Back in August, I was lucky enough to travel to Jakarta, Indonesia for work. Since I’m on an academic-year contract, I was also able to stay for a while after the work was finished. This gave me the opportunity to explore a bit more of the country before the new semester started. Here, I’ll give a quick recap of the trip and more importantly, share some photos!
Getting There
It’s not easy getting from Tucson to Jakarta! Travel took about 30 hours door-to-door, and included stops in San Francisco and Tokyo. I arrived at the Jakarta airport around 1 am, but I still had an hour taxi ride to the hotel to complete the trip.
The map below shows just how much ocean I had to cross!
My route from Tucson to Jakarta.
Jakarta: Work
I had one day to adapt to the time zone and make my last-minute preparations for our meetings. I did a decent job waking up at a reasonable hour (8 am), and I somehow had the self-control to not fall asleep until about 9 pm. Not bad given that Jakarta is 14 hours ahead of Tucson!
The next day, we started the meetings with our collaborators at Sampoerna University. I still haven’t told you what we were doing there; it was a final visit prior to the official start of UA Jakarta, the University of Arizona micro-campus at Sampoerna University. My department at UA will be offering a mechanical engineering degree through the partnership.
The day included a tour of the facilities (classrooms, labs, student housing, etc.), a class observation, and all sorts of administrative discussions.
The administrative meetings continued the next day, but the highlight for me was getting to speak with about 100 students. They were incredibly bright and eager to learn more – I’m so excited to get to work with them further!
Lembeh: Scuba!
After the meetings concluded, my UA colleagues headed home. I, however, didn’t need to be home till the new semester started, so I stayed a bit longer! I wanted to take advantage of the amazing diving Indonesia has to offer.
Indonesia has a TON of world-class dive spots – Bali, Lombok, Raja Ampat, Komodo, and more. It was hard to choose where to go, but in the end I zeroed in on Lembeh.
Lembeh is in North Sulawesi, which is actually pretty far from Jakarta (see the map below). The diving there is a different sort of diving, muck diving (I’ll leave it to Wikipedia to explain what this is). I was really excited about the opportunity to see a bunch of really small, tiny, weird critters, and I wasn’t disappointed.
They’re in the same country, but Lembeh is a long way from Jakarta!
I stayed at NAD-Lembeh for all 11 nights of my scuba vacation, and I’m really glad that I did. They have excellent dive guides, healthy and tasty food, and opportunities for a few extras, like night dives, mandarin dives, and blackwater dives (I did one of each). They also offer in-house underwater macro photography lessons, and my instructor Sonja helped me finally learn to use the manual settings on my camera and strobe! I’ve included some of the photos in this post; you can see the rest of my favorite photos (close to 100 of them) in this gallery.
I also made a gallery of just nudibranchs (ok, there are a few slugs too), because I’m still in shock at how many I saw. On a typical dive trip, I’m happy to see a couple different types of nudis, but on this trip I saw about 75 different species! That’s the beauty of muck diving.
This pygmy seahorse lends in perfectly with the coral it lives on. It is only about 1/2 inch long!
A tiny juvenile warty frogfish.
A gorgeous (and uncommon) yellow ribbon eel. The all start out black, then become blue as they become mature males. Only a select few then change sex and become a beautiful yellow female!
Who doesn’t love seahorses!?
A couple male mandarinfish trying to one-up each other as they vie for female attention.
A frogfish looks at me sceptically.
A peacock mantis shrimp guards her eggs.
A gorgeous flatworm poses for the camera.
A snake eel peeks out of the sandy bottom during a night dive.
A tiny juvenile octopus (less than 1/2 inch) clings to our , we think a blue-ringed octopus,
Anemonefish eggs.
Cute little cuttlefish.
A flambouyant cuttlefish prances my way.
Just one of about 75 species of nudibranchs I saw on my trip! You can see many of the others in this gallery.
A mototi octopus poses for the camera.
This nudibranch is waving at me.
A small mantis shrimp pauses for a photo.
North Sulawesi: Tarsiers!
On the final day, I made the short trip from Lembeh to North Sulawesi to check out the tarsiers at Tangkoko Nature Reserve. Tarsiers are some of the smallest primates in the world. I was able to get about a foot away from a couple of them because they were so curious! Here are a couple photos:
A couple of tarsiers.
This one came to me – it was so curious!
We also saw some owls and several bear cuscuses up in the trees, but they were way too far up for me to get any decent photos. Nevertheless, the day trip over to Tangkoko from Lembeh was definitely worthwhile.
Getting Home
Incredibly, getting home took even longer than getting there. This time, I had to first return to Jakarta, then fly to Tokyo, San Francisco, Denver, and finally Tucson. The Jakarta to Tucson portion took over 30 hours.
Summary
What a productive trip! We made great progress in Jakarta, then I got to dive and practice my underwater photography in Lembeh.
In general, when asked if I would go back to a place I’ve already visited, I say no – I just love seeing new places too much.
Lembeh, however, is a rare exception. I would certainly return to Lembeh, over and over. There is simply so much to see underwater and so much I still haven’t seen. Plus, NAD Lembeh was world class – and I miss their chocolate cupcakes!
Next up: a quick weekend trip to Denver with some friends, then an exciting work trip to the Middle East in mid-October!
Dives this trip: 31
Total dives: 166
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