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

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?!

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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.

Downtown Los Angeles

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.

Burlington Arcade In Pasadena

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.

Downtown Los Angeles

End Of Day One

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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.

Wheel Pies

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.

Taiwanese Beef Noodle Soup

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.

Sanrio EVA Airplane

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.

Bohol, Philippines

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

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END OF PART ONE

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

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?

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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

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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

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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

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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

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END OF PART THREE

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END OF BLOG

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

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!

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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

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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

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End Of Part Two

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

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

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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

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END OF PART ONE

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

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!

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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

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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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END OF BLOG

Blog: Travel Blogs & Their Time Table

I know what you’re thinking, ‘um, this is not a travel blog, you just returned from travel, wtf?!’ & you’d be correct, this is not a travel blog though, I assure you, next week’s will be. Why is this not a travel blog? Well, that would be the entire point of this blog you are currently scanning into your brain through your eye holes. I felt it appropriate & incredible important to fill you in on my process & what exactly goes in to each of these travel blogs that you all so lovingly read, because the answer is no short sum.

Again, if you are a reader of my frequent travel blogs, I thank you, from the bottom of my heart. I started them back in May of 2021 with my three part Maui series & have since done everything from The UK (multiple times), Fiji, Disneyland, etc & am currently working on Indonesia & Singapore for your reading enjoyment. However, the thing that I don’t think a lot of people realize from the outside looking in is just how long each of these travel blogs take to formulate & publish.

On an average week I would say that a standard blog takes me around two-three hours to complete, the shorter ones maybe an hour & a half. The travel blogs on the other hand, & any other recommendation blog I do, ends up being around ten hours of work, minimum, outside of the travel itself. I’m sure many of you read that number & though ‘the hell is he spending ten plus hours on in a travel blog?’ & the answers may surprise you.

Aside from the stories themselves, the remembering key events & filing them into an order that makes a coherent & interesting story, I also have to go through & tag each of the locations involved. If you weren’t aware, each time that a location is mentioned in a travel blog of mine, be it a restaurant, bar, hotel, museum, or even just a landmark, the name is a clickable link that takes you to the site of that exact property. Additionally I have to go in & edit each of the photos posted to the blog & often find & pull the ones I forgot to save to my phone that I want to use. Furthermore, logistics with squarespace, the housing site for my site & blog, make it so I have to switch back & forth between my computer & phone to get things uploaded &/or where I want them to be in the blog itself & if in the process of all of this my work gets derailed & I end up having to shift work time to something else, it often leads to a delayed publishing.

That’s why so many of these travel blog entries come out at later dates instead of right on Friday, which I have designated blog days, because I fall behind, or life gets in the way & the blog doesn’t end up being written in time.

So where is my Indonesia blog? Well in all honesty I have been weighing with posting the two day blog of Singapore first before diving, pun intended, into the week’s worth of content I have for Indonesia. I also arrived home around midnight on Wednesday & have not had the time or bandwidth to hash out a ten plus hour blog to post today or for the weekend so instead you get this, my long, drawn out excuse.

Don’t worry, there will be a travel blog post out next week. Whether that ends up being about Indonesia or Singapore remains to be seen, but something will be out, I promise. The scheduling for the postings may end up being a bit wonky as I head into the next couple of weeks & the further travel I have there but I will get them out!

In the meantime I hope you’ve enjoyed this blurb of honesty regarding the life of the blog behind the scenes & if you are at all interested in the adventures I had, I will have TikToks & Reels posted over the next few days from the trip!

Much love to you all,

-C

Travel Blog: United Kingdom: Part One- York & The Festival

As many of you know, I have a great love for the United Kingdom & the people that live there. It has also been clear, for many years now, that the United Kingdom also shares a great love for yours truly & my music! My first trip there, back in August of 2019, was actually a trip entirely planned around a festival, Park Fest, in Stranraer. Again, that was back in 2019. Naturally, due to the global pandemic, Park Fest was put on hold for 2020 & even 2021 making its resurrection this year some what of a homecoming for a lot of those involved. I was asked fairly early on in the planning phases of this year’s Park Fest whether or not I’d be willing to make the trip to play it, I was more than happy to snag a spot in the line up.

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THE UNITED KINGDOM

PART ONE:

Day One

The original plan for the trip was to arrive Thursday morning, grab the rental car, & immediately make our way to Dumfries. When planning Ali, who was gracious enough to play host to me & contract Ross to help assemble a band on my behalf, & I had originally talked about having the band rehearsal for the show on that Friday before heading to Stranraer on Saturday for the festival. However, plans change & we ended up having to push rehearsal to Saturday afternoon to accommodate all of the musicians playing, totally fine! So now having a new day free we decided to go up the East Coast of England & stay the night in one of the towns there.

We arrived around mid to late morning having barely slept a wink on the flight over. Our immediate mission on the way to the rental agency was to poll our destination. We reached out to all of our UK friends asking whether we should go to Newcastle, Nottingham, Cambridge, or York. Everyone basically unanimously gave us York, so we started up Central England towards York.

We arrived in York in the early evening beelining to our hotel where the plan was to shaft from our travel clothes to something nicer in which to explore the town & take a few choice photos here & there! Our hotel was the Hilton York Tower, set literally across the street from Clifford’s Tower, one of the largest remaining fragments of the York Castle.

Once checked in, showered, & changed we set out to explore the town of York before our evening reservation at the North African restaurant, Los Moros.

Evan had this idea to take what he referred to as my OOTD, or Outfit Of The Day. Despite having packed in a frenzy I had managed to piece together a unique outfit for each day of our trip all while maintaining a suitcase weight of around 40 lbs & compensating for the swings in weather & the varied temperatures we would be experiencing throughout our eight days spent in the United Kingdom.

We actually did a proper photoshoot too, going around the York City Centre finding cool backgrounds to fill the negative space of each of the photos. For this OOTD I had chosen a Scotch & Soda Tan Knit Button Shoulder Sweater, a pair of Light Blue AG Jeans in the Tellis fit, Brown Aston Grey Work Boots, & Keiko glasses by Warby Parker. It was a tad chilly in York so the covering was much appreciated.

After we were satisfied with the photos taken we stopped off in The Shambles, the street of shops that inspired JK Rowling’s creation of Dragon Alley for the Harry Potter books. The parallels are abundantly clear to all who have seen the street as well as partook in Potter media. After our exploratory walk it was dinner time.

Los Moros is up near York Minster on the North side of the town center. It is in a small, unassuming three story town home that you would never guess, from its exterior, is brimming with color & flavor. Upon arriving we were shown upstairs to our table over looking the street below. I swung back downstairs to wash my hands having tripped on one of the steps near the riverside & was greeted by the cutest of outdoor courtyards where people dined under lattice adorned with tiled lamps & greenery.

Dinner was exquisite. We ordered a bottle or Romanian Pinot Noir to split & order off the menu “family style.” Our dinner consisted of a bowl of Casablanca Olives, Hummus with Rose Harissa, Olive Oil, Pine Nuts, & Flat Bread, Batata Hara, a Spicy Potato dish with Coriander, Garlic, & Turkish Pepper Paste, ZFC Chicken fried in Za’atar & Sumac with a Preserved Lemon Mayonnaise, Smoked Haddock Crocketts with Rosa Harissa Aioli, Beef Tanjia; Slow Cooked Ox Tail with Saffron, Preserved Lemon, Button Creamery Cumin Gouda Mash Potatoes, Pickles, & Lamb Jus, & a Chocolate Cardamom & Coffee Mousse with Chantilly Cream & Pistachio Crumble. Need I say more?! All of it, without exception, was incredible. There isn’t a thing within that order that I would change or alter!

The original plan after dinner was to go out, to hit the town & a few cocktail bars, however, the lack of sleep caught up to us & we made our way sheepishly back to the hotel with stuffed bellies. Pretty sure we were both asleep before our heads hit the pillows.

End Of Day One

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Day Two

We awoke later than we had intended, our initial plan was to get on the road early to Dumfries but we decided to roll with is & grab breakfast before our cross-country drive. I had scouted a restaurant just a short walk from the hotel called The Blue Barbakan. The Blue Barbakan is a Polish Restaurant with an “extra multi-European twist.” We, however, arrived around fifteen minutes prior to their opening & resort to initiating the daily hunt so many of us engage in for caffeine.

Coffee was found just across Foss Bridge from The Barbakan at a very quant little cafe called Kiosk. We used to queue formed out its door as a gage for the coffee being brewed inside & were not let down by the parade of patiently placed patrons. The coffee was wonderful, the venue charming. The owner had even thrown an assortment of ceramic ware specifically for his shop of which the title card for them read “Here There Be Monsteras,” something I still am in awe of each time its cleverness passes my brain.

Coffee acquired & consumed & time passed it was now time to return to The Blue Barbakan!

We stepped up into a wood paneled room adorned with framed photos & chalkboards baring the restaurant’s specials. We were instructed by a woman, who I assume was the owner, to sit anywhere we like so we chose a table sat next to a lace curtained window overlooking the bridge. I ordered another coffee & a water & when I asked the matron of the house what I should get she suggested the Full English. Not usually one to do so, I ignored her recommendation as a weeks worth of “full english breakfasts” were staring me down. I opted for the Duck Rumor with Smoked Salmon & Evan the Poached Eggs with Smoked Salmon.

I was elated with the Duck Rumor. Truthfully, I am so glad I ignored her suggestion & went with my gut. Duck Rumor is a ramequin filled with Buttered Creamed Spinach, topped with Smoked Salmon & a Duck Egg before being baked in the oven. Think of it like an Eastern European Uova In Purgatorio. It was served with fresh Brown Bread to scrape the contents of the ceramic over, I could have eaten it forever.

After we paid the bill we popped back over to our hotel where we gathered our belongings & set off again, waving York a very fond farewell.

The ride to Dumfries took us up by Newcastle, where we originally had planned to stay. We got stuck in traffic here as one of the highways is currently undergoing rather massive renovations. Passing by the Angel of the North we made our way West along the A69, a route that used to be used to patrol Hadrian’s Wall, of which many of the pieces still exist to this day. From Carlisle we went backroads all the way to Dumfries where we arrived in the mid-afternoon.

Not to miss my OOTD, Evan immediately had me go out into the neighborhood & do I brief shoot. Never have I felt more self conscious doing a photoshoot than in the middle of a residential neighborhood but that day the outfit consisted of a Blue Goodlife Pullover, Tan Tellis AG Jeans, Yardley Glasses by Warby Parker, & White Goodfellow Trainers!

The rest of our evening was pretty relaxed; we ordered Indian take away from Seimo Seito with Carolann (Tikka Masala, Assorted Naans, & Seimo Seito Masala), then Ross & Ali joined after overseeing Panto auditions for the Royal Theatre. We sat around the rest of the evening exchanging stories, talking about the plans for the day to follow, & generally having a grand ole time. It wasn’t until one or two AM that we were all off to bed.

