately amazed that half the things Puri had begun pointing out to Sam & I were around the size of a finger nail; translucent Shrimp, little Nudibranchs, Shrimp Gobies buried in the sand. I suppose it’s worth noting, if you hadn’t picked up on it already, that we were diving in trios. Typically resort dives consist of one or two dive guides per group of eight-ish. NAD Lembeh does two per guide so that the small things aren’t missed, the commotion around the animals doesn’t stir up the bottom, & the guides aren’t fighting the visibility to keep their group together.

At one point we came upon a submerged fishing net that had long been abandoned to the bottom of the ocean. That didn’t stop the fish & corals from using it to the best of their abilities. One of the buoys for the net was still holding it aloft while the rest of it sat strewn across the sea bed. There were many corals that had taken root, clusters of Cuttlefish & Octopus eggs covered the netting, schools of Cardinal Fish hid amongst the low netting, Eels & Lionfish used the coverage & camouflage options for hunting, the net was teeming with life.

Farther down we found Medusa Worms hosting Emperor Shrimp, Anemones filled with Clowns, Pufferfish grazing in the muck, a beautifully puffed out Gurnard, & many a Filefish.

I, for once, was the air sucker of the group. I guess being at least a foot-foot & a half taller than the rest of your part will do that. I was getting low on air while Sam & Puri both still had just short of half a tank upon our resurface. This would be the trend for the rest of the trip where usually I am the one with all of their air left over.

Our surface interval was supplemented with Papaya, Pineapple, a Loaf Cake, & your choice of either Coffee, Tea, or Milo (Australian Nesquik). We rehydrated & disbursed the nitrogen from our bodies all while traveling over to Aer Prang 2 which I guess roughly translates to “Air Crash 2” though I don’t believe there’s a plane wreck below the surface, at least not that we saw. Aer Prang 2 sits right next to a water depot which really just looks like a cinderblock building with a thatched roof & a small aqueduct running down the dock to the water. Aer Prang would be a popular destination over the next week, as it is half coral reef/half muck. This was the site that really solidified it for me, this was the site that immediately made the 40+ hours of travel to Indonesia worth it for me. Allow me to explain why.

This is going to truly sound like first world diver problems & to some degree it is but I want to wind things back to Fiji for a second. When I was in Fiji, with the exception of the shark dive, all of the dives we were doing were amongst some of the most beautiful reefs I’ve ever seen. This is not to dissuade you from going to do Beqa because if you have the desire I highly recommend it. Hell, I’d love to go back myself! BUT when you’re diving 2-3 dives a day, all of them, as I mentioned, the most beautiful coral reefs you’ve ever seen, it begins to feel a tad redundant. Told ya, first world diver problems. Indonesia has the benefit of variety. You can go from wall dives to muck dives to massive sprawling reefs to giant rock cathedrals swarming with life, sometimes all within the same dive. I will say the thing that Fiji has over Indonesia is its large aquatic life, something I found myself actually missing in Indonesia from time to time.

At the start of Aer Prang you’re dropped, plop, right into a reef. Anemones, corals, fish, & life abound, then you start to head down another slope into the muck. The benefit of this miss mash is that you get kind of the in-between where the muck & the reef are concerned. You get the fish & invertebrates that live in both or are the reef outcasts. You get things like Cuttlefish & Octopuses, you get things like Seahorses (one of which was pregnant) & Frogfish, you get things like Flasher Dragonettes, Pipefish, & Sea Kraits all while experiencing amazing coral life along the way.

After our second dive we returned to home base where it was lunch time. I grabbed a Pocari Sweat which is a Japanese Sports drink & immediately went to download my footage from the day & start editing.

Lunch was usually a tad on the lighter side since most of us still planned to go out diving a third time in the afternoon & was served alongside a massive plate of fruit; mostly papaya, watermelon, & pineapple. I asked after Jackfruit seeing as it’s one of my favorites & was informed it was the end of the season for them, but they would try to find me one.

Our third dive departed at 2:30 PM each day. In this instance I’m not entirely sure the dive site we ended up at as I got lazy in my dive log & just claimed Aer Prang again instead of creating a whole new site for the SSI app like I’d done the previous two. I can tell you that this site was mostly muck but it featured fields & fields of Goniopora & by fields & fields, I mean as far as was visible in all directions. Amongst the Goniopora we found many resting Lionfish, some Blue Spotted Stingrays, Pipefish, Filefish, Clowns, Anemones, Puffers, etc. One of the coolest things we found in the somewhat faded light was a school of Shrimpfish that when you passed light through them looked like a fire blazing above a Gorgonian.

