Learning to Dive in Sulawesi
Roxane and I came to North Sulawesi to learn how to scuba dive. We showed up in Manado, recently host to the World Oceans Conference, and spent the night in a tidy but windowless room at Hotel Celebes. By way of contrast, breakfast was served on the glassed-in sixth floor, with a marvelous view of the harbor. We lingered a long time while we called around to dive centers in the area. The big attraction here is Bunaken Island, with loads of good dive spots. We chose to go with Thalassa, based on the mainland but as close to many of the dive sites as any place on the island.
We made a brief junk-food run in Manado before starting the thirty-minute trip out to Thalassa. It’s a surprisingly clean and pleasant mini-metropolis that holds 400,000 souls but doesn’t feel like it. One of the first things you notice coming from Java is the proliferation of crosses. There are still plenty of mosques, but the Dutch missionaries made more inroads here, and Christianity seems to eke out the majority. The next thing you notice is the swarm of baby-blue bemos, privately owned minivans that serve as a vastly undercapacity transit system. There seemed to be about three vans circling the city for every passenger. They made up easily the majority of all traffic.
We took a taxi to Thalassa, about half an hour outside of town. After signing up for the Open Water Diver course, we sat down to a free buffet lunch. Our first impression was: Holy Holland Batman! All the other divers seemed to be from the Netherlands, and mostly spoke to each other in Dutch. They were also all experienced divers. Some had five hundred dives under their weight belt, and everyone had at least thirty. We were the only ones who could remotely be called newbies. Combine that with the fact that everyone else was over fifty and we felt out of place. But the staff were really friendly and made us feel more at home. We stayed at the 4 Fish guesthouse in the nearby village, run by a pleasant (you guessed it…) Dutch couple. It was a bit beyond our price range, but close to the dive school and totally relaxing. The main area of the house was a massive deck jutting out of the hill, with plenty of shade and breeze and views of palm trees.
As part of the four-day course, we each received a textbook to study during the evenings. Roxane made fun of me for diving right into studying before we even finished lunch, but I’ve been wanting to take this course for years and was thrilled to finally start. Years ago I took an introductory dive, and it was such an amazing experience I wanted to do it again. But without much good diving around home, I had delayed and delayed until now.
The next morning we went to a classroom where we watched a cheesy video that reiterated everything we’d learned the night previous, with a too-slow audio track and a heap of bad jokes. Then it was off to the pool for our first skills session – learning our way around the gear, breathing for the first time underwater, and using an alternate air source. Break for lunch, and then out in the water for our first real dive! I hadn’t expected to dive on our first day, and was thrilled.
Off Bunaken island, just a few feet under the water, the wildlife was just amazing. There was a vibrant coral reef swarming with fish of all kinds. Right off the bat we saw a giant clam with crazed red-and-white markings. There were so many creatures around, what I felt most was that I was in an aquarium. Growing up, I would frequently visit the Boston Aquarium with my parents or grandmother. They have a huge tank in the center of the bulding that spans three floors and has a constantly circulating water flow. If we arrived at the right time we got to watch a diver plunge in from the top and swim around amongst the sharks and angelfish and countless other exciting creatures. I always loved this moment, and drifting in these warm waters I felt just like that guy. Drifting we were, too, since the currents at our dive site were quite strong. It was often frustrating, as I would just become interested in something and then it would be gone. Or rather I would be gone, sucked along by the current. Made it hard to concentrate on one thing, but also ensured we saw lots of different critters. The water was clean and clear, despite what we had heard about wind-blown trash from Manado spoiling the otherwise perfect waters here. Most likely the trash at Krakatau had primed us for the worst, and not finding it, we were happy.
The second day was much like the first, and the third like the second, and the fourth like all of them. We walked ten minutes through the small village to Thalassa, watched videos, practiced in the pool and the ocean, ate delicious lunches with people with whom we would soon have something in common, walked “home,” and studied or napped the rest of the evening.
Dinners were another exercise in being the minority. Besides Jan and Inika, our hosts, we were joined by a Dutch diving couple who also stayed at the guesthouse. Though our hosts spoke excellent English and tried to keep us in the loop, the older couple were not as fluent, so conversation, for us, frequently devolved into incomprehensibility. We’d smile vaguely and wait for some piece of it to be translated. It was an interesting experience, as an English speaker. I’m used to my mother tongue being the lingua franca amongst foreigners here, and I felt like I was getting a chance to feel what it’s like for those travellers who don’t speak it. The food was good, and the cook did a great job making vegetarian dishes for us.
After four days, we received our certification card, which allows us to dive with a PADI operator anywhere in the world. I was surprised how quickly the time went, just as during our dives I was often surprised how quickly our hour or so of air ran out. Never too surprised, thankfully, or I might have had to practice breathing from an alternate air source for real.
We spent our last day taking a tour of North Sulawesi by car. For a place that looks like just the tiny tip of a peninsula, it was surprisingly large. The terrain is hilly and on heavily terraced fields they grow coffee, cocoa, chiles, corn, onions, cabbage, carrots and of course rice.
Next stop: Tana Toraja, home of buffalo-sacrifice funerals and boat-shaped houses.