End Of Day Two

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Day Three

The Saturday started about 9 AM with a briefing on the day’s plans from the Donowhos & a cuppa. Ali had a midday set in Stranraer in addition to an evening set in Loch Raven. The plan for me on the other hand was to grab some brekkie, go to band practice, & then make my way to Stranraer where we were to stay the night after my 7 PM set & interview. So having keys in hand & having said goodbye to the Donowhos, wishing Ali lucking in my own special way, we went in search for breakfast in the Dumfries town square.

I can’t recall the place we originally planned to dine but they were closed for whatever reason, so we ended up at Elevenses. I ordered a London Fog, which was on special, & Evan had a cappuccino, both were excellent! For breakfast I had the “Flower Of Scotland” which was basically their Full Scottish Breakfast, Haggis, Tattie Scones, & All! By the time we finished our brunch it was time to head over to the rehearsal space which was a studio just south of the town center.

We arrived just before noon where we were greeted by Ross who informed us that our guitarist for the day, Finlay, had unfortunately missed his bus out of Glasgow & was now running two hours behind. So we rolled with it. I played acoustic, Ross drums, & Ruairi played bass & we just went through the set top to bottom taking the time to make changes & corrections along the way. We had a brief break before Finlay arrived & we ran through the songs once more before throwing all of the gear in the rental & beginning the hour & a half trek to Stranraer.

If any of you have read my previous travel blogs in which I have travelled to The United Kingdom, you will know that I have a great love for a little smokehouse off the route to Stranraer/Port Patrick. It used to go by Marrbury Smokehouse but has since changed hands & now boasts the name OakHill Cafe & Deli. Their smoked salmon is still equally as delightful as before & feeling a bit peckish along the way we just managed to squeeze in before closing time to snag one of their incredible Smoked Salmon Sandwiches. Don’t worry, they pre-make them daily so we didn’t put anyone to work at closing time on our behalf.

We arrived in Stranraer around 5:15 & immediately headed to Agnew Park to check in. Having received our festival wrist bands, dropped gear, & squaring everything away with the festival promotion team, who are lovely by the way, we went to drop our stuff off at the hotel & get changed for the show.

My set was at 7 PM, as aforementioned above, but I think we ended up taking the stage closer to 7:10. I had planned a forty-five minute set that actually ended up being perfectly timed on my behalf actually cutting a few songs before we even rang the first notes. I did an acoustic set in the middle of the overall full band set just to break things up & give the band a bit of a break but over all I was more than happy with how the show went & how it turned out! After we finished I helped the guys pack up their things, took my guitar back to the room, & returned to enjoy the festivities.

Of course the OOTD photoshoot had to happen, so that was also a part of the evening. For my set I had wore an Oversized Jackson Brand White T-Shirt (RIP) under a Mauve Suede Zara Jacket with Light Wash Tellis AG Jeans (noticing a trend here?), & the Goodfellow White Trainers.

After the brief shoot I was due for an interview with Jinx Sullivan of DG9 Radio. I always enjoy my interviews with Jinx because she always asks the most interesting questions! When she last interviewed me she had brought a rolodex of questions that we just kept going through because we were having so much fun with the interview, I think it ended up being at least an hour long though. This time I think we ended up talking for 30-45 minutes, recorded that is, we continued to talk after for a long while before my hunger once again set in & I needed to search the streets for sustenance.

My first time in Stranraer I was introduced to Curry, Cheese, & Chips after my set. It was love at first bite & also somewhat very familiar due to its similarity to Poutine here in the States & Maneet Chauhan having Tandoori Chicken Poutine on her Chauhan menu. It felt like something I needed to carry on as a new tradition though. So with that in mind we ended up at Istanbul Kebab & Pizza House where we both got an order of Curry, Cheese, & Chips only this time with Kebab Chicken added to it! It smacked. Truly, truly smacked.

We hung around the festival a bit longer, taking in several of the other acts, before we headed back to the hotel to tuck in for the night. I suppose its also worth noting that what had started as an afternoon in the high seventies had ended in an evening in the high 40s, so we were also a tad freezing & caught unprepared for the chill.

End Of Day Three

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END OF PART ONE

Travel Blog: The United Kingdom-Part One: Take Me Back To London

I’m fairly certain this blog is going to take the shape of three parts. Maui was three & it was seven days, Puerto Rico was two & it was three days, so we’ll see if we can fit it all into three weeks worth of blogs! This may end up changing forms mid-series but that remains to be seen. So, I suppose, without any further ado, let’s get into it shall we?

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Prologue:

I’d always known I wanted to go abroad for my thirtieth, let’s face it though, I want to go abroad at any given time. The original plan for that was Australia/New Zealand but ye olde corona virus saw fit to change that plan along with so, so many others. I love the United Kingdom, I’ve had a mild obsession with it since late high school & always enjoy my time there. Seeing how the UK has reopened & Australia has the door slightly ajar in terms of current tourism, The UK became the logical destination of choice.

As I’m sure many of you know, any great trip requires preparation & planning, long twelve day trips six time zones away on the other side of an ocean, extensively so. I knew I wanted to do London for my actual birthday but I also wanted to rekindle some relationships & do a little work while in country. For those of you that didn't know I was in the process of planning a UK based radio tour when covid hit back in 2020 around the song “When He Was Me,” a song that is still yet to be released. The plan was similar this go round except it was meant to center on “Just Another Late Night,” a song that still has yet to come out….but will soon, I promise. Naturally I didn’t want to do a massive radio tour around a single that no one could stream yet so it really just became a series of small acoustic sets.

I reached out to any & all UK based or affiliated music friends of mine to try & pack my musical schedule but I fear I waited a tad too long to do so & thus only a few things ended up happening. I’m grateful for each of you reading this who offered me support, help, reached out on my behalf, etc. I am so incredibly grateful for each of you!

As the above paragraph would indicate we waited just a touch too long to make those moves as well as buying tickets. Plane tickets that were $650 round trip on the Saturday three weeks before were either sold out or almost double three days later but we managed & the dates of the 13th-the 25th were set.

Evan is much more the type A planner than I am & he immediately set out to make accommodations. He found an incredible house/petsitter for us, got connected with our friends Victoria & Rhys in London who graciously offered us a place to stay, & started mapping out days. I dove headfirst into food planning, as I do, & came across several Michelin Star restaurants that I then attempted to snag reservations at.

The week before our departure was pure mayhem. My 185 gallon reef tank decided to develop a plague, of which I’m still battling, the house required scrubbing, pet food required prepping, laundry needed doing, travel documents, covid regulations, all needed navigating, in addition to our normal duties of work & content creation. We also did a photo shoot in the middle of this for album artwork! We did it though, we got everything together & orderly though it truly came down to the last couple hours!

Part One:

Take Me Back To London

Day One

We made it to bed far later than we’d hoped or expected & thus only slept around four or five hours. Our pre-scheduled Lyft met us at the door at 5:30 AM CST & we departed to the Nashville airport for our 7:20 flight to Washington D.C.. The original plan upon arriving in DC around noon was to meet Evan’s brother who lives in Bethesda for lunch during our six+ hour layover but unfortunately something came up. We also made it to the ticket counter at Dulles for Virgin Atlantic far before the staff had even thought about coming into work. We waited around two hours, grabbing food & a drink or two in the interim. We finally got checked in around 2:30 or 3, had an easy trip through security, if you don’t count Evan getting searched for packing a candle in his carry-on, & made our way to our gate.

I took the opportunity of time to film an Object Writing video for Terminal, which I had already done voice over for. I edited it & had it up within an hour or so. If you’d like to give it a view you can find it here! After posting my Wednesday writing prompt I got up & went in search of snacks. I learned this nifty little thing from my friend Stephen Lovegrove. Any time he flies he gifts the flight attendants snacks; candy, chips, anything else he thinks they might like. His reasoning is that flight attendants, especially on international or cross country flights, are there waiting on you hand & foot for upwards of four to eight hours straight. They deserve a treat & definitely better pay & benefits, but then again, so do most people. We boarded our flight, economy deluxe, & passed our bag of goodies to the steward in charge of our section, he was elated. I also may have dropped my guitar on a teenager’s face as I was trying to get it into the overhead bin, it slid out on me. I felt horrible. After battering a youth we claimed our seats for the next seven plus hours & headed off to Heathrow around 7:30 PM EST.

I have this rule anytime I fly through multiple time zones. If you’re headed east, fly red eye, that way you can sleep on the flight & wake up when it’s appropriate to be awake in your new time zone. This works best if you can get a seat that lays somewhat flat. On the other hand, if you’re going west then I recommend flying in the morning or early afternoon & staying up for the duration of your flight, that way you land & are tired at a time when it’s appropriate to go to sleep in that new timezone. I haven’t figured out north to south yet, but I’ll let you all know the minute I do!

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Day Two

We landed in London around 6:30 AM GMT having logged around three hours of sleep at most. We departed the plane, I snagged by guitar being sure not to assault anyone this time, & we made our way through immigration. If you’ve never been to the UK CCTV is a very popular thing there, it’s basically government surveillance that’s kept in majority of public spaces. It sounds very big brother I know, but when you enter the country they scan your passport & your face & allow you on your merry way. Evan of course got stopped again.

We grabbed our bags & popped onto the Piccadilly Line, making our way from Heathrow to Covent Gardens in what was now the morning rush into London. At the Covent Gardens tube stop we were greeted by Victoria & Rhys who graciously showed us to their flat. When we got upstairs they asked if we needed a nap, the plan of which was an hour & a half. It ended up being around two to three.

Still dreary from travel & frankly starving we decided we were going to walk from Covent Gardens to Borough Market in Southwark. I’d been to London before, Evan has not, nor had he been truly out of the North Americas. So with that in mind we did a little sight seeing along the way. We passed by St. Paul’s Cathedral, all ready for Easter, we crossed Millennium Bridge, then made our way past The Globe to the Market.

At the market I had my sights set on a Scotch Egg from Scotchtails but much to my dismay it had been closed down due to the hardship of covid. For those of you who don’t know what a scotch egg is, it’s a soft boiled egg wrapped in sausage & breadcrumbs. It’s fire. Disappointed I followed Ev’s desire for Fish & Chips & we got in line at Fish! We asked the attendant what to get & he suggested the lemon bream so that’s what we got along with curry sauce, chips, & gravy. On the way to finding a spot to sit down we found doughnuts at Bread Ahead, a pistachio & a blackcurrant cheesecake one & grabbed a cranberry lemonade from a local fruit vendor.

