indonesia, sulawesi, and a whole new kettle of fish.

Well. Aren't we glad that we gave ourselves the most time our visa would allow (2months) in this beautiful archipelago? Beautiful beaches, beautiful coral, delicious food, hills covered in jungle, and enough 'HELLO MIISTER' and 'HELLO TOURIST' comments to last a lifetime.

We arrived into north sulawesi and promptly took a boat even further north to bunaken island, a national park and 'world class' diving centre. It was a beautiful place, with a coral drop off 30m off the beach where the beautiful hard and soft corals suddenly plunged from 2m to a deep blue depth....pretty exilharating. There were a few disappointments though, as it is so close to Manado, the major city in the north, there is A LOT of rubbish around, plastic bags etc floating on top of the water. I believe tim even saw a condom. nice.
Also, there wasn't a lot of big species, no sharks, rays etc. We did see a hawksbill turtle on a couple of occasions, and some big napoleon wrasse, but that was it, i think they've only gone and fished them all out. The corals however were extremely beautiful, a wide array of both hard and soft, in so many different colours.
We spent a few days here, then pushed on south to get to the togean islands. This involved a 10hr car ride, then an overnight car ferry into the maluku sea. Fortunately we managed to get a cabin, which became our little oasis of aircon calm in an otherwise crowded, noisy and hot boat. unfortunately we were sharing the cabin with an extremely annoying woman from sweden. she would not shut up. Unsuprisingly we didn't 'bond' so didn't see much of them when we arrived on the island. We spend 5 days on kadidiri in a beautiful little family run resort where we were paying less than 10quids each a night for a room and 3 meals of as much freshly caught fish as we could eat (see photos of fishing). The pace of life was very slow with many snorkelling trips and a positive devouring of all available literature. the snorkelling was good, but it was clear that there had been a lot of damage to the reefs from dynamite fishing - literally throwing sticks of dynamite onto the reef and picking up all the dead and stunned fish, pretty short term thinking. also much of the bigger species had been fished out, we did however see some extremely large bumphead parrotfish, over a 150cm long, very graceful beasts they were too.
we felt our time there was up after 5 days so we took a ferry south to the mainland, a relative 'short hop' of five hours. However the ferry was overloaded, listing to one side and filled with strategically placed bags of durian fruit, perfect for toe stubbing fun. in the centre of the boat there were platforms with very thin mattresses on, to me, it was reminiscent of a slave ship. We managed to find an uncomfortable place to sit, along with a dutch couple (henceforth to be called team dutch) who were heading in the same direction as us. 5 hours later we arrived at Ampana port, as did a MASSIVE storm. We then waited for over an hour whilst much jiggery pokery was attempted with surrounding boats. People jumping in the water, attaching ropes, pulling boats this way and that, with no apparent logic. All the while it rained. We eventually established that it was possible to get off the boat, but that people were waiting for the rain to stop, possibly like waiting for christmas. So us europeans decided to strike out, regardless of the rain. Getting off the boat entailed walking down a wet, slippery wooden gangplank, one at a time. There was a large crowd of indonesians on the boat and on the shore, simon of team dutch started over the gangplank, laden with bags, some bright spark realised that it was quite dangerous, so offered a steadying hand. Everyone thought this to be quite funny, especially as Simon doesn't exactly blend into the crowd, being 6ft 6" and blonde. Annalese went next, then me, each applauded as we made it over, Tim followed, but oh dear. slipped. Thankfully not over the side into the water between the pier and the boat, bags and all, but onto dry land. There was much laughter, and Tim's only comment as he quickly walked away red faced without looking back? 'Well, that was embarrassing'.
We continued south in the company of team dutch to a town called tentana, where we spent a few nights enjoying the beautiful scenery of rolling forested hills and a pleasantly cool temperature. From there we travelled further south into Tana Toraja, land of houses shaped like boats, elaborate funerals with the slaughter of many animals, and gooooood coffee.

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