We returned to the resort & I set about editing once again. If you were unaware on my TikTok & Instagram I post clip videos of my trips as they happens, especially my dives!

The evening rolled around & it was once again time for Tommy’s delicacies & the day’s discussion of who saw what & where! I remember calling it an early night again, having rinsed off earlier & opting to finish up the day’s video in the morning I drifted off to sleep fairly easily.

End Of Day Two

END OF PART ONE

PART TWO

October 22, 2022

Charlie Rogers

Travel, Travel Blog, Blog

Travel Blog: Singapore-Day Drinking My Way Through A Two Day Layover

October 22, 2022

Charlie Rogers

Travel, Travel Blog, Blog

We’re gonna change this up a little bit. Normally I would post my blogs in chronological order of how they happened, meaning that this should technically be “Part One” of Indonesia. However, as I am currently still in the middle of editing all of my footage from Indonesia, including some things that would fit into the segment of “Part One,” we will instead begin with Singapore as I have all of my photos in order there & won’t have to rush to include them here. That means that next week will be Indonesia: Part One & we’ll return to our chronology from there. Sound good? Too bad. Let’s talk about my two day’s time spent in Singapore!

SINGAPORE

Day One:

If you read my blog regarding the 40+ hours of travel I had on the front half of my trip you’ll know that initially my plan was to arrive in Singapore two days before Indonesia & enjoy my time then. My plans for that order of events was thrown a wrench when I couldn’t for the life of me find a hotel that wasn’t $600 minimum a night & couldn't figure out why. Turns out that weekend was the Singapore Grand Prix. So instead Singapore moved its pretty little self to the back half of my trip & I proceeded accordingly from there.

I arrived in Singapore from Jakarta at around 8:30 AM, having only gotten around three hours of sleep the night before & another thirty minutes-ish on the plane my original plan was to head towards my hotel & see if they were willing to put me in my room early. By the time I cleared customs/immigration & gathered my things it was pushing 9:30. I pulled some cash out of an ATM & went to hail a cab. I initially tried to book something through “Grab” which is Singapore’s version of Uber but I couldn’t get the app to download so a standard cab ended up being the winner.

My driver was a Malaysian gentlemen whose name I never quite caught as his excitement about having me in his vehicle made it near impossible to distinguish about 60% of the stories he was trying to convey to me. I gentlemen in question was a Muslim missionary who, on many occasions, had come to The US to speak to local Muslim communities here on what it is to represent the faith in The States & how they should spread the message of The Quran amongst their friends & neighbors. He was overjoyed to have an American in his cab & during our near thirty minute ride he went through every story from every city in The US that he could think of at near break neck speed. He dropped me at my hotel, the Hilton Garden Inn- Little India, & I handed him a fifty note for his troubles & enthusiasm.

The Hilton was more than willing to accommodate my early arrival, of which I much appreciated, & put me in a corner room overlooking the city. I didn't realize, however, when the room was booked just how far Little India was from the Downtown Core of Singapore. Leaving the room completely untouched I went back down to the receptionist to see if I could cancel my stay & move closer in town. He was only able to cancel me the following evening as I’d already checked in which was fine by me.

Initially my plan was to get a nap in before going out adventuring but anytime I’m anywhere I haven’t been or am on vacation I always hear the echos of my sister when she was in her early teens telling me “you can sleep when you’re dead.” Probably during some time in which she was trying to get me to go out with her somewhere. So I got dressed from the clothes I’d wore on the plane & went out into the city.

I was desperately craving a workout as the only one I’d gotten in the last week of travel was that which involved hauling dive gear or hauling luggage around an airport, so I headed over to Barry’s Singapore: Raffles Place. Quite the departure from taking a nap, I know. I walked through the vibrant Little India over to the subway where I took the train over to the downtown block. The Barry’s class was difficult, especially having not worked out for a week & some change, but I celebrated its completion with a shake & a “Barry’s Singapore” shirt, along with a hooded tank top that was 40% off which I changed into to get out of my sweaty, post-workout clothing.

Back downstairs I made the decision that I was going to go get some lunch instead of my initial plan of going back to my hotel to change. I wasn’t stinky I promise, plus I brought deodorant. I made my way over to the Civic District but not before passing many incredible buildings in the downtown block, Yueh Hai Ching Temple (the oldest temple in Singapore, & Boat Quay (a river front restaurant district). I was making my way over to Sing Swee Kee to try Singapore Chicken & Rice! Along the trek I stopped at the Raffles City Shopping Centre just to walk about & gather some AC before continuing on to the restaurant.

