Swimming about and stuff

We've taken a bit of time for a pseudo beach break to de-stress from the trials of this travelling.  It's been hard on us both.  I've broken a few nails and Mel had to wear the same dress twice but we've pulled through.

We basically decided to come to Indonesia because of David Attenborough.  As he is clearly the king and said that a place called Raja Ampat had the highest marine biodiversity in the world we signed up.

Raja Ampat is not the most accessible or developed part of Indonesia.  You have to take a couple of planes and a boat to get there but the trip has it's amusements such as:

A runway party at Sorong airport

Excellent strapline from the local carriers Wings Air

Fortunately we were travelling with a prophet

And we had suitably high powered pants

We stayed at the beautiful Papua Paradise - one of the three dive resorts in Raja Ampat.

It was indeed idyllic but unfortunately this seemed to go hand in hand with price tags more suited to pristine 6* hotels than an au naturel resort in the middle of nowhere. We did as much as we could without spending our entire remaining travelling budget and I even tried my hand at diving which was fun but hurt my rubbish fenland ear canals. What did make the hassle of getting there (and the cost, well almost...) worthwhile was the fact that there were no other tourists around at all, most of the reefs were pristine, and we saw a new exciting underwater creature (or more like 20) every day!

Here's a selection of stuff we saw just looking over the edge of our deck:

baby sharks

pretty puffer fishes

 spotty rays

and some excellent fish herding!

We also bought a brand new waterproof camera so we could get a bit closer to the action. But unfortunately it wasn't actually WATERPROOF and broke the instant we put it in the water. Luckily we still had the old one so we used that. Unfortunately that one is also a bit broken (the screen is smashed) so you can't exactly tell what you're photo-ing. This is probably the best of the bunch:

Here's some other nice stuff we saw on our travels: