The morning excursion was to see the Japanese Binsari Cave, where thousands of Japanese soldiers held out against American troops in WWII, until the cave complex was bombed and all the Japanese were killed. So, there was a tour of the cave and the small museum with artifacts and bones of Japanese soldiers. I have to confess I didn’t bother to get out of bed.
I’ve read a lot of WWII history and WWII fiction and seen all the movies ranging from stellar to mediocre. I’ve visited places like Berlin and the Solomon Islands, the graveyards of Europe, the Pearl Harbor memorial. And now that the grandchildren of the “greatest generation” who sacrificed to fight fascism are completely negating those sacrifices by prancing around promoting dictators and denying the holocaust, I’ve lost interest in WWII. We learned nothing.
I was happier sitting on the deck in the sunshine with a fresh breeze, a cup of coffee, and a good book.
By mid-morning the boat was repositioned to Rusbasbedas Island and we had our last snorkel of the trip. And I say that with great sadness because the snorkeling had been fabulous for the last couple weeks and yet, this was the best site of the entire trip. That beach in the 3rd picture below is the spread of impossibly white, incredibly soft sand that we are headed toward. But the other two pictures give you a hint along the bottom side of the island of how clear, how blue that water was.
There was a decaying wooden shack on the island, probably the remains of a scuba diver lodging from before the pandemic. I asked if there was fresh water on the island because I would have happily jumped ship there. But alas there was only brackish water.
But look at the pictures and tell me that’s not god’s own aquarium.
We disembarked 3 times today. So, y’all are going to more than enough pictures in today’s post.
The first stop was the middle of CenderawasihTeluk (Indonesian for Bird of Paradise Bay), the largest protected marine national park in Indonesia. But they also allow fishing in the national park. So, fishermen set up a collective which maintains a fishing net rig called a bagan, and these fishing nets are set up on floating rafts or boats or multiple boats tied together and then anchored to night fish from with lights. Our objective for the morning was to swim with whale sharks which are attracted to the boats for the small sardines they’re catching.
I’ve swum with whale sharks before in the Gulf of Mexico. But that was open ocean, an hour or more from land, and they were cruising along eating plankton and minding their own business, completely ignoring us. There, the organizers made us wear life jackets and I find it hard to swim quickly in a life jacket. But you got swim alongside them and there were minimal people in the water at a time.
Here, the fishermen were feeding the whale sharks and even drumming on a bucket to attract them. So, to see these enormous creatures hanging vertical in the water while fishermen pour small fish in their mouth while you swam right up to them was a very lazy experience compared to the other one. (I didn’t even know whale sharks ate anything bigger than plankton.) The fishermen give them the smallest sardines which have little market value because they consider the whale sharks good luck. After they’d had their fill, the whale sharks circled us, eyeballing us with curiosity, so we interacted mildly with them. Each whale shark has a unique pattern of dots and stripes that can be used to identify them as individuals.
We went in the water in groups of 20 so, you know, there was a bit of a scum. When I showed my photos later, people commented on how surprised they were that I managed to get pictures of the whale shark without 10 people in the frame. And all I can say, yeah, this is not my first photo tour. Always wait for your shot.
The waterproof case I got for my iPhone worked well, once I turned off the leak detection. It didn’t leak, there wasn’t any problems with condensation inside the case, the resulting pictures were decent. I have no complaints. (Again, I’m not expecting National Geographic to come calling.) But one of my traveling companions had bought the same rig, on my recommendation, and had nothing but problems. She hadn’t taken it out of the box until we got there, and even with the leak detection turned off, the high pitched alarm kept going off. Which meant you had to open the case (in the bouncy boat where nothing is completely dry), turn on and off the power switch and reset the battery. (Yes, the power switch is inside the case, which seems like an engineering mistake.) I guess my advise is never take an underwater camera on a trip that you haven’t shoved in a bucket and clicked a couple times.
Our next stop (after a quick break for tea) was a sandy beach off Kali Lemon for a little mid-morning snorkeling. I will admit that I bought myself a new swimsuit before this trip (because the last one was years old and I’d lost weight during the pandemic) so opted for a cheap bikini off of Amazon because I was just going to wear a rash guard over the top of it. And I want to give a big thumbs up to this bathing suit. Buying clothes off Amazon can be rather hit or miss, but this one was comfortable and flattering. (Which never happens with me and bathing suits.)