The lemon bream was delightful! It worked really well with the curry sauce & was a very light, flaky fish with, as the name would suggest, a light lemony-ness to it! I wanted to like the brown gravy more than I did but I was more than happy leaning heavily on the curry sauce for the chips as well. Both doughnuts were outstanding though, much to my surprise, I favored the cheesecake one, Evan leaned pistachio.

After lunch the walking tour of London continued. We continued down the bank past London City Hall til we got to Tower Bridge. After crossing Tower Bridge & walking around the Tower of London where we hopped the Circle Line to Westminster. Arriving at Westminster we saw Big Ben, Parliament, & The London Eye before walking back to Covent Gardens to meet up with Victoria & Rhys once more.

We let Victoria pick dinner, since we had already chosen the following day’s. She immediately responded with the question “do you like Batman?” to which I excitedly replied “YES!?” After chilling at their flat for a while, probably passing back out in the interim, we got dressed & were led to dinner.

Through Leicester Square we meandered until we were prompted to enter a rather plain looking office building. We entered into a room that looked like an old library adorned with books like “Alice In Wonderland,” “The Drunken Botanist,” etc., busts & portraits of the Wayne family, & a giant stuffed horned owl. We were shown through the bookshelf to a flight of stairs which descended two stories all the while playing Hans Zimmer’s score from Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy. At the bottom of the stairs we were shown through two double doors into a massive 20s style room, complete with jazz band. We had entered Park Row.

If you hadn’t guessed from the above two paragraphs, Park Row is a Batman themed restaurant. The venue is themed after the Iceberg Lounge from Batman Returns & is chockablock with easter eggs & little nods to the films & comic universe at large. We started our evening with a round of drinks, of course all of them being in theme. I got the Bludhaven (Sesame Scotch Old Fashioned), Evan got Matches (Roasted Pineapple Rum Collins), & Victoria ordered The Blue Boy (Blue Caraçao Gimlet) a drink poured from the frame of a print of “The Blue Boy” by Thomas Gainsborough. For our appetizer Evan & I split the “Fit For A Knight” the menu’s Beef Tartare dish & Victoria & Rhys split an order of Fried Oysters. For our main course I got Gotham City’s Savior, an excellently prepared ribeye, Evan got the Mama Maroni, some pretty solid tortellini, & V & R split The Elite, a massive dry aged Tomahawk steak. We skipped dessert, unlike me, I know, but the Row offers a lot of very cool novelty desserts most of which use liquid nitrogen!

After using the Joker themed loo (Harley Quinn for the ladies) we ascended the stairs & walked back through the madness of Leicester Square to Covent Gardens.

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Day Three

Day three started with a bit of a rush. Victoria had made lunch plans for us in the City of London & we all wanted to squeeze a workout in. Rhys went with his trainer & Ev & I tried to squeeze into Victoria’s Barrys Soho class but unfortunately it was full. We found a few spots in Barrys Central London & set out to make the class.

I’m someone who, for the most part, can’t workout in the morning & if I do I have to have been awake for over an hour & I have to have eaten something & had caffeine. I think it has something to do with my blood sugar being slow to ramp up in the mornings but if I don’t follow this rule it makes me sick for the remainder of the day. With that in mind we headed north to one of my favorite London coffee shops, Monmouth Coffee Company. Since it was a bright, sunny, warm London day (I know right?!) I grabbed an iced filter coffee & a pain au chocolate. When I asked the cashier which pastry to get her first suggestion was the almond croissant but then she said it, the phrase that permeated the rest of the trip. “The pains quite nice.” So the pain is what I got.

Onward through Russell Square we went til we made it to Barrys Central. We were around twenty minutes early & my mate Ali had just sent me a text asking for an updated bio for the show in Dumfries. Part of my accelerator had been mentored by an artist who now writes bios professionally so I sat outside Barrys crafting the following biography:

“Charlie Rogers is a Kansas-born, genre alchemizing country singer-songwriter based out of Nashville, TN. His genuine, often widely varied sound aims to bridge interpersonal gaps allowing each of us to feel seen & understood.

Rogers has opened for the likes of Brothers Osborne, Russell Dickerson, & Janelle Arthur. He has played CMA honors ceremonies from Charley Pride to Ricky Skaggs. His artist work & writing has been shared the world over & encompasses stages from all over the US to Spain & the UK as well.

Rogers has been a proponent for music his whole life & began singing & writing even at a very young age. His inspiration for his musical pursuits is & has always been to communicate the commonalities between us, especially for those groups who often feel unseen or unheard, often reaching across rigid genre lines to do so.

Rogers’ most recent release, “Obliterated (Acoustic Mix),” received over 100k stream independently & has been features on radio stations & popular playlists throughout the world. Rogers’ plans to release his next single, “Just Another Late Night,” in the next coming months which is to be shortly followed by “When He Was Me” a ballad written by Shay Mooney of Dan + Shay.”

— Charlie Rogers on April 15th, 2022 outside of Barrys Central London, crafted in around ten minutes

It’s a pretty solid bio, no?!

Seeing as it was Easter weekend Lucy, our instructor, had decided to make class a dirty thirty. For those of you that don’t know what a dirty thirty is it’s thirty minutes on a treadmill, thirty minutes on weights. The normal Barrys formula is usually broken up into several ten minute chunks alternating between tread & floor.

After being thoroughly destroyed in a basement studio just north of Russell Square I grabbed a brotein shake & a Barrys London tank & began the speed walk back to Covent Gardens. Our initial plan was to get back to the flat with around thirty minutes before we needed to depart for lunch buuuuut class had gone over & we were running rather behind. We ended up getting there, showered, changed, & manicured within the span of around fifteen minutes.

We took the Circle Line to the City of London, a pristine, shining metropolis of a city. We were once again ushered into what appeared to be a normal office building but after ascending thirty-nine floors in the matter of just short of as many seconds we found ourselves in SushiSamba! While technically a chain, SushiSamba limits its locations to the most scenic & picturesque. This location of the restaurant has a panoramic view of London & features two outdoor patios, one with an outdoor bar, along with the massive bay windows that encompass the entirety of the restaurant.

Lunch began with a round of drinks as we waited for our table; for Rhys, a lager, Victoria, a Tangerine Spritz, Evan, a Café Millionaire (a twist on an Espresso Martini), & Me, a Kiffirinha (a twist on the Brazilian Caipirinha). Though each of these drinks were incredible in their own right it was the second round that brought the fire. Everyone ordered the same as before except me who ordered a clarified Piña Colada Old Fashioned. When I say this drink was the hit of the table I mean it. The fomo from the rest of the group was real!

For lunch we split a few different things; edamame, wagyu gyoza, toro tiradito (toro, yuzu soy, wasabi pickle, black truffle, & yuzu caviar), the Samba London roll (tuna, salmon, hamachi, avocado, asparagus, onion, hishiho mayo, crispy yuba, & yuzu dressing), & the tiger maki (crab, tiger prawn tempura, beetroot yogurt, & red onion). The Samba roll was my favorite, the Tiger Maki, Evan’s.

After lunch we basically had a free day & decided to make our way up to Shoreditch. We made a quick detour through Spitalfields Market to grab a juice & peruse before heading to what has been rated the second best bar in the entire world, Tāyer + Elementary.

If you hadn’t caught on yet this Friday was definitely a day filled with drinking…sorry Mom. V&R had taken off of work to join our escapades & we were taking full advantage of it.

Tāyer + Elementary is a quant little Shoreditch craft cocktail spot. The esthetic is very modern Industrial meets Scandinavian in design & it’s laidback simplicity creates a very soothing environment. The bar is a bit of a two in one. Elementary operating weekdays & afternoons, Tāyer taking over for the late weekends. The Bergamot Margarita & the Frozen Yuzu Margarita were popular amongst the rest of the crew, on the other hand I got one of the best Nigronis I’ve ever had in addition to an off menu drink that I still have no clue what it was. I remember it being piney though! Does it live up to the title of second best bar in the world? Yes. Yes it does. The drinks are creative & endearing, the menu is constantly changing & allowing more & more room for experimentation.

Now rather decently buzzed we made our way back to the flat. As the years go by day drinking seems to get harder & harder, rest was needed.

As aforementioned dinner had been decided by Ev & I at Kricket. Kricket is one of my favorite London stops. It’s traditional British Fare mixed with Indian in a fun chic locale. We arrived a tad early for our reservation so we were escorted down to their new speakeasy SOMA Soho. Much like their upstairs neighbors SOMA Soho takes the traditional flavors of India & integrates them into craft cocktails. I got the Almond, a whiskey soda highball meant to taste like marzipan, Evan got the Coconut, a coconut/grapefruit fizz, & Rhys got the Chai, a chai sour. Victoria ended up with wine terminating her voyage on the day of liquors.

For dinner we order way too much food. Kricket is meant to be shared so you order plates for the table & pass them about. Let me see if I can get all of what we ordered here. We got Pistachio & Date Kulcha, Bhel Puri, Samphire Pakoras, Grilled Butternut Squash, Cornish Sole, Keralan Fried Chicken, Beef Boti Kebabs, Kashmiri Lamb Ribs, Burnt Garlic Tarka Dal, & Malai Tandoori Paneer. The fried chicken & butternut squash were my personal favorites! In addition to our smorgasbord we got a bottle of wine to split, while Rhys partook in the Dark Matter, a green chili rum margarita.

Quite stuffed & intoxicated we stumbled through the bustling Soho Friday night back to the flat where we slept like rocks. If you’d like to know the level to which we were intoxicated, I am entirely lacking photos from Tāyer + Elementary on…

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Day Four

HAPPY THIRTIETH BIRTHDAY TO ME!!!!!!!

If you couldn’t have guessed by the previous day’s events we woke up rather hungover. Not a great way to start a birthday I guess but I wouldn’t change a thing! After showering, dressing, contemplating the meaning of existence, it was once again time to set out.

In my Michelin search & my “Top Restaurants In The World” search one place came up consistently, The Clove Club. Having been awarded their second Michelin star back in February & being the foodie that I am I absolutely had to go celebrate my birthday there! However when I went to book the only available reservations for the 16th were at noon. Fine by me! Boujee Birthday Lunch it is!!!

We take the tube to Hackney, greeted by another glorious day in London. The only problem with the glorious nature of the day was that Evan & I had planned for UK spring, you know, dark & rainy, soooo we were a tad warm to say the least. We arrived at The Clove Club & were the first ones there, probably because we booked the opening slot but I felt a bit like an elderly couple going to get the early bird special.

We were very poshly greeted by a lovely hostess who asked if we needed anything before our seating was ready. Yes. Coffee. Lot’s of coffee. She then proceeded to bring us two excellently crafted pourover coffees.

When at little last we were sat I was greeted at the table by a birthday card from the staff in addition to a very well travelled Somm/Scuba Diver from New Zealand. He explained our tasting menu options, long or short, as well as the drink pairing options, wine, tea, or a mix of both, & off we went!

