Komodo memories

When upset, I calm myself best by thinking about diving. It's quite hard to explain to people what exactly is the edifying effect of falling into the sea with a tank on your back and breathing through a regulator, so I'm not going to try. But I thought I'll share some selected pictures here from my trip in Komodo early April this year, where I had the best holiday in my entire life (and that's a fair number of holidays). In one line: ref Komodo I didn't think it was possible to get so close to paradise. And when I'm sad, I can always go back to this post and look at the photos and call up my memories, and remember that life can be very, very beautiful.

(Ok, the photos are really crap, I know, but.... well, they are meant to be memories, not photographs... if that makes sense.)

There are many critters I love in the ocean, but my favouritest dude is surely the peacock mantis shrimp (odontodactylus scyllarus):



Spotting a mantis shrimp never fails to make my dive. These guys have tons of personality. They live in little burrows in sand bottoms or coral rubble, and you can always identify their homes because they have a front door and a back door. If you gently (gently!) tap their front door, for example, the dude shoots up and peers out with this "what the eff do you want" look on his face, I kid you not. Then you try gently tapping the back door, they spin around and pop out the other side to see what's going on. I could play with them for hours... toss little pebbles, wave my fish pointer around - they are astonishingly intelligent creatures. And they are utterly fascinating too: Look at their eyes - humans have 3 classes of colour pigments in our retinas; mantis shrimps have ten. Humans have binocular vision; mantis shrimps have trinocular. I can't even imagine what their world must look like. And get this: their claws have the force of a 22 caliber bullet - they could smash your finger if you got in their way... serious dudes! While they are not uncommon, it is hard, though, to find a free-swimming shrimp, and when you do... what a sight. Their iridescent, incandescent colouration always takes my breath away.



A speedboat taking divers out to the reef - a sight which never fails to ignite in me paroxysms of delight. It's like... the lights dimming in a cinema, the tuning of an orchestra, the revving of engines at an F1 race...... the sights and sounds of pure anticipation. Who needs drugs? Just these are opiates enough to send my heart racing.



Ok, me. Nothing interesting there.



This is a random picture of the dive guide, but to me a visual epitome of the heaven of diving: surrounded by rainbow ribbons of little fishes, a sturdy, healthy coral reef, a rooting turtle...... and just hanging out, chilling, perfectly buoyed, weightless and suspended, in water, in beauty, in daydreams......



The bats at Satonda - and the most amazing land sight I've ever seen. The photo does them no justice - they filled the sky, like the flying monkeys in Dorothy of Oz. If you kept really quiet, you could hear the beating of their wings; if you looked hard enough, you could see their odd flying motions, totally (obviously) unlike birds. As dusk falls into darkness....can one also believe in the stuff of nightmares?


And, of course, the Komodo Dancer boat herself - my favourite being the bottom right, with all her sails puffed out on a clear, blue afternoon. I don't think I had ever felt so contented, so at peace, so tranquil in my life as those days on the boat, feeling the warmth of the sun, staring at Gunong Agong, my dreams filled with swimming fishes, my life, for a little magical while, floating on an unruffled cloud.