I was greeted exuberantly when I walked in, by literally everyone working the restaurant. They all wanted to make sure I was in the right place & wasn’t just some lost tourist who had wandered into a random chicken shop. I was sat right by the kitchen & brought a cup of chilled Ginger/Pandan Tea & a cup of Clear Broth Soup. I asked the first waitress what to order, she had me get traditional Boiled Chicken & Veggies with Rice Balls, the second waitress added the insistence of Fish Maw Soup with Chicken Collagen so I agreed. The food was incredible, simple as can be but bursting with flavor. I didn’t realize it at the time but the stall has been operating out of the same location since the early 1970s. I even bought a jar of their chili sauce to bring home much to the owner’s surprise who was shocked I could even make it through eating it atop my lunch.

After lunch I made my way towards the Mandarin Oriental Hotel because their bar, MO Bar, made the list of the Top 100 Bars in the World as well as the Top 10 Bars in all of Asia in addition to it being the only of the several in Singapore that made that list to be open on a Monday. Along the way I encountered the remnants of the Grand Prix that had jumbled up my trip & passed through yet another mall to take in the AC.

I arrived at the Mandarin Oriental where I asked the concierge for directions to the bar, I was instructed over to the elevator feeling far too underdressed to even be setting foot in the hotel, much less its award winning bar. I was greeted at MO Bar by a lovely hostess who sat me at an upright along the window overlooking the bay. I then received the spiel about the cocktails & the bar itself. Each of the drinks on MO’s incredible fun bar menu (even the online version is cool) is meant to pay homage to a specific country in Asia & the local ingredients found there. The physical bar menu is set up almost like a 3D constellation map with lighter drinks on one side & the more boozy on the other.

I was served some Wasabi Chips, a bowl of Chevda, & some sparkling water before I ordered a Full Moon, a drink with Rum, Wheatgrass, & Pear topped with a Sugar Film Moon based on South Korea. I will say, of the drinks I had during my time spent at MO Bar, I think this one was my least favorite. That’s not to say the drink was bad by any stretch of the imagination, in fact it was excellent, those that followed were just more so.

My next drink was a Honeybee; a Honey, Whiskey, Kumquat drink, at the bartender’s request. It was an excellent, heart warming, & frothy tribute to Penang that was served inside a black marble cup, of which I still would love a set for my home bar, along side the perfect accent of grapefruit which really brought an interesting quality to the beverage.

After I’d finished by second drink I struck up a conversation with the hostess/waitress who had sat me. We talked about everything from my travels to her life in Singapore & even delved into the Top 100 list they’re feature on, of which, I’ve been to several of the bars listed. I mentioned to her that while my first two drinks were exquisite, I really look for niche cocktails at bars, something that I wouldn’t find anywhere else that maybe imitates of food item or evokes specific feeling, as the cocktails I tend to remember in my travels & life are those that drew from very specific inspiration. Her recommendation was the Satay By The Bay, an homage to the street foods of Singapore, going so far as to include “chicken floss” in the list of ingredients for the cocktail. So I gave it a whirl.

Y’all, when I say this is one of the most fascinating cocktails I’ve ever had I’m not joking. Boasting a “nutty bitterness,” the Gin based twist on a Negroni tastes almost exactly like Chicken Satay with Peanut Sauce, it’s truly incredible. It even has the smokey notes from the charcoal of the grill mixed into it! Additionally I was brought a “taster” of the Afterglow, a Ginger Gin Martini variant with cotton candy (candy floss) melted into it meant to be a tribute to Java. The curious thing about the Afterglow, besides how delicious it is even to a non-martini drinker, is that it really accents the floral notes of the ginger instead of bringing out the traditionally used root, even though the root was what was used.

If I’m being entirely honest, I’m not sure how long I spent at MO. I know when I got there I was at the tail end of afternoon tea & by the time I’d left dinner service had begun to roll out. That’s not to say I didn’t knock back a few more drinks before my departure.

My final drinks of the evening came as a duo as well. I had asked about two cocktails, the Ube & the Annona, both out of my love for the ingredients involved, but since I was preparing to close out my journey down craft cocktail lane I went with the dessert cocktail, the Ube.

The Ube was explained to me as an experimental cocktail, something of a milkshake without the milkshake texture. I’d probably qualify it as some form of a milk tea served with a warm chocolate spring roll. Before the Baguio inspired drink graced my lips however I was served another taster, this time of Annona. Meant to convey Koh Samui, the Annona is a Gimlet twist made from Gin, Soursop, & Pandan. The pandan really is the star of the show here bringing a grassy nuttiness to the understated citrus of the soursop. An excellently balanced cocktail.