The thing with tasting menus that they don’t often advertise is the series of snacks you are presented before your “actual meal” can begin. In this case our snacks course consisted of a few things. The first thing we were brought was a Spring Herb Broth. Bright, green, herbaceous, & warm it was a very welcomed welcome gift to the two of us. Next was a crab snack, presented in the hollowed out shell it was a thin wafer like tart piped with a custard made from the crab. It was salty, creamy, & savory with that subtle crab sweetness. The third snack came on a bed of pine branches. It was a Buttermilk Fried Chicken Bite with Pine Salt. Tender, juicy, scrumptious with just the slightest alpine notes from the salt. The last snack item was a molten lava Escargot Bon Bon. I say it was molten lava because the interior cream was boiling. Encased in a delicate fried shell the escargot bon bon was an adventure for the pallet for sure! I thoroughly enjoyed it!

Our first course was delectable; a nice cut of Hot Smoked Wiltshire Trout atop an almond milk & watercress cream, served with Petrossian Caviar, brown butter almonds, & a crispy bit of the trout skin. Almost like a lighter more buttery salmon the trout was perfectly smoked & the combinations the textures brought to the dish were next level!

The second dish was the star of the show, Raw Orkney Scallops with Roasted Hazelnuts, Clementine Gel, Mushrooms, & a Black Truffle Butter on top! This is the dish that they claim won them their second Michelin star! The scallops literally melted in your mouth & the bright citrus paired perfectly with mellow earth notes of the truffle & mushrooms. Truly a stand out worthy of the star it received!

Course Three, Scottish Langoustine. If you don’t know a langoustine is about halfway between a prawn & a lobster, though technically a part of the lobster family. This dish came with a squashed slice of Green Tomato & was covered with a White Beer Emulsion. On the side it also included some sort of Aioli. This dish was sweet yet acidic, the malt nature of the beer played nicely with the brighter notes of both the crustacean & the tomato.

Another fish course number four was that of a fillet of Cornish Monkfish. Delicately prepared the flakey white monkfish was then topped with a hot pot of its skin, Swiss Chard, & Sichuan Pepper really giving it a savory bitterness that ended up feeling much hardier than I’d anticipated from such a light fish.

Course five, the last of the savories. This course was a Dry Aged Middlewhite Pork. It sat upon a bed of Bagna Cauda, a traditional Italian “fondue”, & was paired with a crispy thousand layer potato & artichoke. I didn’t expect savory/sweet Italian from The Clove Club but I guess that’s my error in assumption!

Now onto my favorite courses.

I mean the above statement not because I think the dishes in question were the show stoppers of the afternoon but because my unrelenting sweet tooth demands it.

Dessert course one was a Grilled Habañero Granita, or as my bud Beau called it, flavored ice. It sat atop a Wild Plum Sorbet as well as something creamy that I’m not quite sure of. The dish was fire & ice. Spicy, yet very cool & refreshing at the same time. The plum had a slight saltiness that honestly made me want to take the ingredients & make them into a margarita.

Apparently The Clove Club is famous for their Gateau St. Honoré, a pastry so named after St. Honoré (no shit), the patron saint of pastries. Theirs has some nice bits of Rhubarb in the center that added a very nice tartness to the overall sweet, custardy pastry! I think it was my favorite dessert of the evening!

Next came more Rhubarb, a very popular British ingredient I quickly learned along with blackcurrent. Along with the Gateau came a Yorkshire Rhubarb Sorbet with Ginger Ale Gel & some form of crumble underneath. It was an excellent pallet cleanser to “end the night.” Only it wasn’t…

You see tasting menus also often like to include a dessert snack course at the end where you get little things like truffles & macarons. This menu was no different. Our tasting snacks were an Array of Chocolates; Milk Chocolate Macarons, Hard Shelled White Chocolate Truffles, & Dark Chocolate Ganache, meant to be consumed in that order. It’s hard to mess up chocolate y’all & each of these were exceptional!

Thinking we were done I went to get up but was met with a slice of Gold Foil Opera Cake & a candle with “Happy 30th Birthday” inscribed on the plate in chocolate. It was absolutely darling.

Overall I would say The Clove Club has more than earned its two Michelin stars. I wish I could remember the wine pairings to add in here but I unfortunately forgot to write them down. I will say this to the Somm team over at the club, this was truly the best pairing I’ve had with a tasting menu! Each wine was unique & interesting & enhanced the flavors of the food with expert precision & visa versa. This made for an excellent birthday lunch & I’m beyond blessed to have had the experience!

After lunch I reached out to my friend Kim Logan (+ The Silhouettes) to see if we could snag a quick hang. Kim traditionally lives in Glasgow & frequents Paris with her band but was in London for her boyfriend’s band’s show the night prior at Helgi’s in Hackney. We hopped the bus & headed the couple of stops to meet her.

She met us outside Helgi’s with a massive hug & ushered us in. The crew were packing up their gear from the previous night so while they did that we sat in the bar & chatted. It was mostly music bus & mutual friends but it was nice to connect in person!

After they left to return to Glasgow we walked through Hackney towards Bethnal Green to grab the tube back Soho way. We grabbed coffee at Mare Street Market along the way & made a mental note to come back because she was cuuuute!

Back in CG we slept off the day & the night before’s alcohol & calories before meeting V&R for dinner at Temper Soho.

Ev & I were still pretty full from lunch but we ordered a few things to get us through the night; Cheeseburger Tacos & Wood-Roasted Sea Bass.

After dinner we went to a wine bar back in Covent Gardens called Plume! I was feeling bubbly for my birthday & got Champagne, something somewhat uncharacteristic of me (I tend to drink red.) Post night cap we walked the streets of the Theater District before ending our last evening in London fulfilled & full of love, booze, & incredible food.

END OF PART ONE

Travel Blog: Disneyland (COVID Edition)

FORWARD

Hi friends,

Happy Friday!

As many of you know, I, on the occasion that I get to travel & do fun things, tend to write travel blogs about those experiences. The past couple of weeks I have held residency in LA primarily for work but I also managed to clear up a day just to make Disneyland happen. I wanted to share what I found there & how it differed specifically from my trips to Disneyland in the past. I also wanted to frame this in the light of my usual travel blog with pictures & stories to add a bit more fun into the mix.

I hope you enjoy!

BTW, unlike my other travel blogs that are often many parts, this will only be one. I was only there for one day.

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DISNEYLAND/CALIFORNIA ADVENTURE

Allow me to start this by saying that I am not a Disney adult. I am a huge fan of a lot of the mouse’s properties specifically where things like Star Wars & Marvel are concerned, I am also a lover of animated films, but I am by no means a fanatic, nor am I a Disney Parks fanatic. I don’t have the inside scoop, as of yet, BUT I did do quite a deal of pre-planning before even setting foot in their doors, which during the current Ponderosa Steakhouse, is a requirement.

Let me first say that to even get into the parks, under the current conditions, you have to reserve your ticket & your parks ahead of time through the Disneyland App. We wanted to park hop, so we had to book our reservations & date of entry extra early. In addition to your park reservation you also have to make virtual queue reservations for two of the current rides, Rise of the Resistance in Disneyland’s Galaxy’s Edge & W.E.B. Slingers in California Adventure’s Avengers Campus. Reservations for which open up at 7 AM the day of.

I set my alarm the morning of our trip for 6:55 AM in order to get up & make our ride reservations. They allow you to form groups in the app, combining all party members’ tickets into one section so that you can book for the entirety of your party & not just one person at a time. We had been assigned a starting point of Disneyland with our park hopper pass which meant we couldn’t apply for a spot in the W.E.B. Slingers’ virtual queue until noon, we also weren’t allowed to enter California Adventure at all until 1 PM…with that park closing at 6 that night for Oogie Boogie Bash, a halloween party that requires a completely separate ticket & reservation…Anyway, I logged on right at 7 AM & our virtual queue spot for Rise of the Resistance was set to be around 11:45-12 PM. That should show you how quickly they fill up. Think of it like Southwest Airlines boarding group check-in.

We arrived at the park a little later than I’d have liked which ended up being around 11 AM. Disneyland is currently opening its doors at 8 AM & California Adventure does the same at 10 AM. They also are apparently not running the tram system at the moment. How that prevents the spread of COVID when you spend the day masked up with a ton of strangers all crammed together on rides, I’ll never know. So yes, you have to walk from the parking garage to the park entrances & yes, it is a walk, around a half a mile.

We entered Disneyland & immediately headed to Galaxy’s Edge. As I mentioned above I am partial to Star Wars which is probably the understatement of the century. I love Star Wars, truly, deeply. I grew up on it, I have been many a character from Star Wars for halloween, I consume all the lore & media available around Star Wars. So I was looking forward to this portion of the park to say the least. Quite frankly I was convinced that I was going to cry walking into Galaxy’s Edge but I didn’t! I definitely had the cheesiest of grins though.

Photo Credit: Evan Michael

Upon entering Galaxy’s Edge we immediately went looking for food & drink, we were all pretty hungry. I popped into the Milk Stand & got a Blue Milk & a Toydarian Swirl. I liked the Blue Milk a lot, the Toydarian Swirl, not so much. It was overly salty for some reason & they’d put way too much tajin on it for my taste. After a drink we walked over to Ronto Roasters for some lunch. Ev & I both got a Ronto Wrap (a sausage topped with pulled pork, peppercorn sauce, & tangy slaw all wrapped up in a pita) & Jenna got the Ronto-less Garden Wrap (a plant based sausage, kimchi, pickles, & peppercorn sauce also atop a pita). In addition to the wraps we also got an assortment of drinks; the Tatooine Sunset & Meiloorun Juice. I preferred the Meiloorun Juice but ended up swapping it out with Jenna & Evan because they couldn’t pallet the Tatooine Sunset, which I truly didn’t mind.

After lunch it was time for us to join our physical queue for Rise of the Resistance. Yes, you heard that right, after you spend several hours in a virtual queue you then have to spend around 20-30 minutes in a physical queue. While in the queue it became time for us to book our spots in the W.E.B. virtual queue. We tried & we tried to get in but the app wouldn’t let us through so we ended up missing out on a spot in the queue…more on that later. We got onto Rise of the Resistance & I immediately started geeking out. The ride operates in a fashion that makes it so you enter a landing ship in the park before being sent into space & being picked up by a star destroyer. You then exit through the same doors you entered through into the hanger of the star destroyer, it’s fantastically immersive! From there you’re shown to your “prison holding cell” where you are busted out by members of the Resistance cutting through the wall. You’re then set in a cart led by a droid & have to escape the star destroyer before returning to Batuu i.e. Galaxy’s Edge. It’s truly a superb ride with some impressive effect & animatronic work involved!

