Waking up to a calm anchorage and a boat on an even keel was such a great feeling after the lumpy seas we experienced on passage last night…we seem to be regularly pounding into a head sea now that we have turned our bow southward!

Breakfast over with, Michael, Jan, Cornelius and myself dropped Lorenz back to Wakatobi Resort, (http://www.wakatobi.com) a cluster of attractive guest cabins centered around a large well built lodge overlooking the water above a white sandy beach. Wakatobi is extremely isolated as dive resorts go, being 18 hours by boat from Kendari, which in itself is a small and remote town. Lorenz set up the resort here about six years ago, basing his choice of site on this remoteness and the nutrient rich currents in the area, always a good indication of abundant and diverse marine life. As we will be diving here over the next couple of days we should soon find out for ourselves!

After dropping off Lorenz we went ashore at a ‘sea gypsy’ village known as Lamanggao just around the corner, a fascinating experience. It was home to around 200 people, and what made this village particularly interesting was that it was built mostly over the water or on reclaimed land. The seaward-most houses of the village were on stilts in around six feet of water, while those a little further back were built on ‘man-made islands’ constructed from lumps of coral stacked up in large flat ‘squares’ and separated by narrow ‘canals’ linked by rickety bridges…a sort of ‘Indonesian Venice’! Closer still to the original line of the coast where the reclaimed land had been longer established, the canals between each ‘lot’ had been filled in with coral blocks to create ‘solid land’ bordering onto the main island itself. It was only this area that had any soil cover, the outer part of the village was all coral rubble, and the few small trees here and there had been transplanted into solitary small patches of earth; wire enclosures protecting them from the numerous chickens scratching around the village. I found it amazing that this land had all been reclaimed ‘by hand’ through hours of tedious work, literally block by block. (I couldn’t help wondering though whether any of the coral used was ‘live coral’ from the local reefs).

Lamanggao canals.

As per usual I was also struck by the strong sense of community in the village, the impression that everyone knew their place in the scheme of things and lived harmoniously…women sat together chatting and watching over the younger kids, while men worked together on their boats or repairing nets. Several of the women had covered their faces in thick yellow paste, which I speculated might be a sign of mourning (..well they looked sad!); in fact when I asked our guide Udin it proved to be for a much more mundane reason; it was actually ‘Indonesian sunscreen’ made from rice-flour paste!

As well as the usual village sights like children chewing sugar cane, fish drying on racks, firewood stacked haphazardly under the houses and the typical jumble of fishing nets and canoes, there were also a number of pigeon coops…a strange thing to see in an Indonesian village! Another thing I was interested to note was that the nets hanging under the eaves of many of the houses were weighted by beautiful Tiger cowries, the first ‘non-decorative’ use I have seen these shells put to.

Sea gypsy children.

We spent some time watching an older village man at work building a boat…crudely made by western standards, but a work of art when you considered the tools he was using. He had inset lots of small portholes into the planking, cutting out the round holes with a handsaw and rasp. The relatively large gaps between the thick planking had been caulked with bamboo pith, although he admitted that nowadays they finished off the sealing with good old Araldite! Nogarno as he was called invited us into his home, a high ceiling house built with hand-made concrete blocks and incongruously paved inside in immaculate white tiles, (brought from Bali). A poster of Leonardo DeCaprio hung on one wall, and a bulky 20Hp engine sat in another corner, ready for placement in his soon to be finished boat.

Other houses in the village were a similarly peculiar mix of rustic and urban; some little more than huts built on stilts with bamboo and woven coconut-matt wall panels still had framed glass windows and highly polished furniture inside. There was a distinct change in house style from seaward to shoreward; from wooden huts to more permanent looking concrete houses and from canals, plank bridges and clutter to a dusty ‘main street’ and more of an air of orderliness... however even this part of the village had the appearance of being half finished! When we left, it seemed half the village accompanied us to the water’s edge, and the small jetty was a mass of bright colour, grinning brown faces and waving hands as we headed back to STARSHIP for lunch.

In the afternoon Lou and I took Cornelius and Jan for a ‘resort dive’ at the ‘home reef’ in front of Wakatobi Resort, their very first experience on Scuba. This reef proved to be very pretty, with abundant soft corals and plenty of fish life; both Jan and Cornelius loved their first time diving and surfaced with big grins which gave me and Lou a kick too! I find introducing people to the underwater environment is one of the most rewarding aspects of being an instructor; it is rare that people don’t come up with a sense of wonder at this new and very different world where they are suddenly free from the restraints of gravity. Meanwhile Trevor, Michael and James were diving at the same site with Lorenz but drifting further along the reef, and they too had a good dive, describing the hard and soft corals as some of the best they had seen.

Jan and Cornelius all smiles after their first dive.

By the time we had all surfaced and loaded the dive gear back on to the tender dusk was falling, and we returned to STARSHIP just in time to watch the sun sliding below the horizon in a blaze of red, the sky fading from dusky pink to full night with that suddenness found only in the tropics. We are now looking forward to dinner with appetites whetted by an afternoon in the fresh air…and I think it is steak tonight, so ‘got to run’!!

Adios,

Diver Dave