My Ube was also served along side a plate of cookies & chocolates from the staff whom I had gotten relatively acquainted with over my several hour stay. I’d shared conversations with the majority of them, gotten their takes & recommendations, & found out a little about their lives in the process. I even informed the bartender, who plays a hand in the crafting of the menu, that I found their menu more enjoyable & more memorable than the vast majority of bars I’d checked off on the Top Bars list, including those ranked in the Top 10 of the world. He hugged me.

I am a massive fan of Jackfruit, as the members of my dive party in Indonesia can attest to, as well as the desserty nature of Ube, a root vegetable similar to Taro or Sweet Potato. The creamy whiskey drink had a lovely lulling quality to it, I almost would have liked to try it warm surrounded by snow.

I payed my tab & departed. I was thanked repeatedly by the staff whom I also returned my gratitude to & was given the sweetest post card, signed by each of the staff whom I’d interacted with over my incredible time at the MO Bar in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Singapore.

I was advised to go & see the Supertree light show at the Gardens By The Bay, I figured that since I was within reasonable walking distance & still required sustenance that I would kill two birds with one stone; see the show & get some satay! I crossed The Helix Bridge over the bay & skirted the gardens before cutting in towards the Supertree Grove.

I could hear the music from the outskirts of the park. There were runners everywhere & I was actually under the impression that I was going to be early for the show, turns out I arrived about halfway through it. Now I’ll be the first to admit that typically I find myself underwhelmed by light shows/firework shows/etc. but this was a spectacle to behold. Partially so because of the trees themselves & the hybrid technological marvel/plant housing that they are & partially because of the sense of community it offers. There are people camped out all over the park under the trees, each gazing up to the dazzling display above in wonder. Maybe it was the quantity of drinks or the lack of sleep but it was something undeniably heart warming.

After the light show ended I made my way over to Satay By The Bay…sound familiar?… where I got a fresh pressed Thai Guava Juice & naturally, some satay! The plate I ordered came with two prawns, two pork belly, & eighteen chicken satays along with rice. It was the smallest option. It was also served with a peanuty pineapple sauce that was the bomb! I only ended up being able to eat about half of the plate as I truly wasn’t that hungry, but I knew I needed something on my stomach other than alcohol & sugar to top off the evening.

I walked through the gardens on my way back to the train station which were beyond peaceful in the growing night. There was never a point in which I felt unsafe or nervous walking by myself in the well lit pathways.

My route to the train took me through the Marina Bay Sands where I passed way too many stories up for my fear of height’s liking through the middle of it. I finished my commute back to Little Italy where people where enjoying Chaat in the streets & carrying on amiably as I passed. It kind of make me wished I’d saved what little appetite I’d had for some Roti or something of the like.

I made it back to my hotel, took a much needed shower to wash off the day, & was out before my head hit the pillow, grateful for an incredible first day in Singapore!

End Of Day One

Day Two

I was awakened at 7:30 AM by the sounds of bells emanating from the Sri Veeramakaliamman Temple adjacent to the hotel. After around thirty minutes straight of tolling, I gave up on sleep & immediately set to packing my things. If you recall from the previous day I was planning to move hotels to something a little closer to the Downtown Core but that wasn’t going to stop me from exploring Little India a bit first.

I’d been advised by multiple different parties that I needed to give Toastbox or Ya Kun a try & get some Kaya Toast. The staff at MO Bar the night before had been adamant about Ya Kun being the superior of the two so I made it may breakfast stop. I found a location just a six minute walk from where I was staying & made my way through the bustling streets of Little India, adorned in decor for Diwali, towards the restaurant.

The location for Ya Kun I found was a small stall set inside a petite mall right next to the Little India Arcade. The venue only had around six or seven small tables total & it was near to full by the time I arrived. I stood at the counter where an old Singaporean woman took my order. I got the Kaya French Toast combo which came with a Milk Coffee & Two Soft Boiled Eggs for around $5. While the woman was cracking my eggs onto a plate she spotted my painted nails.

“Why are your nails painted” she probed?

“Because I enjoy them” I replied with a smile.

She was silent for a moment.

“Someone did them for you?”

"No, I did them myself.”

Without a beat she said: “I can tell.”

I just laughed & she handed me my plate of eggs instructing me on the locations of the sauces before I sat.

My Kaya French Toast & drink didn’t take long to follow, all the while I was scouring the web for a new hotel. Y’all, when I tell you Southeast Asia has been hiding Kaya Butter from us, they have been HIDING KAYA BUTTER FROM US!!!!!

What is Kaya Butter? Well, to put it simply, Kaya Butter is a Coconut Jam. Similar in taste & texture to sweetened condensed milk, I wrapped my meal & immediately went back to the country to buy me a jar for home!