Photo Credit: Evan Michael

By the time we got off the ride it was almost time for us to enter California Adventure. Did I mention the park was beyond crowded the day we went?! So most waits for rides were at the bare minimum thirty to forty minutes. We got to Cali Adventure right around our entry time & made a be-line to Avengers Campus. We did this partially because much like Star Wars I’m a tad Marvel obsessed but then so is Jenna, at least where the MCU is concerned, & partially to try & fix our virtual queue issues with W.E.B.. I was given the task of talking our problem over with a park manager because, if you remember in my previous travel blogs, I have a super power of always being able to get a reservation anywhere. I explained to the parks manager what happened, may have been a tad exaggerated on the details while keeping them honest, but when he looked at our party he found no reason we shouldn’t have been able to make the reservation & added us to the last queue of the day, 5:30 PM. Bag secured.

Once we’d secured our reservation in the virtual queue we headed to Pym’s Tasting Lab for some libations. It was a hot day in Southern California & water, amongst other drinks, were a must. Evan & Jenna got the Honey Buzz, which they both agreed was way too sweet, & I got the Particle Fizz because anything P.O.G., Passionfruit, or Guava will always get my vote. We took our drinks & walked over to Pixar Pier to ride The Incredicoaster, an Incredibles themed launch coaster. Along the way we also snagged a few bottles of water & a pickle which we had downed completely by the time we boarded the ride.

I was more than pleasantly surprised by The Incredicoaster! It was truly a lot of fun. The drops were there but not too extreme, the twists & loops were also there but again, not too intense & the theming of The Incredibles trying to catch Jack-Jack fit perfectly. There’s even a part of the ride where they pump in the smell of fresh baked cookies (subliminal advertising for the cookie stand at the ride’s exit)!

After the rollarcoaster we came to the consensus of being way too hot & hopped over to Ariel’s Undersea Adventure because it was indoors & air conditioned. The ride itself is fine, a dark ride that casually takes you through animatronic events of the movie, but we had really gone in just to get cooled down seeing as it also had no wait.

We left the pier & went back to Avengers Campus to try & get on Guardians of the Galaxy-Mission: BREAKOUT! but they had just closed it for a re-theme they do during Halloween that revolved around monsters of the MCU. So instead we got food. At Pym’s Test Kitchen Ev & I split the Not So Little Chicken Sandwich & Jenna had the PB3 Superb Sandwich sans Candied Bacon. The food there was excellent with the exception of the stale bread on the chicken sandwich which we easily removed & ate like a fried chicken steak. I also got a Proton PB&J Punch here which was a fascinating drink to say the least.

We decided to go back to Disneyland because most of the rides we wanted to do were there, our reservation for W.E.B. wasn’t until 5:30, & all the ride queues were short seeing as everyone & their mother had flocked to California Adventure for that 1 PM call time.

Upon re-entry of the land we made our way to Indiana Jones Adventure, one of the best rides in the whole park if you’re asking me or Jenna! The line was relatively nonexistent so we were on & off in a breeze. We then made our way over to Pirates of the Caribbean, which, if you haven’t ridden, is 1,000X better at Disneyland than its Disney World counterpart! I said what I said & I’m sticking to it. After we had basically, again, walked onto Pirates the people were starting to return from California Adventure. We snagged a few Spicy Pickles from Bengal Barbecue & walked back on over to Cali Adventure just in time for our W.E.B. reservation.

If I’m being completely honest we weren’t exactly the most upset about not getting a W.E.B. reservation initially. You see we thought the ride was going to be very similar to Toy Story Midway Mania in the sense that both rides are “shooting gallery” style where each individual person racks up points shooting at targets. We weren’t really into the idea of that, but we went! We’d put in the effort to secure the resy so why not give it a whirl? There was no one in line when we got there & we actually walked onto this ride, that is after the ride pre-show played, shout out to Tom Holland, pleasure getting to see you as always.

I’m going to lay this out flat for you all. RIDE W.E.B. SLINGERS IF YOU GET THE CHANCE!!! The ride is a complete & utter blast! You are loaded into a cart, Toy Story style, you are given 3D glasses, Toy Story style, but unlike Toy Story there is no mounted gun. “But Charlie,” you may ask, “how do you score points then?” Well my lovelies, you score points by “webbing up” spider-bots & assisting Spider-Man through many different rooms in the ride. What do you use to web up these spider-bots you ask. YOU USE YOUR ARMS!!!! YOU LITERALLY EXTEND YOUR ARM, TOBEY MCQUIRE SPIDEY STYLE, & WEB UP SPIDER-BOTS LIKE THE WEB FLUID IS COMING OUT OF YOUR WRISTS!!!!! It’s a workout for sure but honestly was probably the most fun we had all day!

We exited the park right around the time it closed for Oogie Boogie Bash but not before I picked up a shiny set of display web shooters that I actually ended up using as part of a last minute Peter Parker Halloween costume that weekend. When we once again re-entered Disneyland we immediately went for Dole Whip by the Enchanted Tiki Room. The sun was setting, the day was starting to cool of & it was a nice. We then decided to head back over to Galaxy’s Edge.

Photo Credit: Evan Michael

If you haven’t caught on, yes, we did spend most of our day bouncing between Avengers Campus & Galaxy’s Edge & I couldn't have been happier about it!

Jenna’s one request when we booked our Disney trip was that we grab drinks at Oga’s Cantina, she wanted herself a Fuzzy Tauntaun (fizzy lip tingling drink). Unfortunately Oga’s is now on a reservation/waitlist system only & all reservations for it are booked out about a month in advance. So we decided to head into Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Run. On the way to Smuggler’s Run my reservation sense was tingling & the super power once again kicked in. I opened up my Disneyland app to check on Oga’s & it was still showing a ‘full waitlist,’ I clicked the ‘add name to waitlist’ option anyway & much to J’s surprise was immediately given a wait time of 15 minutes. So naturally Smuggler’s Run got to wait.

Photo Credit: Evan Michael

In Oga’s I once again start geeking the F out. It’s a Star Wars cantina through & through & it feels like it was literally ripped out of one of the films even though it’s an all new creation. I ordered an Oga’s Obsession (boba & jelly concoction served in a petri dish) & The Outer Rim (a pomegranate margarita-esque cocktail), followed by a Takodana Quencher (dragonberry rum with kiwi & pineapple) which I was not a fan of. The other two things were bomb though! J got a Fuzzy Tauntaun, naturally, & Batuu Bites, an assortment of crispy veggies. She was disappointed to find the fizz wasn’t tingly this go round & apparently it had been a problem all day. Evan got Jabba Juice, a non-alcoholic orange/pinepple boba drink.

Oga’s Obsession

After we’d payed our tab at Oga’s it was almost time for the thing I’d looked forward to doing all. freakin. day! It was time for me to build my lightsaber at Savi’s Workshop! Yet another thing that you have to book in advance, Savi’s allows you to build a custom lightsaber all your own. You first choose what type of hilt you want; something reminiscent of the Old Republic, or maybe the Jedi themselves, something more in line with the dark side, or maybe something more that feels like having had to had scavenged for parts. I chose “Peace & Justice” a style more inline with the Jedi.

Once you choose your hilt style you are given a pin to mark which your preference was before being shown into the “back room” of Savi’s to construct your saber amongst around 10-12 other people. I was placed dead center. Like the whole show that accompanies the build was happening right in front of me. This is the moment I expected to cry, the moment I assembled my own lightsaber. I didn’t. I was, however, visibly shaking. To quote Evan it was like an ecstatic tremble.

The first thing that happens once you’re placed is that you’re told to choose your Kyber Crystal. Your options are blue, green, violet, or red (you can buy more colors & crystals in the store next door). I chose blue, anyone surprised there? After choosing your crystal you are given the interior mechanism of your hilt & instructed to insert your Kyber Crystal. The assistants of the show then place your designated tray of parts in front of you & you are walked through the process of building your hilt around the inner mechanism. You have the options of two different pummels, two different igniters, two different emitters, & four different grips (of which you pick two). When your construction is done the cast members come around & place your hilt into an “ignition chamber” attaching it to a blade. You then all ignite your sabers at once as the room darkens & the chambers all open simultaneously. Chills. Instant full bodied chills. I got them but still, no tears much to my surprise. In addition to my blue crystal I also got a red & a white, the latter of which I lean the most towards. If you understand Star Wars lore you know what that means.

I tried desperately to get Jedi robes & a tunic while at Disney but they said they’d been sold out of them for months. I had planned to use that as my Halloween costume for the weekend but I guess some plans fall apart. I even tried to get a Resistance pilot suit but alas everything was too small.

Our last venture of the evening was Smuggler’s Run, yes we made it aboard! Another ride that I cannot recommend enough, Smuggler’s Run puts you in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon. In a crew of six two people are assigned pilot (one controls vertical stick, the other horizontal), two people are gunners, & two people are engineers. It’s a lot of fun & I may have gotten a little too competitive in the midst of it.

With the park closing down & exhaustion setting in we walked (ugh) the trek back to the car & made for In-N-Out for a late night dinner. Overall I’d say it was a pretty great day at Disney, I just wish it hadn’t been so crowded so we could’ve ridden more things or maybe ridden things multiple times!

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FN-2187

Travel Blog: San Juan, Puerto Rico-Part Two: Viejo San Juan

Welcome Back!

If you haven’t read part one from my trip to San Juan, Puerto Rico, I’ll link it below! If you’ve already given it a read, thank you for coming back for this second part & of course thank you for taking the time to read my work in the first piece! Here’s that link for those of you that need a refresher:

PART ONE

All caught up? Great! Let’s head on into part two then!

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PART TWO

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DAY THREE

The problem with staying in an old convent is that the doors to your Juliet style balcony are often several hundred years old & made of real, non-particle board, wood. That being said, when you close them at night in order to block out the street light directly outside of your room, you end up completely blacking out your room. That’s definitely not a bad thing when it comes to getting some sleep however, when it comes to waking up it makes things a little more complicated. When you’re laying in bed in the pitch black there is no way of knowing whether or not it’s midnight, 8 am, or even potentially noon. All of this is a very round about way of saying that we didn’t wake up on this, our day three, until around 11 AM…

Our initial plan where day three was concerned, was to go either to El Yunque, Camuy Caves, or Mata La Gata. We did not realize that unfortunately, due to COVID, they were limiting the number of vehicles & patrons into each of these respective locations & were requiring reservations of which we had none. So our plans changed.

We decided, since the rainforest was off the table, to have ourselves a day in Viejo San Juan, further exploring the Spanish/Caribbean fort city we’d been staying in for the last two days. We set out from El Convento in search of café striking out rather consistently along the way. Our first attempt at caffeination was at Don Ruiz located within the Museo de las Américas which was unfortunately closed due to the Rona. Our second attempt was also closed though I’m blanking on the name at the moment. Some what defeated we continued down the hill making our way towards the more touristy parts of the city. We figured if anything would be open it would be down where the cruise ships let off.

