Derawan Shmerawan?

When we got here…

we were really disappointed.  Can’t say we didn’t warn you about how spoiled we are.  We weren’t kidding.  The disappointment lasted about 24 hours – we even considered just doing a day of diving and then leaving.  Turns out Pulau Derawan IS all that, and worth the three days and cost to get here….except for some trash and some seriously lacking respect for the environment which is what bothered us the most when we first arrived.  After we got over ourselves and I stopped wishing the entire human race (myself included) extinct, we stayed longer than planned and had an amazing time.  In fact, we were quite out of money and might have stayed longer than the 9 nights we stayed if the closest ATM wasn’t a full day’s travel away and our emergency stash of American dollars didn’t have too many creases for the one guy on the whole island we could find willing to give us a horrible rate to exchange it for Rupiah.

 

As you can see from the photos, the water here is ridiculous, the weather has been virtually perfect, and the diving has been some of our best (more on that shortly).  We have been lucky enough to share much of our stay with some exceptionally lovely people – the nicest family in the universe, a crew of 6 from Australia (Neil, Yvette, Will (12), Charlie (10), Chessie (8), and Gerogie (6)), and dive master Debbie and her sweet friend Alex from Switzerland.  They really have enhanced our time here sharing card games, sand-castle building, snorkeling, karaoke-ing, sandbar-walking, swimming, jetty-jumping/flipping competitions, and even firecracker booby trapping (obviously Gabe hasn’t changed that much this year).

As far as wildlife, we have been overwhelmed.  Huge turtles swim everywhere you look – off our bungalow deck, off the boat, in the shallows of the islands – you can hardly go 3 minutes without seeing a turtlehead or four pop up.  And, while we thought it would be hard to compete with the Perhentian whale shark, we found some stiff competition on Kakaban and Sangalaki Islands, just an hour’s boat ride from Derawan.  We spent our second day here on a trip out to both islands where we did a “wall dive” at a really cool drop-off off the coat of Kakaban Island. We saw turtles and beautiful coral and lots of fish, and diving alongside the wall was so cool.  I felt like I was flying.  The middle of Kakaban Island happens to also have a gigantic lake in the middle of it filled with millions (literally – we talked it over and we both agree that’s no exaggeration) of jellyfish.  And because this particular group of jellyfish have had no predators for however many thousands of years, they either never had or have lost their stingers.  So you can snorkel to your heart’s content surrounded by jellyfish….and get no stings.  So that was awesome.

 

Then we went to Sangalaki Island to test our luck diving at Manta Point for Giant Mantas. Luck was seriously on our side. During our dive we saw 6 mantas swimming through the deep, all about 3 or so meters across. So amazing to watch them fly slowly by with their huge mouths open filtering the water for plankton. We were awestruck, amazed, dumbfounded – you name it. It was so good that we went back again and spent another whole day at Sangalaki. The island is picturesque and we laid on the beach, ate lunch, and walked the perimeter of the entire island. The sand was cratered by hundreds of old turtle nests and practically the only “trash” to be found was the turtle shells from all the hatchlings. AND, we got lucky again and saw even more Mantas on our dives. But the absolute best was snorkeling with them on the surface. There were at least a dozen in the morning, and while I was diving in the afternoon, Gabe saw probably another 2 dozen more. We weren’t sure but it seemed like they were playing with us – they would swim toward us with their mouths wide open and then at the last moment turn hard and swim the other way only to swing back around 15 seconds later and do the same thing. They would swim around you, under you, over you. It was such a thrill, we could have stayed all day. Definitely a once in a lifetime experience.

 

Other highlights have been snorkeling with the turtles in front of our hotel, hanging on and jumping off the various jetties on the island, and “land” snorkeling from above the water. It’s also been fun walking down the “main” road saying hello to the really friendly locals (there is a group of 10 or so year old girls who have a total crush on Gabe), eating lots of Gado Gado and tempeh, and general gazing with our jaws dropped at the beautiful water and scenery. And, there is a serious population of cats on Derawan which of course means….KITTENS.

 

 

 

 

 

Last night as we were gathering our stuff, we couldn’t find Gabe’s sunglasses anywhere – the pair he bought only 2 weeks ago to replace the pair he left on the dive boat in Perhentian.  We looked all over the place and they had just basically disappeared even though we had not left the deck the whole afternoon.  We went back through our pictures from the day to see if we could figure out when they went missing but no luck.  Gabe got up early today before our boat out to snorkel through the water out front to see if he had jumped in with them on (which he said he would “never” have done).  Still no luck.  About 20 minutes before our boat was due to pick us up we were exchanging pictures with the Aussie family and Gabe found photographic evidence in their shots that he did in fact jump in the water with them on – and exactly where.  Back out with the mask he went and barely 2 minutes later he came back up with a huge grin on his face and glasses in hand.  It was a sweet way to end a great 9 days.

We left Derawan at 8am this morning with only a general direction – Sumatra – in mind as we were not able to look at flights or destinations on the internet.  After 15 minutes browsing flights (and not even checking email or facebook – can you even imagine the will power?!) at an internet café, we bolted to the “airport” in Berau where we caught an extremely shady looking airplane to Balikpapan.  That is where we are now.  From here we fly to Jakarta and figure out what we want to do on Sumatra for the next week before we head to Earl and Sam’s place on Asu.  We might be sleeping in the Jakarta airport tonight.

Thanks Derawan, for an epic stay.  We’ll respond to all of your emails and FB messages soon.

Love,

Haley and Gabe

p.s. most of this blog was written on our last day on Derawan and finished during our travels to Jakarta

 

 

 

 

 

 

Other notes:

You can walk the entire perimeter of Derawan in about 30 minutes.  But some people still have motorbikes.  Really a bicycle is hardly even justifiable.

No internet here. None.  Longest connectivity drought on our whole trip.  Hope nothing important happened while we were here.

Some guy who spoke no English found out we were from America and said ‘Oh, the international terrorists’.  Nice.  We were wondering whether the anti-Islam film was going to cause problems for us in Indonesia but as there were no warnings from the U.S. Embassy at the time we were booking our tickets, we came anyway.  We thought there’d be not much knowledge of it, if any, on Derawan given the lack of internet but we were wrong.  From now on we’re Canadian.

Many people here call Gabe ‘ewe com su pai!’ And we still have not figured out what it means despite asking about five people. Maybe a combination of stupid, handsome, and wild man/savage.

Indonesians really like to have their picture taken with us.

Gabe typed up a guide on how to get from Kota Kinabalu to here that took 45 minutes.

Local girls don’t like Justin Bieber, he’s ‘ayam’ (‘chicken’); but they do like lady gaga, she’s ‘bagus’ (‘good’).

Gabe got his flip-flop fixed here for $1.50. Good thing as there is not exactly a mall here.

I may or may not have dropped the (new) camera. On concrete. Again. There are some battle wounds but it is basically still working really well.

Drivers in Indonesian Borneo like to hang all sorts of decorations and stuffed animals in their windshields to block their view of the road as much as possible. And they avoid having seatbelts whenever possible. They also drive like maniacs.

It took us precisely 57 hours to get here from Kuching. The first day of the route was a taxi, a plane, and then two local buses, all in order to spend the better part of a day of back and forth at the Indonesian consulate in Kota Kinabalu (where upon entry you would have been certain you would not be able to speak to a person in this lifetime, much less get any sort of visa – but we it was actually cake to get around the mayhem and we had visas 5 hours (and $120) later). Then we took another local bus, to an overnight bus, to a minivan, to another flight, to another taxi, to a boat, to a car-share (a harrowing 3.5 hour roller-coaster through the jungle with a shared seatbelt) to a small city called Berau where we had to spend the night. That was followed by another (2.5 hour and harrowing) car-share (no seatbelts, but plenty of windshield blocking kitsch) to a speedboat that finally dropped us on the dock of our hotel on Derawan. It was worth it.

There are no mosquitos on this island. Good thing we’re taking this malaria medicine.