Kirstoire Maclean

I'm sorry I can't make this brief. This is for me as much as anyone else, I want to remember everything. But just read the first paragraph if you like!

The four days I have been on this boat have probably been the highlight of this entire trip so far. And of my life (but I wonder how many times I have said that?!). Komodo National Park is beautiful, above and below water. But below water it is mind blowing, I feel like I have taken diving to the next level and challenged myself, learnt a lot and seen things I will never forget and forever cherish. I have found my new happy place and at the moment when I close my eyes I see it. It is actually making sleep quite hard! I just don't know how to describe it to you to do it justice, but the effect it has on my subconscience should give some indication to how phenomenal the underwater world is. I am struggling to read and to sleep because I have been so stimulated by beauty and adrenaline.

I will try to explain the experience chronologically and not get carried away in my current state of elation!

Komodo National Park is a large group of islands off the east part of Indonesia. There are only four small villages within the park and the entire area is protected. So you just see nature, with no buildings. Being on a live aboard boat we are able to access places other boats cannot get to, so a lot of the time it is just us surrounded by beautiful green sculptured islands, with surreal rock formations and a diverse forms of landscape. As it is the end of wet season the land is bright green, but soon it will dry out and be yellow.

We are on an Indonesian wooden built catermeran that sleeps up to 10 guests, but we are a group of 7. The other guests are very interesting, an Italian couple who live in Gabon working in gorilla conservation, an American mother and daughter who both travel and do a lot of extreme sports, Canadian guy who has retired and sold his house so lives overseas throughout the winter and myself and Rebecca-the friend I made in Bali in January. We all get along very well and enjoy the time between dives chatting about all sorts of topics.

The boat has a large crew who are all Indonesian, consisting of captain, cruise director/dive instructor, 2 dive guides, 2 dingy boat drivers, 2 mechanics/engineers, 2 chefs and a table service man. They sleep on deck and in a shared cabin. The boat has 4 levels-lower deck has bedrooms, first deck has diving platform with all our dive gear, kitchen and dining, more bedrooms and bathrooms, second floor has captains office, another bedroom and seating area and the top deck is a lounging/sun deck. The staff are incredible, they feed us ridiculous amounts of delicious food, wait on us at mealtimes and give full assistance with all our dive gear so we carry heavy equipment as little as possible and don't have to set up any of our own gear.

The dive guides have astonished me with skill, strength and understanding-to be a guide here you need to know the sites extremely well and be able to manage stressful and difficult scenarios on almost every dive. They give detailed breifings of our dives and pay attention to our individual diving experience and skills. Komodo is renowned for having very strong currents and complex diving, so it needs to be managed especially safely. We are in small groups of 2-3 with a guide, who is our guide for the entire trip. Myself and Becky have a tiny little Indonesian called Hans and I am in awe of him. He is so strong for someone so tiny, he can carry both of us against a current in order to get us somewhere safe to hang out and watch the underwater world go by. After I had a scary experience in the Philippines I told him I was scared of drift dives, where you ride a current and 'fly' through the water. He has offered alternative entrances to some dive sites, but told me that he knows from my skills that I can manage the more complex journey. I trust him entirely and have taken the latter option and now I have done about 8 dives with strong currents, complex management and involved drift diving for all or part of the dive. And now I am not scared and I bloody love it.

So there are two elements of diving here to describe; the scenery and the technical adrenaline pumping journeys involved within the dives.

We started with two dives that were 'simple' in terms of Komodo NP, so that our guides could see how we are under water and what your air consumption is. This is important so that they know for later dives how to time the routes and keep us with enough air to ride the currents to get to a safe exit point of the site. (For example they use reef hooks to keep us in place when there is an extremely strong current and we could stay there for 5-10 minutes if we used air quickly or 15-20 minutes if we consumed less air.) These two dives were indescribably beautiful, they were at islands that were surrounded by neverending coral forest. The islands provided some shelter from the currents that wrap around the land, so we would enter the sites at around 25m and then zigzag up towards the top nice and slowly, whilst spoiling our eyes with a rich view of wonderful colours and countless fish and creatures. As we would reach the edge of the island we would feel a current and go back in the other direction. Even this was harder than most dives I have ever done and it was just the beginning! As soon as we went down I saw a sea snake and it was just the smallest welcome to what was about to be the biggest ever treat to my eyes. I can't even begin to tell you what I have seen in each dive, it would take way too long!