The snorkeling off Kali Lemon was good, but I’d been spoiled by swimming in god’s own aquarium surrounded by swarms of fish. But the giant boring clams, Tridacna Crocea, were delightful and the sheer variety of corals. (Note, they’re called boring clams because they bore down into boulders and coral heads to create a little pocket for themselves. Nobody ever sneaks up on a boring clam. They are the smallest of the giant clams.)
The third stop of the day was the village of Kwatisore, on the shore of Cenderawasih Bay. They greeted us at the dock with two lines of dancers and as everyone stepped off the zodiac, they were escorted on either side by dancers onto the village green. We were told to be very flattered, that this is how they greet royalty. Then they did a dance about a hunter stalking and killing a bird of paradise and feeling such remorse about it, that he promised never to do it again, as they carried the dancer representing the “dead bird of paradise” stage left. The village has a single paved road and is organized with houses / structures on either side. It was amusing to note that the village church used the larger industrial oxygen bottles for bells and why not? Use what you have.
And I have been very remiss about the sunset shots.
I know what you’re thinking — this blog post has no pictures?! But here’s the thing. Sometimes you go out in the wild looking for things and you don’t find them. It’s not like the wildlife signed up for a specific itinerary. You see all these fabulous nature documentaries with amazing footage and they don’t really talk about how the photographers didn’t go out for a day or a week. They spend a month or six, dragging a massive amount of equipment into remote places and then just sitting here in a hide, watching moss grow or counting mosquitoes, sweating or freezing, for days and days. I think it makes it more magically when you accidentally see one of those National Geographic moments. But looking ≠finding.
Today was one of those days…
The wake up call was at 3 am. And I sat clinging to a cup of coffee like it was the only floatation device in rough seas, one of the passengers, an elderly Dutch gentleman who had sat opposite me at dinner a couple nights previous, came up to me. (Notice that I was sitting alone, because people that know me? They would wait until I finished that cup of coffee.) And this gentleman was not a native English speaker (because the world does not all speak English) so when speaking English, he had a rather impenetrable accent and sometimes struggled for the right word. And he was prone to long stories about his childhood, so in a noisy room, I had to really concentrate to follow him. And he said, you’re walking much better today. Which confused me because I didn’t think my walking style had changed, unless he was referring to that fall on the stairway at the hotel a week ago. So, I said, ??? And he said, you’re not using your walking poles today. Ah, you see, there was another woman on the trip, a very tall Australian (note, I am not considered tall) who had her hair dyed in a very unusual manner. It was as if she had bought a box of every color of dye — red, blue, green, yellow, purple, brown, black, orange — and dyed each curl a different color. She also had some sort of mobility problem. She talked very proudly about how she’s trained for six months to be physically able to take the trip, but then in the airport on the way out, she had fallen and had enormous bruises over most of her lower body. She took a pair of walking sticks everywhere and needed a lot of help to get up and down, in and out. Good for her, she was out and about in the world. But this was not me. And it’s difficult at 3-ish in the morning not to roll your eyes a bit because, dude, you’re confused.
Unfortunately, we sat there and we sat there. While we were supposed to be ashore about 4-ish because we still had an hour drive once we got ashore, the ship was not in the right position. It took about an hour, maybe hour and a half, to get where we could be loaded into the zodiacs and taken into the town of Manokwari. The goal for the day was to see more / different birds of paradise and bowerbirds up in the Arfak Mountains. But these are birds that are only active at first light and clock was ticking.
Once in town, we were loaded up into 4-wheel drive trucks and flew up the side of the hill. There wasn’t a lot of traffic, so these guys drove like fighter pilots, weaving in and out and calling to each other out the windows. I’m guessing that there are difficulties getting fuel for cars and trucks in this area, because both on the way out and the way back there were miles-long queues of vehicles with drivers sleeping in the front seats. It looked like they were lined up, waiting on gas. I’m not sure why we needed 4-wheel drive vehicles, it wasn’t until the last 15-20 minutes of our trip up the hill that it was unpaved and even then, it was more or less smooth packed dirt.
Then suddenly they stopped and pulled us out of the cars and started hustling up the steep hillside on rough, broken trail. It turned out to be only a 15 minute walk, but without explanation, I just settled into, well, we’re just going to keep hauling our asses up this 30-40 percent grade. Without warning, they turned a corner and shoved us into a tin hut. And by “us”, I mean, me, one of the women I was traveling with, and 3 random people I didn’t know. The problem being that because we were so late and had already missed that pre-dawn window, we had no time to organize into groups of rabid birders and, well, the rest of us. And my friend and I were now trapped alone in a metal shed with 3 rabid birders. (Cue ominous music) Every time I shifted or coughed or took a drink of water, they aggressively ssussh’ed me, followed by long, put-upon sighs, and tongue clicking. If hrupfts were bullets, I’d be dead. You see, we were sitting opposite a bowerbird installation, where a bowerbird had collected and arranged items (natural and human trash, like the lids off water bottles), sorted very carefully by size and color. But there was no bird. We sat in that blind for a hour, with the rabid birders blaming us for not being absolutely silent as the reason there was no bird. It wasn’t because it was too late in the day, or that there wasn’t a female for the male display his mating dance for, it was because I had coughed 20 minutes ago. I know this because at the end of the hour when we switched out to another blind and they ran up to the staff birding expert to complain about me. And then when they shoved the 5 of us in different tin hut, I went behind the blind and peed because it had been hours since that cup of coffee, and the woman came out and yelled at me because the smell of my pee was going to chase off the birds. How dare I pee in the forest?! After a second hour without a single bird, it started to pour down rain. So, they came back and moved us to 3rd blind. Still no birds.
When they finally came to collect us and take us back to the truck, there were 2 young guys who were not part of our trip that were hanging about and the 3 birders asked them what they’d seen (because that’s what birders do), these two jokers said, oh, yeah, we’ve seen 5 birds of paradise and 10 bowerbirds. And I’m close enough to hear them, but not close enough to say, dude, shut the f**k up, these people have no sense of humor and they’re going to believe you.
On the ride home, we ended up with an Australian couple who once they found out what I did for a living, regaled me with story about how they hate the company I work for because it doesn’t pay its taxes. And, yes, no large tech corporation pays its share of the taxes. Their tax rate is too low and they still hide money in weird places around the world to avoid paying taxes and I’m mad about that too. We pay our senior executives Scrooge McDuck-sized mountains of cash, couldn’t some of that money could be funneled to the common good?
For the record, only 1 group of about 5-6 passengers out of the 70 or so of us saw a bowerbird. And that was because the guide with them went out to the bowerbird installation / mating display area and moved one of the pieces in the setup out of place, so the bird dashed back in to arrange it properly again. So, you’re telling me that the bowerbird is an OCD bird? No wonder the rabid birders were so disappointed not to see it, it’s their spirit bird.
The good news is that this is the last time on the trip that I was out looking for birds, so I’ll stop complaining about birders now.
Don’t get me wrong. I love to sit and watch birds. The grace and the engineering feat of flight is amazing. And after all, they’re what time and distance has done to the dinosaurs. But I’m not a birdwatcher, aka a twitcher. The people that travel the world to add to their bird lists— shakes head —it’s a social acceptable way to channel the worst OCD tendencies, as opposed to counting bathroom tiles or trainspotting. Birdwatching is competitive OCD. And you will always get a number of these people on any trip and god bless ’em. After all, we’re in a remote part of the world, filled with incredible birds found nowhere else, what better way to pump up your life list?
But I always try to keep a little distance between the zealous birders and me. Our energy and goals are not on the same page. So, when I tell you that today was all about the birds, birds that are only active in the pre-dawn, well…
The wakeup call was 4 am and after giving us enough time to grab a cup of coffee, we were bundled into boats and taken ashore. And let me tell you, there’s nothing that makes you feel more like a pretend navy seal than riding in a fast zodiac across pitch black waters, no visible lights, headed for a shore you’ve never seen in the sunlight. On the shore, we were hustled into trucks and taken up the hill and let off at a trailhead and handed a walking stick. Now if I’d been smart, I would have brought my phone so I could use it as a flashlight. If I’d been a genius, I would have a headlamp. (You know I have a drawer full of LED headlamps at home, right?) I just blindly followed the person ahead of me up a steep, slippery trail. 4:30 am and the air temperature already hot as an oven.
We’ve been given a choice between two destinations. One, an hour and a half walk to see the Wilson’s bird of paradise, though there is only one bird per bird blind and he won’t display unless a female shows up, but if you catch it, it’s amazing. The other option was a 45 minute hike to see the red bird of paradise where there will be multiple male birds displaying their mating behavior, hoping that female shows up, but they were also be further away. Knowing my luck with birds, I choose the second option as having better odds of seeing a bird. And we were successful. There was 3 male birds that started shaking their money makers as the light slowly crept into the sky. They’re noisy little birds. The following video has a clip of them at the 1:43 mark.
And I know the question you’re going to ask, just how many species of birds of paradise are there? And the answer is 42. (Insert your own Douglas Adams joke here.)
I offer up my selection of pictures from this encounter without any hope that National Geographic is going to come calling. It was dim light, the birds were about 50 feet away (15 meters) and moving quickly. I only offer them as proof that I did indeed see the birds in question.
It was only about an 90 minutes in the blind, then full daylight was on and the show was over. And that’s where things got a bit confused. You see, the expedition leaders had their wives and kids aboard and they felt the trail the rest of us took was too tough for the kids, but the easier trail they took went through people’s backyards, so they didn’t want to take the entire group that way. Which meant they weren’t coming back with the rest of us. And the local guides wanted to show the expedition leaders another blind for the next time they came through that was about 30 minutes away and stand around and talk about it. Which means that we humped our way back down to the trailhead and we only had the birder expert member of the staff and he said, oh, sit here and wait, eventually someone will show up for you and then pissed off into the jungle to add to his bird list, taking the only radio with him. So, we sat there for an hour, an hour and a half in the heat and no one showed, but the cars were there. You know that someone is going to say the hell with this and get in a car and tell them to take them back to the dock. I followed along with the mob. But then we were stuck on the dock in the bright sun (though it was a little cooler down by the water) with no way to contact the ship to send zodiacs.
Another half hour, hour down at the dock, one of the expedition leaders showed up with a radio and a single zodiac arrived and there was an uncivilized scramble as to whom would get in the boat. I stepped back and said, women and children first. This wasn’t the lifeboat on the Titanic. But, man, my politeness totally came back and bit me. You see, when the one zodiac got back to the ship, the captain repurposed him for another task, so the zodiac didn’t come back to the dock. And we waited, and we waited. Finally, the Captain took pity on us and came and got us himself. You can tell he’s the Captain because his life vest says it.
And funny story about that brown hat I’m wearing. If you go back through my travels, there are many pictures of me wearing that hat. It’s my go-to travel hat. I got it 15 years ago on a trip to Microsoft and it has “Microsoft” stitched brown on brown across the front of the hat. And considering who I work for, have worked for over the last 20 years, I find it my funniest private joke, my most public statement about how I feel about my employer that I will not label myself with their logo.
For completeness sake, I will say that other group that went further to see the Wilson’s bird of paradise, sat there for a long time with the male bird not doing anything and then at the last minute a female showed up and he gave them a brief show. So, everyone got to see something today.
Somewhere between Buru Island and Wajag (and I don’t know whether it’s spelled Wajag or Wayag), we crossed the equator which I had never done by boat before. And there’s usually a big ceremony with King Neptune where all the virgins (aka people that have never crossed the equator by boat) are trotted out to do embarrassing things and drink some rum. They had such a ceremony here with a staff member dressed in fishing nets with a cardboard trident and people pushed in the small pool on the upper deck of the ship and we were given a combination of Tabasco and lemon juice to drink. Which may have been more historically accurate because of the dangers of scurvy and all, but was completely vile and left me asking, where’s the rum?
There is little information about Wajag Island on the internet, but what information you can find about it, gushes about its beauty and biodiversity. Diver, surfer, birder paradise. It’s a popular spot (as you can imagine) with drone photographers. It’s a dot on the global maps, so let’s look at a more detailed view…
The only way to get to this part of the world is by ship. If you can get to West Papua, there are live-aboard boats that run trips out to this area. At least, there used to be, what with the pandemic and all, I honestly don’t know what businesses have survived.
It’s a tangled maze of coral islands and pristine beaches with the heads of hawk billed turtles popping up to eyeball us. I think they’d hoped to find manta rays for us to swim with here, but didn’t find any. But that’s a very small note on the chance to visit such a remote, untouched place. We went in by zodiac.
This is a panorama of 4 shots and I’m pleased with it mostly because it’s hard to get things to line up in a bouncy moving boat. Though I have to admit that I’m old enough that I used to sit and do panorama stitching by hand, hours, like knitting. And now you just push a button and come back in a 5-10 minutes.
We then landed on a beach and most of the places we snorkeled, you swam out a small distance to a drop off and there was lots of room to maneuver. This was a shallow white sand cove with an abundance of stagshorn coral just beneath the surface, so you swam with a great deal of caution. I did not scrape myself, but coral cuts (because of the stinging elements of coral and all the little organisms) are more difficult to heal.
But we were rewarded with swarms of tiny, little fish, about the size of the last digit of your pinkie.
Today we disembarked on Buru Island and to say the locals were excited to see us is an understatement. There were at least a 1000 people lined up on the beach waiting for us, taking videos of us arriving with their cellphones (and you would think after all this time, I would be so experienced at a wet zodiac landing that I would be graceful at it, and you would be wrong). And once you waded ashore they grabbed you to get a photo with you. This is my mother, hold my baby. Somewhere in Southeast Asia, I was trending on social media. I now have had my 15 minutes of rock-star fame. No one has ever been (or will ever be) that excited to see me. (And that includes the dog when we picked him from the kennel where we’d left him for 3 weeks to go to the Amazon.)
They’d printed out 5 or 6, 8 foot banners with the ship picture (and remember this was the ship’s maiden voyage under this name/paint job, so I don’t know where they found the pictures) and the date, there were dancing and speeches. The dancing included swords and I’ve always thought most dance routines could be improved with weapons. The island had declared today a holiday. The local officials traveled 6 hours to greet us.
Apparently we were the first cruise ship to ever visit Pasir Putih. And they would like many more to come, please, thank you. Because tourists = money into local economy = money spent on infrastructure. You hear those stories about the cargo cults (which was not just a World War II thing, other much earlier examples are available) and you see how it all happens. These people were throwing everything they had at us because they want us to come back.
One thing that surprised me was how mountainous an island it was. It goes up to 8000+ feet, has a number of bird species only found on Buru Island (most above the 3000 foot level) and is thickly forested. You look at it and think, well, here’s one place that won’t be overwhelmed by climate change… But then they take you to the village and it’s on stilts in the lagoon and you go, ah, no… one good super storm and it’s gone.
We managed to tear ourselves away from the crowd of well wishers (and by we, I mean, a small group of us because the birders stayed to find birds and other people stayed to eat cookies and tour the village) and we went snorkeling.
A lovely green turtle, Chelonia Midas.
Oh, and there’s a story I forgot to tell earlier (mostly because I haven’t gotten around to mentioning it to my husband, but he never reads my stories) about our second night in Labuan Bajo.
It’s been a long day in the heat with the Komodo dragons and I was still suffering from jet lag, and probably most significantly, I’d had a beer while I was listening to the lecture on the history of Indonesia and we were headed down the marble steps to dinner. And I missed a step, or three, and you know Indonesia has no hand rails… And I went flying. Someone came up to me later and said, it was so weird. I was mid-air, head first, headed for an enormous one of those heavy sand-filled cans they use for ash trays and I apparently did this little twist and ended up star fishing myself on the only mat in the entryway. Bruised my chin because I’ve always said, I lead with my chin. He kept going on about how he was standing right there watching and he didn’t know how I pulled that off.
And all I could say was, well, I skied for years and skiing isn’t about the falling, it’s about the landing. Always protect the melon, aka your head.
But I will tell you my Apple Watch freaked the fuck out. A very loud shrill alarm went off and won’t stop until I answered, yes, I’ve fallen but I’m fine. I’d suffered a blow to my dignity, I didn’t feel like I needed my jewelry to bugging me just that moment.
There are over 17,000 islands in Indonesia, so pinning anything down is a little complicated.
So, Hoga Island is part of the Wakatobi island group, a group of islands in the larger Tukang besi Archipelago off of Buton Island in the Sulawesi Tenggara. The name Wakatobi comes from combining the names of the 4 largest islands in the group, Wangi-Wangi, Kaledupa, Binongko and Tomia. And you’ve seen me use the word Tenggara before. It’s Malaysian / Indonesian forsoutheast. So, Sulawesi Tenggara means the area on the southeastern side of Sulawesi. And Tukang besi is Indonesian for iron-worker or blacksmith.
There are two origin stories as to why this is the blacksmiths’ archipelago. One, a Dutch visitor named Hoger visited Binongko Island and saw people making iron tools (the idea of working a roaring fire in this heat and humidity makes me want to faint), so he called the area Toekang Besi Eilanden. Two, that the name refers to Tulukabesi, the king of Hitu (in Maluku), who took up arms to oppose the Netherlands East India Company. The locals suffered greatly here during the spices wars in 1800’s. The Dutch had little patience with anyone who didn’t agree with their agenda of monopolizing and enslaving the region. And even if you were an obedient slave, they might turn their cannons on you or decide that you needed to be slaughtered to send a message to someone less obedient. (The Dutch have formally apologized in recent years.) I would recommend a book that I’m about halfway through called Nathaniel’s Nutmeg: How One Man’s Courage Changed the Course of History by Giles Milton, that talks about the spice war history.
What Wakatobi is known for today is diving. There’s at least one very high end diving resort and a number of smaller ones. Unfortunately the local airline has stopped service to Wakatobi. The high end resort is still flying customers in via private plane, but the smaller resorts and other local businesses are out of luck. And what with the troubles, the pandemic, no maintenance was done on many of the tourist structures, so they’ve completely rotted away. The beaches are covered in hermit crabs sculling over mounts of plastic trash that washed in from the ocean.
They started us on foot toward a village, telling us that it was 20 minutes, just beyond the pier. So, we got to the pier and asked again, and the natives said, 20 minutes from this point, we’re almost there. So, we hiked another 30 minutes along the beach, and the staff said, shouldn’t we be headed into the trees, because the village isn’t on the beach? So, we head into the vegetation, wander around a bit following the guides, pop back out on the beach about 20 minutes later and ask the guides, how far to the village? And they said 30 minutes, tops. This is where me and a couple other people said, it’s been lovely hiking in the heat, but we want to go back and snorkel, so we turned back. One of our group did press on and said, it was another hour and a half before the village. Which meant that it was 2 and half hours, 3 hours back, so they totally missed the snorkeling.
Which was a shame. Because it was good snorkeling. Warm water and, yes, my underwater camera was working. It was very shallow, but when you got out there, it was a nice drop off filled with healthy coral and fish. The biologist kept reminding us to look for seahorses in the shallow sea grass, but I didn’t see any.
And while I was bobbing along, taking pictures, half heartedly chasing after the fish who kept their distance, I looked down and said, wait a minute, am I swimming with a venomous sea snake? And, yes, I had that verified later with the biologist. It was a banded sea krait, but they said, I probably shouldn’t worry, they’ve very chill and won’t bother you if you don’t bother them.
Not bothering the wildlife is my middle name. A couple times the travel medicine doctors have lectured me about not petting anything and what to do if I get bitten by a wild animal. And I’m all, no, no, no, I do not touch the wildlife.
I will start by saying that the beach hotel we were staying out had a fine collection of large yellow garden spiders (native to Indonesia). Argiope appensa is you want to get picky about it. These are obviously females because the females are much larger than the males. They are not poisonous or dangerous. The zigzag web element (a stabilimentum) is thought to help keep birds from running into the web and accidentally destroying it.
Today was another transport day. Moving us from the hotel in Labuan Bajo down to the pier by bus, from the pier to the ship in small 8-10 person zodiacs (again, I feel that the crumpling, water slick steps down to the zodiacs would have benefited from a handrail, but Indonesia does not believe in handrails), getting us settled in our staterooms, running the abandon ship / lifeboat drill that they always do first thing. There were meals, there were welcome drinks, there were crew introductions. We headed out across the Flores Sea, not expecting to make land until tomorrow.
This was the maiden voyage of this ship for this company and my friends and I looked at each other and said, wait, wait, didn’t we promise ourselves that we wouldn’t do another maiden voyage after the disaster that was Sri Lanka? But maybe we’d already punched that ticket so we’re good?
The ship holds about a 100 passengers. I’m not sure how full this trip was. It never felt full and between meals while we were at sea, everyone seemed to disappear. I would curl in a sunny spot in the bar on the 5th deck with a book and not see another human for hours at a time. When we left the ship, we always seemed to take about 7-8 zodiacs, 8 passengers per zodiac, a staff member, the zodiac driver. So, that would be 80 people, most or less. I had sprung for a cabin to myself because I need to remember how to travel with people again.
My traveling companions spent the afternoon amusing themselves trying to get photos of the flying fish in the water and the brown footed boobies in the air while I hung over the rail and watched. I enjoyed watching their frustration trying to capture sharp closeup pictures of small fast creatures moving randomly. I celebrate their rare successes more than I enjoy the challenge of trying to achieve this myself. Sometimes as a photographer it’s important to put down your camera and be in the moment, that you’re traveling through this place and time right now. (Fun fact, the record for the glide of a flying fish is 45 seconds.)
And what is finer than a bright sunset from the deck of a ship far from land and all your normal cares?