Blogs from Sulawesi, Indonesia, Asia - page 19

Deep underwater. Deep, deep underwater Postscript: Damn. It took a long while to find the motivation to actually wrap up this blog. Even though it was more or less written it has taken me forever to make the final editing, but here it is. All of the underwater photos were made by Kari Kulonen. Entering the "real" world again My plan after Vipassana was to either go diving or if the meditation had put me in another mood then just head home. But fortunately my appetite for adventures had not been quenched by sitting still for a while. So after the wierdly emotional goodbyes at the Dhamma Center I went straight to the airport. One final note about the friendliness of my fellow Vipassanars (a new word I think). I was along with a couple of ... read more

After so much time snorkelling and lazing around on white sand beaches we were ready for a change. We took a bus heading northwards to an area in the South of Sulawesi called Tana Toraja. The area is high in the mountains with even higher mountains surrounding it. The temperature was a pleasant 26/28 degrees C - much cooler than the 40 degrees in Makassar. The nights are cool enough to sleep without a fan or air-con. This area is known for it's strange customs and funeral ceremonies. We booked ourselves into a pleasant little guest house with mountain views, then joined up with four other travellers and hired a car plus driver/ guide for two days to see the area and learn about their strange customs. On the first day we visited a traditional village, ... read more

The Togean are a group of equatorial islands in the Maluku Sea. They are embraced by the northern arms of Sulawesi, which itself is just one of the 17,000 islands that together make up the worlds largest archipelago, Indonesia. In a land of islands, where the sea is a constant in many of its inhabitant’s lives, the Togean remain a beautiful example of how this relationship must have started. Whereas somewhere like Jakarta is representative of the dirty, industrialised apotheosis of a seafaring nation's relationship with the sea, the sparsely populated Togeans are indicative of a humbler, less overtly materialistic interpretation of this symbiosis. The Togean are almost entirely populated by indigenous Togeans and the Bajo, a race of seafarers whose existence has always been linked inextricably with the sea. The thread that binds the Bajo ... read more

For the most part, modern man relates to nature at a distance, through conduits; be they television, the movies, literature, or myth. All these substitutes for direct experience seek to anthropomorphise the creatures they describe in an attempt to make them more palatable and less alien to the soft skinned, tender hearted city dwellers who seek safe escapism between pages and after adverts. This humanisation of nature has given modern man a vastly different view of nature from the one perhaps held by their grandparents, but definitely by theirs. Unfortunately, the "Mother Nature" of common consciousness is actually a vicious and unforgiving matriarch, and to try and mask this cruelty by investing her charges with human characteristics is like describing a volcanic eruption as the natural release of a mountains anger in response to the scarification ... read more

Ce paradis caché, c'est Gorontalo . Pas eu le temps de d'explorer beaucoup de sites. Je n'ai pu plonger que 2 jours. Ces 6 plongées me donnent déjà une idée de la richesse des fonds. Quelques espèces endémiques, notamment cette anémone ressemblant a un choux chinois ! Cela veut dire des animaux non répertoriés/étudiés a ce jour ! Attention, la saison est courte, et il est impossible de plonger hors saison, les vagues atteignant 5 m, les courant sont imprévisibles... 1 seul club de plongée, à ma connaissance.... read more