After these dives we went to Rinca Island to do a small hike and see the Komodo dragons. I have always wanted to see the dragons, but since becoming a diver this part of the NP I had almost forgotten about! However they did not disappoint and have still been a highlight-we saw countless dragons. Most of them were just lounging in the shade, but some of the smaller ones (which need to eat more often) were on the prowl. It was everything I ever imagined, like watching a dinosaur in the desert hunt out prey warning their peers about the incoming predator. We were being guided by two rangers who had big forked sticks to protect us, should anything kick off. The rangers carefully managed our placement with the dragons and helped us take photos safely. The hike we did took us up a big hill that gave a great view of the bay and surrounding islands.

We did a night dive that night, which are always in calm safe conditions and make for a very relaxing experience....then the next day the adrenaline started pumping!

There is a reason why we do dives in challenging currents; the currents pull in plankton for fish to feast on and these fish attract large predators, so there is a good chance of seeing sharks, tuna, barracuda, Napoleon gropers and other large pelagic fish- all referenced as 'big fish. Then once within the calmer part of a dive, when out of the strong current there is usually a massive and wealthy coral garden which thrives in life and has many more fish and also lots of small and unusual things living within them-collectively referenced as 'micro'.

We did 3 day dives a one night dive each day. Every dive we have done has been completely unique and has a story of its own, but to make it brief I will tell you how we managed the currents in order to see as much as we could. Usually we would enter the current at the beginning of a dive. The simplest would then be a drift dive, where we follow one straight route and then swim across the current into a sheltered bay at the end. Within this type of dive and for the more complex our dive guide would sometimes find a rock (or somewhere within the coral that would not damage it) that he could hook onto with a reef hook. A reef hook is a metal hook with 1-2 lines attached to it, with hooks on the end. Hans' hook had two lines so once he attached it Becka and I would each hang onto one of the hooks. Then we could relax and stay in once place and enjoy the view. Hans would sometimes hold the line if it was a super strong current, otherwise he would hand onto some rock with his fingers and his immense strength. Sometimes when we were hanging out like this the current would be so strong it would be pulling at our masks and regulators so we would have to hold them. It was an intense experience!

Some of the dives involved more complex routes where we would go through small channels or 'cauldron' formations that suddenly create a 'shotgun' effect, where the current is suddenly much stronger and you get fired very quickly. In these instances we would always have to be very close to Hans so that he could get the hook in place and we would quickly hold on. If we missed the opportunity we would have just kept getting swept with the current and would have swam across the current into the calmer part of the dive. But we always managed to stay close enough and manouver ourselves so that we could use the reef hook he set up for us. These dives were exhilarating and physically tiresome. I always thought diving was the laziest sport, but now I have seen the more active way to do it!

We did a total of 13 dives over 4 days and they were all the best dive I have ever done-everytime I came up to surface I was rushing with excitement and saying 'that is my best ever dive, favourite so far'! I won't list everything that we saw, but my highlight was definitely the manta rays as I have never seen them before and they are the most elegant creature. They are huge winged flat fish that feed on plankton in currents and hang out near coral bombies so that the smaller fish can clean them. We spent one drift dive in a current passing by bombie cleaning stations and we saw 14 of them. They move so gracefully with a gentle flap of their wings, swinging their jaws slowly to collect plankton. When you are hanging onto a rock and feel the strength of a current that can pull you at speed for a great distance it is so impressive this creature gracefully glide through. At the cleaning stations they glide around in circles whilst the smaller fish clean them, it looks like a dance and is mesmerising. This is what I see when I close my eyes at the moment and I hope it never stops!

We were lucky enough to see these beautiful creatures in four dives and also we watched them from the boat gliding around in the shallows. Other big fish of particular excitement that we saw were many sharks (white tip, black tip and nurse sharks), huge bumphead parrot fish, tuna, Napoleon groper, big schools of barracuda and and jacks. We also saw many turtles and lots of micro creatures. On night dives we saw octopus, feeding lionfish, bizarre looking crabs and crustaceans.

The coral was so colourful and diverse it was just so beautiful. I haven't seen anything so beautiful since being in PNG and I couldn't dive then, so this has finally made up for that.

The whole experience has been so incredible I feel completely content and could come home tomorrow. I don't think my trip can get better than that and I've made my memories to focus on when I am trying to relax at home.

......but of course I still have two weeks to go. So this evening I fly to Cambodia to meet a friend I made in India.Read more