After breakfast I cut through the arcade, sampling snacks & perusing the stalls many of which selling gorgeous, fragrant malas & variant sized statuettes of the many Hindu deities. After circling around Little India one more time, popping in & out of shops & enjoying the wafting incense mixing in the street, I headed back to my room to gather my things & check out.

There’s an awkward time discrepancy in the hotel world. Check out always falls somewhere between 10AM & Noon but check in is never before 3 PM. That’s a long time to wander aimlessly with your bags. Luckily I’d my checkout time wasn’t til noon & I’d thought of a solution. I would return to Barry’s & burn an hour & a half-ish there!

Back to Barry’s I went where I got my ass kicked, literally. It was leg day. After class I got me a smoothy & a few items of 70% off merch I’d missed the day prior! After I hopped back onto the train & made my way towards the Civic District once again where my new hotel awaited me.

My new accommodations were at the Grand Park City Hall, a five star hotel that I’d found a solid deal on due to the renovations undergoing the facility. I entered around an hour early but fortunately the had a room available for me as well as a complimentary upgrade! The room was stunning & while the 6’4” gentlemen that I am may have been remiss about the twin beds, I thoroughly enjoyed the ambiance & little touches that went into my stay there. After getting situated I made my way upstairs to the roof top pool for some rays & a soak before returning to my room to shower & get ready for the evening.

Truthfully I was awaiting a call from Odette notifying me that my waitlist status had been bumped to a table so my dinner plans hinged on it. I made my way over to Chinatown in the interim where I planned to stop at Jigger & Pony, another of the Top 50 Bars, to get a drink & maybe a light bite to eat.

I’d been told by the Google that Jigger & Pony opened at four, so I’d gone just after in hopes of catching a seat sans reservation. Google was wrong, it didn’t open til six, so I returned to a stand I’d passed, Yomie’s Rice X Yogurt, for a refreshing beverage to cool off the heat of the day. I got a fresh Mango & Yogurt drink & sucked it down as I began to walk around Chinatown. I knew I was close to the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple & Museum so I headed off in that direction.

I guess my luck or timing was off that day because I arrived at the temple right around five, at which time it closed apparently. So I took up a seat by the Chinatown Singapore: History & Culture Center, resting my feet that were still screaming at me from the 12+ miles I’d walked on concrete the day before.

After some time spent relaxing & watching the Xiangqi players in the courtyard I came to the realization that I was next to the Chinatown street market. I got up & flitted between the shops even finding an exotic plant stall that made me desperately wish I could bring plants home through customs.

When I’d finished perusing the hour was approaching six & I decided to make my way back towards Jigger & Pony but not before stopping at september coffee for an Iced Black Sesame Latte. Ya boi was crashing. What better solution for the crash than a dim lit bar & alcohol right?!

I was the first person at Jigger & Pony where I was sat at the bar right near the entrance. That’s not to say the bar did not quickly begin to fill with people who had clearly stumbled upon the same list I had & were looking to those “Top 50 in the World” quality cocktails.

At the bartender’s behest I ordered a Madame President, a deconstructed Negroni served with the Campari in lollipop form. The drink was not nearly as dry as I was anticipated with the Campari separated & the Vermouth being a dry instead of sweet variety, I think the orchid & melon liquors really balanced it out. You were meant to sip the cocktail, then take a lick of the lollipop, or whatever other way you wished to enjoy the drink. All I know is I could have had fifty of those Campari Lollipops!

Next I ordered a bit of food, not to over shadow the excellent Wasabi Chips (I see a trend here) that had been served, but I needed something more. So I ordered Deviled Blue Crab Dip served with Smoked Leeks, Sambal Belacan, & Potato Espuma. It smacked.

With the arrival of my dip I diverted course from Gin & found my way to Rum with a Corn Colada. Yes, you read that right, a Corn Colada. I don’t know who thought of it, whose brain said ‘try this out’ but power to them because it was incredibly refreshing. Served a little more like a fizz with egg white the colada swapped out the coconut for butter creating a surprisingly complex mix.

At this point exhaustion was really starting to set in & despite the intrigue the Jigger & Pony menu presented my intuition said it was time for me to call it, so I did, making my way back toward my hotel.

In all honesty I’m kind of glad Odette never called, I don’t think I’d have made it through, I was that tired. I literally went back to my room following my time at Jigger & Pony, packed my things, & fell asleep.

In my defense I had been woken up early & I also had an early flight to catch the next morning needing to be headed to the Singapore Airport around 6 AM.

End Of Day Two

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