Photo Credit: Evan Michael

The day we’d chosen to embark upon greeted us with 96 degree air saturated by 80% humidity. It was hot to say the least. Despite our linen layers & downhill decent we were sweating bullets around halfway down the city. We happened to pass a paleta shop rounding one of the corners & stopped in for a small respite. We had unknowingly stumbled upon Señor Paleta, one of the highest rated dessert bars in all of Puerto Rico! I got a passionfruit paleta, at the recommendation of our host, Ev got mango. We ate our paletas, juice dripping down our arms, as we wound our way down to the docks.

Upon arrival the demographic shift was more than apparent; far less locals, way more tourists running around anxiously, shoving their way into the chain restaurants that greeted them as they exited the gargantuan ships. But, amongst the hustle & bustle of blind tourism sits Cafe Cola’o, it a quant little eye in the middle of this figurative capitalist hurricane. When we entered Evan & I were the only two minus the two baristas occupying the building & even then it felt a tad claustrophobic. I ordered one of their specialty drinks, iced, & Evan had a simple iced latte. The baristas seemed taken aback by the fact I ordered our beverages in Spanish as I’m sure majority of their clientele doesn’t speak a lick of it. I basically chugged my coffee, it was so good & so refreshing. As soon as the ice was rattling around the plastic cup in my hand my hunger began to set in.

Photo Credit: Evan Michael

Just up the street from Cola’o is a six table top bistro called Spiga, they are famous for their sourbough bread. A sleepy little black dog had settled into their siesta beneath the table we were assigned but we didn’t mind. I had the Prosciutto Caprese Sandwich & Evan had the Prosciutto Brie. I’m glad I ordered what I order because despite normally having a palette for Brie & Fig Jam, that day I wasn’t having it. My sandwich was incredible & Evan swears by his as well, despite me not being much of a fan. I grabbed another cortado before we headed back up the hill away from the tourism.

Photo Credit: Evan Michael

We had decided to give the old fort a tour, Castillo San Felipe del Morro. By the time we reached the top of the city again the sweat had really begun to soak in. With clothing now cling-wrapped to our bodies we walked along the curtain wall to the stretch of green Bermuda lawn that skirts the walk up to the castle. We paid the $10 admission fee & began our exploration. Much of the castle is built atop much older parts of the castle. There were often places where you could easily distinguish the original parts of the build from those that were only a hundred years or so newer. The castle is mostly empty rooms but has a few exhibits still set up along with some pretty amazing views.

After walking around the fort for a bit we headed back to the hotel to cool off before we went to dinner. We stopped at a Piraguas vender along the way & got two Guayaba Piraguas to help aid our refrigeration process. For those that don’t know, Piraguas are a type of shaved ice taken from a massive block. The shavings are funneled into a cup & pressed down before being topped with fruit juice, in this case Guava.

After hanging out for a while in the air conditioning of our hotel room we gathered up our energy & ventured back into the heat of the early evening in search of a happy hour. We ended up at La Taberna Lúpulo, a local taproom that served an interesting twist on classic cocktails, their twist being that each cocktail contained some form of beer. I got the La Patria Colada (White Rum, Créme de Coco, Fresh Pineapple Juice, & Coconut Porter) & Ev got the La Perla Punch (Lime, Passionfruit, & Coconut Rum, Fruit Juices, Topped with a Sour Beer). Both were incredible however their take on the classic Piña Colada was most intriguing!

After drinks it was once again time to eat! Dinner was Deaverdura a Puerto Rican place I’d find via the interwebs. We once again played my favorite game at a restaurant, surprise me, & our waitress brought us these bomb ass Shrimp with Fried Plantains & Carnitas with Moros y Cristianos. The food was truly to die for & their menu, which was written on a black board in the corner, changes daily based on whatever they feel like making.

After dinner was more food. I was stuffed but my dessert stomach was calling out for sustenance. Evan had found this place on Tik Tok that had a very interesting gimmick; they made waffles in the shape of, as they referred to them, “weenies” & “flowers.” In addition to their quirky shape apparently the waffles themselves stood on their own, no pun intended.

Back down the hill we went only this time we headed diagonal, going east. We found “Mr. Weenie Waffles” tucked inside a clothing boutique. It was run by one woman who was, to put it lightly, overwhelmed. We were second in line but she was finishing up a mobile order before the couple in front of us order & then had to do another mobile order after them of around four individual waffles. Each waffle has the option of being stuffed, iced, drizzled, & topped. Evan got a Weenie stuffed with Bavarian Cream, Chocolate Iced, drizzled in Dulce De Leche, sprinkled with Coconut & I got a Guava stuffed Weenie with Vanilla Icing, Dulce De Leche drizzle, & Coconut. Did I mention my obsession with all things guava or is that apparent? The reviews weren’t wrong, it was a pretty solid dessert. The funniest part of the whole experience was the fact that after we ordered a group of about six people came in & about an hour later on the Mr. Weenie Waffles Instagram page they posted a help wanted ad. Poor woman definitely needed some help.

We got a to-go Passionfruit Mojito from a bar called Marylin’s Place, the interior of which is basically a shrine to Monroe herself, & walked back up the hill. Viejo San Juan allows you to carry drinks while exploring so we used that as an excuse to tie us over until we reach the next bar.

We went back to La Factoria from day two, partially because we wanted to see what the other two bars within the bar looked like but mostly because their cocktails were bomb! Making our way into the far back room we were greeted by a DJ spinning traditional Latinx Pop as well as a dance floor full of people. We both ordered a Campeta (Aged Rum, Pineapple & Fermented Ginger) then sat back & watched the locals let loose.

After our drinks we started walking back towards the hotel but were drawn into a bar called La Cubanita. I blame the supernatural for our sudden interest in the bar as we’d never noticed before but it ended up being the perfect night cap. The reason I blame the supernatural is because our bartenderess, Kilani, was a self proclaimed witch, La Bruja de Viejo San Juan, & she created cocktails using the innate properties of the herbs which she mixed in. She treated mixology as if casting potions or creating elixirs similar to an apothecary. I wish I could recall the drinks she prepared for us as they were all perfect, truly perfection in addition to her being the lovelies human. The only one I can recall was a Lavender Mule made with rum in place of vodka which she cleansed with a dried sprig of lavender before serving the drink.

All the bars closed promptly at midnight having last call sometime right after eleven to make sure everyone was cleared out in time. With bellies full of rum we made our way back one street over to Hotel El Convento before closing our big blackout balcony doors for the night.

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DAY FOUR

This is by far going to be the shortest of the days in this blog series. Why? Well, because once again we fell victim to those damn convent doors. How those nuns ever woke up, I’ll never know.

Day four begins once again at 11 AM with foiled plans. The plan for this particular Saturday morning was to walk up the street to the Farmers Market that happens every Saturday morning at El Museo de Arte e Historia. Much like the day before, this museum & its courtyard were also closed…dammed Rona. So we went to see if the empanada place we wanted to try, Deshistoria, was open instead. Nope. The hours on their door were basically a massive “shrug” emoji as well, it basically said “we show up when we want to.”

Defeated & slightly hungover I remember a place in San Juan proper that we’d wanted to try that was also enroute to the airport. We went back to the room, packed up our stuff, pulled the car out of valet, packed it up, & headed into the newer side of town.

La Casita Blanca is as its name implies, a white house. It takes up about a blocks worth of real estate & has a massive tree rooted in the middle of its dining room. We found street parking with ease (remember that super power from the Maui blogs?) & were immediately sat by who I presume was either the owner or at least someone who had been with the restaurant for a long while.

This lovely Puerto Rican woman asked us if we'd ever been in/what brought us in to which the natural only answer is: curiosity. She swung a three foot black board with the days menu over the back of one of our table’s chairs & began explaining her way through it. Before she got too far in I told her what I’d told the waitress the day before, “I trust you.” I told her to bring us whatever & however much she wanted & with great intrigue she agreed.

She started us off with Catfish Bread & Plantain Soup. The bread was kind of like a doughy chicharron, the soup more savory than I’d expected it to be & when combined, woof, incredible. The next thing she brought us were a series of Stews & Rice. One of the stews was Beef the other Chicken, one had Moros y Cristianos the other dirty rice. I preferred the beef while Evan preferred the chicken, so I guess it worked out nicely! In addition to the stews she brought us a pot of beans & half of a massive green avocado covered in veggies. The main course was so good that we couldn't stop eating it. We just got fuller & fuller & fuller but couldn’t for the life of us put down our forks.

When finally we’d slowed to a stop she came over to us looking slightly mournful & explained that what they were in fact famous for was their Tres Leches Cake & how it’d be such a shame if we missed that due to full stomachs. I AM A SUCKER FOR TRES LECHES CAKE & this one did not disappoint! You could very distinctly taste each of the tres leches involved, each evolving perfectly into the next.

We paid & thanked her ten times over before heading off to gas the car, return it, & catch a flight to the mainland.

Puerto Rico was a beautiful experience, I’m so glad I got to have it even if my experience was limited from the pandemic we are still fighting on the daily. A lot of the locales in Puerto Rico require not only proof of vaccination but also a mask until you are seated or eating so I guess if that bothers you, good, stay away from this beautiful place & its incredibly loving people. I can’t wait to be back & see more of the island, I know next time will definitely include El Yunque, Mata La Gate island, as well as diving Black Wall & even more mouthwatering delights!

Until next time Puerto Rico, thank you for the adventure & dear lord, thank you for the food & all the rum!

Mucho amor para todos!

-C

Photo Credit: Evan Michael

END OF PART TWO & SERIES

Travel Blog: San Juan, Puerto Rico-Part One-Four Day GetAway

Hello, welcome back to another addition to my travel blog family! I know a lot of you enjoyed reading about my Maui adventures so I’m excited to share with each of you my experience in San Juan, Puerto Rico this past weekend! Unlike my Maui blog series however, this will only be in two parts. Seeing as I only have about four days worth of content to share that seems more than doable! So I guess without further ado, let’s get into it!

