Hahahaha wow you guys are still here! Legends <3

After that adventure, writing anything new would/could have been pretty pale, but at least at the moment, our lives are anything but pale. We are in Indonesia after all, and our underwater shenanigans have not even started yet. To resolve this, as soon as we were done with our time at Tasikoki, we took a boat to one of the nearest islands: Bunaken.

Bunaken is a renowned 8-square-kilometer Indonesian island located off the northern tip of Sulawesi, and is the centerpiece of the Bunaken National Marine Park, which is globally celebrated for its staggering marine biodiversity. The plan was simple: stay for five nights at a local guesthouse, do some spontaneous snorkeling and maybe some safari-style tour but mostly chill.

But what about diving you ask? I mentioned in the Thailand story that we went diving one day. I never did mention what happened on that dive. It is not an exciting story, so I decided to bury it for the moment, but as we have come a long way, I realize that you are likely a lot more familiar with my overall health situation. So I will take a moment to touch upon it now.

Basically, that dive was the first time I went diving after a gap of four years. I had no idea what to expect, maybe some poor kicking or bad overall buoyancy control. I will get back in the groove as soon as I hit the water, that's just how I always operated!

But I was way off. We opted for a refresher course, as is normal if you are diving after a long break. Our instructor for the day was Karli, a 25-year-old Canadian diver, and despite the generic talk I gave her about my situation, she seemed pretty excited to go underwater with us. The procedure was clear: we wear the gear and backroll out of a window in the basement of the big boat, because the alternative, the giant stride into the water, is usually impossible for me. I don’t love big boats.

We swam to the spot from where we would start the retraining, and at that point I was feeling my heart sinking a little. My fins were killing my feet, and I could see that I may not be able to wear them and keep trying to kick for the next 40–50 minutes. I tolerated the pain, but a bigger issue followed immediately after that. As soon as we started making our way under the water, my legs informed me rather rudely: “Nope. We are staying on the surface, you can go where you want. Bye!”

So I struggled. Sometimes upside down with my tank pressing on my head, sometimes right-side up, struggling like a beetle flipped upside down. Under no circumstance were my legs coming under the water with me. Honestly, it was hilarious, if it was not also slightly sad. Thankfully, it was only a moment of panic and tears, before my training kicked in: Calm down. Ok, so things seem to have changed. My natural buoyancy is way off, because I have lost plenty of muscle in my legs now, since the last time I went diving.

I signalled to Karli that we needed to stop the struggle, and have a conversation back on the surface. After a quick chat, she took my fins off, tucked them somewhere on her BCD, and told me with a huge smile, "Don’t you worry man, we are still going on our scheduled dive." The difference would be that she would take over. There would be no kicking, struggling, or buoyancy control on my part.

So, thanks to Karli’s infuriating enthusiasm, both the planned dives happened on that day, but they were closer to a discover dive for me and the scenery under water was genuinely nothing to write home about. So, overall I was put off by the whole experience, and was starting to resign to the fact that I may never dive again. That was followed by the whole Vipassana thing and by the time we reached Indonesia, I was in a much better place about the whole thing. However, I was still not considering a dive, and in this chapter you will learn how irritatingly stupid the idea of “give up on diving” is—especially for someone like me.

Back to Bunaken, we settled into our rooms at El Homestay, and started exploring what was the tiniest island I have been on. Pristine waters on all sides, dramatic sunsets every evening, and the homestay itself was one of my favorites. The homestay owner, Stefen, arranged all our tours; we opted for two snorkeling tours and one dolphin tour with him on his boat.

Bunaken sits at the heart of the Coral Triangle—which is one of the richest centers of biodiversity on the planet. Spanning six countries from its core, it’s an area of ocean that covers parts of Malaysia, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste, the Solomon Islands, and the Philippines. According to my chat, the Coral Triangle is just one percent of the earth’s surface, but has more than 75 percent of the world’s coral species and the area contains more than 30 percent of all the world’s coral reefs. How cool is that?

So we went snorkeling, once to Siladen, and once to Turtle City, and my mind was absolutely blown. The Siladen Island house reef is just mind-blowing, some of the best, most beautiful, and most alive corals that I have ever seen. I saw brain corals the size of giant boulders, met a million Nemos, and even some pretty deadly-looking stone fish. Turtle City was another insanity- like the name suggests, it was a literal city full of turtles. The first turtle surprised us, but then we saw some 50 of them, and you would be surprised to know, each new turtle was still as fascinating as the first one. I have always loved snorkeling in general, but on this trip, I loved it the most.

Then came the dolphin discovery tour—it was not much of a discovery, as Stefen seemed to know the exact address of the house pod, and once we were there, our boat captain sat at the back of the boat and started singing softly in Bahasa. Stefen said it was the song of the dolphins! I don’t know what the lyrics were, but it seemed to work like a charm. We were almost immediately greeted with a pod of what seemed like hundreds of spinner dolphins, and as our boat slowed down (so that they don’t feel chased), the beautiful creatures showed us how fascinating and playful they can be by interacting with our boat and gliding and jumping all around us. To this day, and hopefully for the rest of my life, my brain will enjoy the joyride of dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin that comes with such an interaction with a wild animal living their number one best life. More power to them, hope they take over the world some day.

That evening, Niki went on one of his long walks. When he came back, he started a nonchalant conversation about how he ran into some guy that runs a local dive school and they talked about how snorkeling is like watching a movie and diving is like being in a movie, etc. I understand subtle persuasion from my husband pretty well, so I said, "Fine, let's go talk to him."

One quick conversation convinced me as well. I can see how fascinating and stunning this whole area is; would I really let logistics get in the way of being in the damn movie? Next morning, we once again got ready bright and early. Backroll from a private boat, gear up in the water, no fins, and the dive master does all the work. I won’t lie, this is not the most ego-boosting way to dive. As a certified open water diver, I deeply dislike not having much control of my setup. There is insane amout of trust I need to have on my instructor, and I am still a control freak to some extent. But it is painless and efficient, and unless I have it completely figured out, the trade-off is passing up on the opportunity for a personal visit to the giant turtles of Turtle City. I think that would be foolish. Did you know that turtles sleep by wedging themselves into rocky crevices or coral reefs so they don't float away in currents?

The five days we spent in Bunaken were honestly like an underwater dream come true. I ate well, slept even better, and spent most of my days having detailed one-way conversations with underwater cuties. I reorganized my mind to fall in love with diving again, and this was the biggest gift that this tiny island could have given to me.

We love you Bunaken, we love you Indonesia and terima kasih ❤️