Week 54: Sailing to the Dragons

Komodo! In elementary school I had no idea what country it was located in, but I definitely remember as I went through my dinosaur phase being excited to learn that there were still dragons that ruled the remote parts of the world somewhere.

In this instance, his lizard highness is taking a more passive approach to ruling his part of the island, but still managing to look majestic.

To get to Komodo, you need to fly to the Indonesian town of Lubuan Bajo, which is on medium sized island to the right of Java. Also, apparently abbreviated on maps sometimes as Badjo...generating an obligatory humorously raised-eyebrow look from me to Jo as we arrived and learned this.

Although we got to pose with some of the largest reptiles on the planet, they aren't the only thing to see...Komodo is a world-class dive location, and makes many top 5 bucket-list scuba destinations for its incredible variety of pristine coral and crystal clear waters.

To get to the dive spots we elected to do a 5 day liveaboard on the Situju 7 (Situju also means 7, so I guess the boat is the 77... very lucky) - shown here over Jo's left shoulder

It as awesome as I imagined a pirate ship would be, including our very own brass porthole in our quarters

Unfortunately, the anchor winch motor wasn't functional, but the crew had it under control. All we were missing was an Indonesian shanty

Along the way to the dive sites, we stopped at several really spectacular destinations. One that's achieved instagram fame is Padar island. 

What's cool about this place is that from this summit you can see three distinct bays, one of white sand, one of black sand, and one of pink sand

We got a closer look at the pink sand beach the next morning - there's a bunch of red coral offshore that gets ground up with the sand and turns white sand pink

The diving...I could go on and on with superlatives about our experience. We did a total of 12 dives over the course of our sailing, and I can honestly say it was breathtaking in a way that I'll never forget. Our conversation after each dive was one of wonder, and our conclusion was that if everyone on earth had the opportunity to spend 5 minutes seeing what we saw...they'd never throw another piece of trash in the ocean again. The closest comparison I can draw is the visual intensity of the movie Avatar, with the variety of exotic life and vividly colored immersion.

Including a couple videos without snipping out many stills this time - of course even with a red filter on my gopro the camera at 60' deep doesn't do justice to what we could see with our eyes

The coup de grace was a closeup with my favorite animal in the whole world - who was hiding under a rock and literally came out to give us a show by flashing her colors and patterns for a minute before retreating back under her coral shelf

Everything about this trip to Indonesia felt more than a little exotic. To wrap this I'll include a couple of pics taken from our boat as well as from our cute little hilltop hotel that overlooked the harbor.