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PROLOGUE

I feel it’s important to outline the situation that led us to Puerto Rico in the first place. Some of you may know, others may be sad you didn’t know, but a few weeks ago Southwest Airlines was offering a three day deal where in if you booked either a round trip flight or two one way flights & used them both by November 18th, then for the entire month of January & February they would give you an unlimited companion pass to use within those two months. My entire family got in on the deal & book themselves flights. The strategy on this end was finding a flight on the cheaper side that would give us a weekend get away but also wouldn’t break the bank. We initially planned on flying to New York City for a weekend, I have many a friend that lives up there, I love the city, & hadn’t been since June of 2019. That was until we found the same priced tickets as NYC but to Puerto Rico. We went with Puerto Rico…naturally…as here you are reading a blog all about traveling to Puerto Rico…

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DAY ONE

Our flight to SJU didn’t leave Nashville until around 4:30 PM, we had a lay over in Fort Lauderdale that didn’t require us to deplane & then we were off to San Juan. At least that was the initial plan. Upon arrival at Fort Lauderdale, having attained all of the new passengers we needed for the next leg of our trip we were all forced to disembark the airplane due to a malfunction of the plane’s air conditioning unit. I didn’t really think it was that big of a deal until Evan reminded me that the AC unit on an airplane is also a part of the system used to filter out the air. We are still in a pandemic after all. We ended up sitting at a completely different gate in FL for around an hour & a half before they found us a new plane & we began to re-board. Man, was that a shit show. The gate agent requested that those of us board who had been on the previous flight from Nashville first which apparently to majority of the people who boarded in Fort Lauderdale, wasn’t fair. They made their feelings about the fairness of this all very well known as well, many attempting to butt into the line of Nashville folks or just outright board before us. Of course this then caused further delay.

After a two hour flight over the Carribean eased by a copy of Cruella previously downloaded from Disney+, we landed in San Juan. The island is requiring proof of vaccination for entry, which we uploaded before hand & were given a QR code to use after baggage claim. Right across from the terminal we picked up our rental car, a mid-sized SUV. We planned to go up into the rainforest & such. Key word; planned, we’ll get to that in the next blog. The rental agency let us pick any mid-sized SUV we wanted on the lot for the same price so naturally we picked the nicest one they had.

About two days prior to our trip the Government of Puerto Rico installed a midnight curfew. It meant from the hours of 12 AM to 5 AM nothing could be open with the exception of all night services & to-go food options, cuz, you know, you can’t catch or transmit CoVid after midnight… We hadn’t arrived in San Juan until about 11:15 local time & by the time we got the rental & were headed towards our hotel in Old San Juan, it was rapidly approaching midnight.

We drove straight to our hotel, Evan searching for open food places on his phone the entire time with no luck. The roads of Old San Juan are narrow, they’re also paved in cobblestone & are often steep at times. Driving on them feels a little like horseback riding in the mountains. Our hotel, Hotel El Convento, luckily was one of the few places en Viejo San Juan to have parking. It was valet across the street at the Catedral Basilica de San Juan Bautista but I guess in spite of the convents change in usage, it still held ties to the catholic church.

As I hinted at in the above paragraph, the Hotel El Convento is a boutique hotel built inside a former convent. Thought the nuns have long since self, the sanctity & beauty of the space still remains. It is a five story, one square block building wrapped around a courtyard that also serves as a bar/restaurant. Each room features a Juliet style balcony & maintains much of the original Spanish style charm.

Upon arrival we asked the front desk attendant where to get food seeing as it was now the midnight hour. He basically told us we were S.O.L. unless we wanted to get our car out of valet & drive to a gas station. We also were in desperate need of water. (Post Maria you’re not supposed to drink from the tap in PR. Urban places are apparently safer than others though.) Still wide awake & starving, we dropped our bags in the room & went out to explore.

The hotel attendant wasn’t wrong, everything was closed. That is, except a little bar that was still teeming with life. We entered hesitant, yet hopeful. I asked the bartended with my fingers crossed whether or not they were serving food AND THEY WERE!!!!!! SUCCESS!!! VICTORY!!!! They didn’t have bottles of water though so we ordered the next best thing, beer. In addition to the two beers we got buffalo wings & truffle fries. The bar was alive with patrons, mostly locals, who were dancing, singing along to the “Best of Frank Sinatra” album playing & generally disregarding the quarantine. As lovely as the bar was I’m not going to divulge the name, I ain’t no snitch.

With full bellies & continued dehydration we returned to the hotel room where we bunkered down for a short night of sleep.

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DAY TWO

We woke up around 6:45 AM despite having only gone to bed about four hours prior. Parched at this point we pulled the car out of valet & made our way to the nearest gas station where we stocked up on the largest bottles of water we could find & a Celsius or two. By the way, the Fruity Cereal Kit-Kats smack. #BreakfastOfChampions

I had booked a dive through a local dive shop called Scuba Dogs. They do many dives around the island but one of the ones not too far from Viejo San Juan was in what used to be the world’s largest natural swimming pool, Escambrón Marine Park. During the 30s & 40s the marine park was part of a socialite beach club attached to the long abandoned Normandie Hotel. The marine park, or pool, was created when a giant concrete walkway was installed around the perimeter. The wall underneath the walkway featured slates that allowed fish to enter & exit the bay at their leisure, but kept the “sea monsters” at bay…no pun intended. Since the demise of the Normandie Hotel the marine park was converted into a nature sanctuary. The seawall was demolished & now the bay & the surrounding areas play host to many species of marine life, large & small.

My dive was with a local dive master named Paco. I had booked two dives around the park with him that started at 8 AM & after brief introductions & dive planning we set out. Our first dive was out past the edge of the bay in the surrounding reef. One of the other dive masters in the area often brings stale bread for the fish so they’ve now picked up the habit of approaching all divers with the hope of a free meal. We spent majority of the dive surrounded by a school of hungry fish made up of Yellowtail Snapper, Blue Atlantic Tang, & Sergeant Majors. At a certain point a small group of Jack joined. I was advised at this point to tuck my hands because anything outlying that they see extending from your palms, including your fingers, they perceive as food. On our way back into the bay we found a few Trunkfish, Clown Wrasse, & two massive French Angels!

The dives themselves weren’t very deep, I think we maxed out around 30 feet, but that made the consumption of oxygen move much slower. Our second dive, which was inside the bay & around the destroyed wall, was around an hour, our first, around 50 minutes. During the second dive we went around checking the fish houses & taino reefs they’d placed around the inside of the park. I must have encroached upon the territory of an Ocean Triggerfish because they were not happy with me. Upon entering the first of the fish houses, while looking for Arrow Crabs, I felt a little nip on my arm through the wetsuit. I turned around to find a flared out triggerfish darting all around me, trying to nip at anything it could get at on me. It didn’t stop this display even when we’d left the shelter & chased us to the next one finally relenting after we got out of eye shot of it.

Further around the bay we found several Trumpetfish, a Scorpionfish, a couple of Grey Angelfish, a Sea Turtle, & even a Caribbean Reef Octopus! Paco uses his guided dives as an excuse for nature conservation, which I happily joined in on picking up any bottles or scrap we found along the way.

Post dive we met the above pictured iguana, but at this point I was absolutely starving. Evan has spent his morning snorkeling & swimming in the bay so he too was feeling the effects of hunger. Never one to skimp on my food research when it comes to travel, I had already found several options for lunch but we both agreed we were feeling local seafood. I had found a restaurant about fifteen minutes down the road called Que PezCa’o. Tucked in the bay by the maritime police depot, Que PezCa’o is surrounded on all sides by the boats of local fishermen. An outdoor eating situation in it of itself, it appeared to be a local favorite. We ordered Fried Grouper Strips, a Ceviche Mofongo, & a Taco Trio (two Ceviche, one Snapper, they were out of Octopus.) The food was incredible! Truly some of the best ceviche I’ve ever had!

After lunch we were feeling a tad sleepy & I, as usually, had a hankering for something sweet. We made our way into San Juan to Kasalta, a local cafe! Here we order two Guayaba y Queso Pastelillos, a Flan con Cinco Leches, & two Café con Hielo which we took back to the hotel & ate poolside on the fifth floor overlooking the bay & all of Viejo San Juan.

After pastelillos on the rooftop we decided to check out some of the bars near by. We found one that came highly recommended called La Factoria. During the day this craft cocktail bar only has their front bar open but on weekends the back two rooms serve as a dance space. I ordered a Peligroso (Barrilito Rum, Averna, Campari, Dry Spice Infusion, & Lime) & Evan ordered a Lavender Mule (Ketel One, Ginger Tea, Lavender, & Citrus.) Both were delicious & we sipped them sitting in an open window watching the old town walk go by.

After drinks we went back to the hotel for a bit where, after a while, we changed into clothing we could get wet in. We pulled the car out of valet & began our hour & a half drive over to Fajardo on the east coast of the island.

Why venture to Fajardo you ask? We’d booked a tour! Well, kind of a tour. We had booked a kayaking trip through the waters of the bioluminescent bay! By the time we got there it was dark, we arranged ourselves within our tour group & were given a safety briefing before being escorted to our kayaks. The kayaks were all linked together in the middle of a shallow bay, you had to wade out a bit to get them. Once we were in our kayaks, which had glow rings on either end of them, we were instructed to paddle single file up a channel through a mangrove forest. The forest waterway was pitch black but the moon was nearly full & illuminated the bare spots of water fairly well. All around us the “coqui” frogs were calling back & forth & the further we got up the channel the more the water began to sparkle.

The bioluminescence was different from the pictures I’d seen in the past; less solid washes of light & more like sparks flying off of whatever gave them kinetic energy. When we reached the lagoon at the end of the channel we bunched up into a group & passed around a tarp to block out the light. Once the light was properly blocked we were instructed to splash around in the water. It’s truly a magical experience even just going for the late night kayak ride. By the way, our tour company was called Eco Adventures!

Once we’d paddled back up the channel & had dried off the search for food began all over again. By the time we’d finished the tour completely it was 10:45 & we still had to make it all the way back to San Juan. We stopped several places along the way hoping to find food but all of them were closed. We finally ended up at a 24/7 grocery store by the San Juan Airport where we grabbed a bunch of pre-made sandwiches & sushi for dinner.

We went to bed that night exhausted but having had a blast of a day!

END OF PART ONE

Travel Blog: Maui-Part Three-Food For Thought

Previously On

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PART ONE

PART TWO

Now, back to our regularly scheduled content!

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SECTION TWO: MAUI CONTINUED

DAY FIVE

In case you were unaware, Maui is home to a very popular local restaurant, Mama’s Fish House, which is located on the north shore in Paia. I have very fond memories of going to Mama’s as a twelve year old lad & was understandably invested in going back this trip. However, COVID regulations being what they are in the state of Hawai’i at that moment, Mama’s wasn’t taking any walk-ins & their reservation list was booked out until August. I had called a few days prior to Sunday to see if there were any random cancellations but had, until that point, no luck. I was advised by the receptionist to try & call or “walk-in’ right as the restaurant opened at 11 for their lunch seating.

