The beautiful Togean islands

Time for another crazy timeline of travelling that still amazes me. Mainly because even though it was hellish, it went all to plan. I should become a travel agent!

12am Beijing

Check out of hostel and spend the afternoon haggling for some great souvenirs in a nearby market.

10pm Beijing

Catch the last train to the airport and join the looooong queue to check in for our Air Asia flight.

Late night coffee for Damo

2am In the sky somewhere

Red eye flight is flying through a thunderstorm. Sleep is out of the question!

8am Kuala Lumpur

Feeling pretty shitty now and I look like a homeless person sleeping in the airport.

2pm Jakarta

Finally on Indonesian soil! But we still have some way to go to get to the fabled Togean islands. Check into an airport hotel and Damien disappears off on a motorbike to try and get our washing done. Get to bed nice and early because there’s another busy day tomorrow!

3am Jakarta

Caoimhe and Laurent are here! And they haven’t slept in about 25hours!! All excited, we head to the airport to have breakfast of chips and coke before boarding the Lion Air flight. Interestingly enough there is a prayer card in the seat pocket of the plane, which in several different faiths implores him above to protect the flight and get us there safely. This is very reassuring given that Lion Air is banned from flying in the EU and verrrrrry recently had a high profile accident in Bali airport. Off we go!

Please God don't let us crash..

11am Gorontalo, Sulawesi (Sulawesi is an island in Indonesia)

After a stop over in another town we are finally on land and starving! After lunch and a shopping stop in the local mall we make for the port in Sulawesi’s version of the tuk tuk.. but wait a minute it’s backward! So far everyone is very friendly and nice and we’re all marvelling at the busy streets dotted with mosques and waving kids.

5pm Gorontalo port

We’re on a boat! And in an excellent coup we seem to have ousted the captain from his quarters (for a bargain price of $10 each) and gotten ourselves a nice (if compact) private cabin. Let the journey and beer drinking commence!

First class bitches!

11pm At sea

Everyone is, unsurprisingly, asleep.

5am THE TOGEAN ISLANDS!!!!

We’re freaking well here dudes!

  

So, after that marathon journey (approx three days) we were ready for some serious relaxing! A little boat ferried us and some other travellers over to Kadidiri island and Black Marlin Resort. The resort shares a small bay with three other guesthouses and our small cabins were bright and had top dollar views of the sparkling ocean.

Exploring the small reef in front of the hotel was awesome, there was a multitude of fish and bright blue starfish and corals. Every day we had our three meals in the hotel, but that was the only downside – the food was pretty uninspiring (soggy fish balls).

The diving around the Togean islands is pretty special because of a huge variety of coral and super visibility. We went for two dives as Caoimhe and Laurent completed their Open Water. I started to get a bit stressed and nervous again as the boat went out and we flipped backwards into the ocean from the boat (like they do on the telly!). This culminated in me nearly hitting the bottom of the boat as I tried (unsuccessfully) to descend. Oops.

But once we were below as usual I forgot all about my stupid worries and relaxed, enthralled by the beautiful reef. This one looked like a sculpture made from the most vivid colour playdough, in all kinds of crazy shapes.

A further dive took us to the Catacombs, a wall of incredible coral, teeming with life. At one point I spotted the inquisitive face of a moray eel poking out from a crack. The only downside of the dives was the dive master (kind of like a guide who minds you on the dive), a sweet young Indo guy who unfortunately had an obsession with the very very micro. I mean TINY! He would encourage us to all gather round (this is rather difficult for those of us who are as buoyant as a stone) and look at some miniscule shrimp hiding in a plant. All this while there were all matter of multicoloured beautiful fish swimming behind us! He was a lovely guy so I couldn’t face telling him that half the time I couldn’t even see what he was bloody well pointing at.

Laurent knows that the best way to enter the water is the safest way

On our last day we took a boat ride to a nearby lake which has a resident population of non stinging jellyfish. A seawater lake was created when two outlets merged together and enclosed off a small pocket of water. The jellyfish who ended up there found no predators in their new environment and hence lost their sting. So you can swim amongst them with no danger of having to ask someone to pee on you! I found the whole thing very disconcerting, the water was murky green and the jellyfish swam out of the gloom like weird wobbly aliens. Everyone else ploughed on ahead with it though with Caoimhe even managing to pick one up. Ugh!

On the way back from the island we stopped at a local village of wooden houses on stilts. As soon as we got off the boat we were mobbed by children, in fact the only people in the village seemed to be excited kids. It was really cute, they all lined up on the pier for a photo as we waved goodbye.

The last night in the Togeans was hilarious (why do drunken nights always happen when you’ve a day of travelling ahead, why why why?!). It was the birthday of one of the dive masters and the guys in the hotel were passing around the arak, which is a locally brewed spirit which tastes like petrol as most locally brewed spirits do. But mixed with some lime and ice it was bearable. Because C&L had just completed their Open Water, they were forced (nicely!) to glug arak and beer through a snorkel. Then the dancing started!

After a while two of the young guys who worked around the resort appeared.. as young ladies! Weird.

The next morning we waved goodbye to the white sands of Kadidiri and made for the next part of our Indo adventure.. funerals and graves in Tana Toraja. Sounds mental – it was! Watch this space…