Santika Manado

20 Dollars less in our pocket, a lot closer to the equator. After an amazing final night in Bunaken we took the ferry back to Manado. From there, the bus to Gorontalo. A nine hour jeep ride through tiny villages, by an abundance of rice fields, passing election posters, rivers and not so solid bridges. When we reached the mountain range the drive became less pleasent as the many curves that our driver had to enter with a speed of 80 km/h kept ...

... home when we're lucky enough to find the giant pacific octopus. Only one more day of diving! We'll do two dives tomorrow, finishing up our diving by 1pm so we'll have plenty of a safety margin for our flight from Manado back to Singapore. Stay tuned for the last of our diving adventures!! Pam & Andy

... to confuse the ghosts and keep them from entering your house. Hmmmm. Mythbusters should check that one out and save the carpenters some time. Our next stop was probably the most unusual and grossest of them all; the public market. Each major village has a market, and they are basically gathering places for the locals to sell their goods, whether it's fruits, vegetables, nuts ...

... but is loaded with the weirdest fish out there. Stay tuned! Day 4 will take us back out to Bunaken for more fabulous wall diving. None of us can get enough! Oh, and tomorrow evening we'll also be checking out the mating Mandarin fish. They are incredibly beautiful and put on a courtship dance not to be missed. Hopefully we'll have some pictures for you! Bye for now!!

... and we were looking forward to the experience. We were not disappointed! The last place we stopped was a village where they constructed home for sale, and when you bought the home they disassembled the home, and shipped it to where you wanted it reassembled. They shipped these beautiful home all over the world!

... of the more expensive pastimes I have undertaken whilst on my travels. Definitely one of the most worthwhile though. Bunaken is a small, quiet island which comprises of a local village and a row of dive centres offering food, accommodation and diving packages. The island itself is surrounded by a coral drop-off which is around 100 metres off-shore. There are approximately 40 sites around the ...

... including massive barrel sponges, many new coral species, lots of really nice fish, including lionfish, nappolean wrasses, regal angelfish, filefish, 6 different types of anemonoe fish, and also plenty of amazing invertibrates. I went out night snorkeling my last couple of nights and saw a host of unique creatures inluding cuddlefish, a tiny octopus, squid, insane filter feeding brittle stars (looked like soft corals), anemonie crabs, lobster, shrimps ...

... paradise. Almost immediately outside the harbor, the almost perfectly conical island of Manado Tua comes into view. A dormant volcano, it neighbors Bunaken. After a 45 minute cruise, we arrive to our promised "wet-landing". Cha Cha employees greet us with neoprene diving booties with which to protect our soft pink toes on the crushed coral scramble to shore. Bunaken (as well as most of the other islands in the area) is completely surrounded by ...

... about 20 minutes of swimming along with my heart in my mouth I found the lights of Sarah and her dive buddy on the wall about 15m below me, which was a real comfort, and I swam above them the rest of the way letting their escaping bubbles tickle my tummy. I resolved there and then to learn to dive the next chance I got. Our final stop in the Minahasa region around Manado was Tangkoko National Park, home to the world's smallest species of primate, the tarsius ...

... might be laundry day after that), a moray eel, and several sea snakes. On our last dive we saw our very first sharks, a couple of little white-tip reef sharks, maybe a metre long. One was sleeping in a cave; the other was circling under an overhang like he was on figure eight rail. Amazingly graceful to watch up close. That will likely be our last dive for at least a month so it was great to see some memorable stuff. Keep us coming back for more. The time has come ...