Sunday rolls around, Evan & I pack up the car with all the things we figured we’d need throughout our day & we headed up Paia. We arrived at the gate of Mama’s around 10:40 & pulled into a spot. Within a few minutes a line of cars had already began to form behind us. I made the call a few minutes before 11 to see if by any miraculous chance something had opened up & BAM!!! SUPERPOWER STRIKES AGAIN!!!! They had a table available at 11:20. Feeling rather hungover from the previous evening & needing to burn some time, we went back down the street to Choice Health Bar where I grabbed a Tropical Beets pressed juice & a Noni shot, a local ‘cure all” that I will definitely agree with them, is an acquired taste.

Juiced up & nearing the time of our newly minted reservation we headed back to Mama’s, immediately found a parking spot up front (superpower), & were shown down to the lower host stand. After around five minutes staring at the collection of autographed photos they have by the restaurants entrance we were shown to our table.

The vibe of the fish house was exactly as I remember it; deep Koa accents with open breezeways set nestled in the side of a hill, bay front, just off a grove of palm trees. We sat, order a little bit of the hair of the dog, & enjoyed the warm sea breeze sweeping through the venue.

At the recommendation of the waitress we ordered the Macadamia Nut Crab Cakes & the Toko (Hawaiian Octopus) for an appetizer. The crab cakes were up there as some of the best I’ve ever had, as was the octopus! For our main course we split the Mama’s Curry & their daily special of Mahi Mahi. We’d had three separate people in the restaurant rave about the curry & boy, were they right! The fish was so fresh & so perfectly prepared, it practically melted in your mouth. Dessert was espresso & a Polynesian Black Pearl, Mama’s signature dessert. The black pearl is a Passionfruit Mousse topped with Chocolate Ganache with a Cookie Shell & Passionfruit Drizzle! I’d had it before & I had never forgotten just how incredible it is!

We wrapped up at Mama’s around 12:30/1 & were absolutely stuffed, the problem with that being that we had another dinner reservation at Merriman’s at 4:30. While doing my initial restaurant research for Maui I’d stumbled upon Merriman’s & had managed to snag their very last reservation for the foreseeable future. Say it with me folks, superpower. So hoping to burn through a few calories, aid the digestion process, & having just made it through the 24 hours elevation limit following my dives, we went up to ‘Iao Valley to hike!

We were under the impression ‘Iao was a longer hike than it was but it was stunning nevertheless. The drive up to ‘Iao was very reminiscent of the Road to Hana in the sense that you go from one ecological biome to another in almost the blink of an eye. You go from Hawaiian hill country to lush rainforest. It was raining up in ‘Iao but we didn’t mind. In all honesty we were pretty hot & sweating from sitting down at Mama’s. We basically did the hike in 15 minutes then spent the next 45-ish just wandering around the park, going down to the river, contemplating swimming, trailblazing, etc.

Having a little extra time between our hike our & early dinner we decided to go back & change as we’d gotten a little muddier than we’d initially anticipated. We cleaned off & got back in nicer clothes before we climbed back into the car & went up Lahaina way.

Dinner at Merriman’s was set right on the edge of a cliff overlooking the north shore to the backdrop of a wedding happening just below us. It was served grand prix style so we got to pick from a few options in each category; appetizer, entree, dessert (naturally). Evan & I once again split everything we ordered getting Ahi Poke & once again, Octopus. Evan favored Merriman’s octopus, I think I favored the Mama’s one, both were exceptional though. Our entrees were Shrimp & Scallops as well as a Macadamia Nut encrusted Mahi Mahi. Dessert was Passionfruit Pot De Creme & a Flourless Chocolate Cake. I wish we’d gone into dinner a little more hungry but I don’t think either of us regret getting to do both restaurants even if they were bumped a little close time wise to one another.

We went back to Kihei & ended up once again sat at the bar at Nalu’s before calling it an early evening. I had a dive that departed from Lahaina at 6:45 AM the next day & we were going to need to leave our condo around 5:45/6 to get there.

END DAY FIVE

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DAY SIX

As I stated above, Monday started with an early morning. We left the VRBO at between 5:45/6 AM & went back up the coast to Lahaina. My check-in at Lahaina Divers was at 6:45 at their shop. I checked-in, grabbed a wetsuit, collected the rest of my gear & walked through old town Lahaina from the shop to the harbor. Aboard the ship I was shown to my BCD & tanks for the dive before we did one last check & headed off to Lanai. Evan went on his way to explore Lahaina, landing somewhere with a chocolate croissant on a beach.

The dive Monday was to the Cathedrals of Lanai, a series of lava tubes off the southern coast of the island of Lanai. Our first dive spot was Cathedral One, a lava tube with a large stone in the middle they refer to as “the alter.” I was paired with a dude from Colorado but the total population of our dive group was 8-10 people. I think I decided at this early point in my dive experience that it might just be worth it to pay the extra bit of cash to have a private dive guide or at least to get a smaller dive group. The amount of times I got kicked in the face, run into, etc was alarmingly high. That’s not to say I didn’t have fun, I had a blast, truly. It was just a lesson learned at 40 feet below the surface.

At the first cathedral we swam upon a series of rare crabs, several sharks lounging in a cave, & a massive porcupine puffer, not to mention the breathtaking, pun intended, cathedral itself. We exhausted our tanks, returned to the boat, & went off to our second dive location.

Our second tank of the trip was reserved for Sergeant Major, a dive they can only do when the current conditions are right. The site is named as such due to the large quantities of Sergeant Majors, a striped yellow & grey damselfish, that school there. The main draw to Sergeant Major’s lava fingers however is the presence of the Javanese Eel. A Javanese Eel, otherwise known as the Giant Moray, is just that. Giant. They can reach up to three meters in length & weigh up to sixty-six pounds. Did we find the eel? We sure did. Was it magnificent? It definitely was!

At Sergeant Major I felt the pressure of the close quarters especially when it came to getting the whole group to see the fauna of interest. In one such occasion I did my best to get out of the way of a less than observant fellow diver & ended up with a three inch gash across my thigh from a run in with a stony coral.

I don’t mean to sound down trodden on the dive, it was a blast & truly an amazing experience. I honestly can’t wait to dive the cathedrals again & my dive guide was awesome! I’ll just definitely be doing so in a smaller group.

After our dive was finished we all boarded the boat & headed back to Lahaina. Evan met me at the dive shop where I picked up a t-shirt & a sticker then we headed down the coast towards Leoda’s to get a post dive pie or two.

At Leoda’s we got one of their Famous Banana Cream Pies & a Pineapple Macadamia Nut Pie. As much as a banana cream pie fan as I am, I think the pineapple one was my favorite! In addition to the pies we went to the small local convenience shop next door & grabbed a few pieces of Spam Musabi.

Once we’d returned to Kihei I went down for a nap after feeling sapped from the morning. Pretty sure we returned to Nalu’s yet again that night. We’d made friends with the bartender/manager, Sue, & were going there to hang out with her & exchange stories.

END DAY SIX

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DAY SEVEN

Our last day in Maui.

Our flight out wasn’t until around midnight & I’d asked our lovely VRBO host for an extension on our checkout time since we had nowhere to go until then. She graciously gave us the entirety of the day!

We slept in a tad as we knew the day & night ahead of us was going to be a long one, especially with that red eye flight out. After waking up a bit later than usual we set out to grab one last snorkel before we had to say goodbye to Hawai’i. We ventured down to Wailea to Makena Landing & got to snorkeling amongst the divers. Was I fairly jealous of the fact they could stay down while I had to come up for air constantly, yes, but I enjoyed myself nonetheless even seeing two separate turtles & almost running into one!

After our morning swim we headed back to start cleaning the apartment we’d called home for the past week. Since our host had extended our time for free we decided to make it as easy as possible on her & cleaned majority of the place ourself, including laundry. Once we were satisfied, we packed our stuff into the car & headed off to get one last shave ice from Ululani’s.

I got the same flavor as before, the guava, mango, passionfruit mix with macadamia nut ice cream but instead of a second POG I got a Thai Tea with Sweetened Condensed Milk on it! Shaved ice in hand we went down the road to return Evan’s snorkel gear & bid the Maui Dive team one last fond farewell.

We’d been invited by Sue to come sit at Nalu’s with our bags until it was time to catch the shuttle from the rental service to the airport. So that’s exactly what we did! I wasn’t mad about that decision at all, especially since I wanted to grab one last bowl of poke before we left. Sat at the bar of Nalu’s we met a couple from Fort Collins who were on the last leg of their trip too. We sat exchanging drinks & stories until I received an urgent call from the shuttle service saying they needed us to get on the earlier shuttle to the airport. I honestly didn’t know it was an option but the driver disclosed that we could also just drop the car at the parking lot across from the terminal & they would come pick it up in the morning. We opted for that option & sat at the bar for another hour or so.

After many a hug & sad goodbye we drove to the airport dropping the car exactly where the rental company had asked. The airport looked like a ghost town, especially compared to the week before. We breezed through the livestock/produce check, check-in, & security & made it to our gate with an hour to spare.

END DAY SEVEN

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END SECTION TWO: MAUI

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SECTION THREE: KANSAS TO NASHVILLE

We’d received a comp upgrade on our seats & were each put in the exit row. I guess no one else thought to try & do the same because the exit row, on both sides, was completely empty. So, we took advantage of that! I took the left side of the plane, Evan the right, & we had our very own economy class lay flat beds!

Getting surprisingly more rest than expected & landing in Phoenix, we got to our gate & took an additional nap followed by another nap on the flight from Phoenix to Kansas City. We picked up dinner on the way back to my parents & met my sister & her family there for dinner.

The next morning, before heading back to Nashville we met my sister & niece at Snooze AM Eatery for breakfast before swinging back by my parents, picking up the dogs, & heading back home to Nashville.

END SECTION THREE

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END BLOG

EPILOGUE

I hope you enjoyed my stories, I hope I was able to capture even the slightest bit of majesty & magic that Maui has to offer & transport you there for even the briefest moment in time. Maui is an other worldly place full of immense beauty, personality, love, & culture. It is a place all its own & if you let it, it’ll readily make you feel welcomed & right at home. Much like any place I travel I have found that the people are truly what makes them special. This world is a colorful tapestry of life experience, trials & tribulations, & all of us are searching for the same things, identity & home.

Maui was already a special place in my heart but now it has cemented itself there. I’ve found myself over the last few weeks having a very hard time leaving it behind not to mention how much its sabotaged my sleep schedule. I urge anyone to find a way to Hawai’i but if you go, do so with respect. These islands are someone else’s lands, someone else’s home, someone else’s traditions & they are worth celebrating. Treat the land with respect, treat the people with respect, & do your best to leave it as you found it for those who come after. Yes, Hawai’i is beaches & ocean but it is so, so, so much more than that. It is a thriving culture & community that deserved to be preserved & passed down from generation to generation. Mahalo Maui for an unforgettable week. I’m grateful for the lessons you taught me, the friends I made, & the amazing opportunities you laid in my path. I can’t wait to see you again & I truly hope it is sooner rather than later.

-C