Indonesia - Intro

This article discusses following locations:

From zero to hero also this story begins slowly: Our first three days after arrival in Indonesia were all about getting our dive gear released from customs. I'll spare you the details and bureaucratical hoops we had to jump through. Bottom line: Never send personal property in parallel to your flight to Indonesia. We paid a total of 800$ in tax as we had to redeclare our divegear as 'new' import.

So as you might imagine, our last three months before getting back to work should be about diving. Especially muck diving. A type of diving on mostly sand but not corals. Below you'll find a fraction of what mystical animals we spotted and Silke took photos of.

As soon as we had our gear, we headed directly to Tulamben and the Matahari Tulamben resort by Suci, an amazing host. There we were diving with hundreds of nudibranchs with our personal guide, Parta. Silke and Parta have eagle eyes for finding the tiniest nudibranchs while my specialities are more on mid sized camouflaged predatos like scorpion/frogfish/octopus/crocodilefish. So I had little to contribute on this muck sites. Still, even I sharpened my spotting skills for the tiniest creatures in this microverse during our 35 dives there.

It's such a rich and diverse area. For example, we saw more leaf fish - camouflaging as leafs - than actual leafs.

After Tulamben we did an excursion to Permuteran/Secret Bay to see some cuttlefish and pipefish in colder water (24°C) but that place is not recommended anymore. Because sadly most critters disappeared from there maybe through overfishing.

After rebuying broken/overused stuff in the amazing Bali Dive Store in Denpasar, we headed to Nusa Penida for three nights. Famous for Mola Molas and Manta- and Ninja- rays. On this trip we only saw the Mantas, with impressive 3m disc width diving silently around us. For the Molas, we met people that spend 15 days there without seeing one. We were lucky though since from Tulamben a few days before, we did a one day trip there where we saw two of those weird and huge animals.

Anyways, rather than bore you with further details I'd like you to enjoy some of Silkes fine photos here.

Our next stop is Komodo, where we'll be on a Liveaboard for a week before continuing to Cenderawasih Bay for some more whale shark action.

Disclaimer: Yes, we also visited some temples and beaches, drank from coconuts and Mango juices in the sunsets but who cares about those side stories ^^ Oh yes: We used Grab (Uber equivalent of Indonesia) to get everywhere.

And now on to the sub centimeter sized animals: