Just a quick note, I’ve written a four-part series of sustainable travel and travel writing for Talking Travel Writing, and the first piece came out last week. If you’ve an interest in travel writing, the Talking Travel Writing Newsletter absolutely belongs on your subscribe list. You can find out more here.
An entrepreneur, a photographer, a kitchen hand and a travel writer walk into a bar ... it might sound like another of “those” jokes, but it’s what I’ve been living for the last seven days—with seven more to come. And while much of the last week has been underwater, admiring Raja Ampat’s incredible coral reefs, much of the in-between time has been by the table.
I’ve written before of the self-imposed doom travel writers face. A doom of seeing everything but experiencing nothing, of never having time to linger. Of finding a place where all one wants to do is put their bag down, but the bus leaves at 8pm. Of meeting like-minded souls, but for the most fleeting of moments. So when a generous friend invites me on a trip that promises the opposite to all the above, I jump at it.
One last Sorong sunset before Raja Ampat. Photo: Stuart McDonald.
1. I’ve been undulating between 18 and 22 metres along Fam Wall for about 35 minutes. Save the occasional half kick to help me over a fan coral, I’m weightless in a near-to-nothing current. Below me, the wall plunges, blurring into a hard-to-describe blue tinted with purple. Behind me, the blue is deeper, richer, yet when I reach into it, I grasp at nothing—it is there, but it is nothing.
I let the current catch my fins and turn me like a second hand on a watch, till, with my head at six, a royal wave of my hand spins me to face the wall. I continue to drift, inverted. The colours, and the minuscule critters—what the photographer called “macro”—go about their business, oblivious to me.
A thought crosses my mind. Describing what you see when diving is like trying to describe a dream you’ve just woken from.
Today in awful. Photo: Stuart McDonald.
2. The four of us are the resort’s token Antipodeans, with Europeans making up the rest of the guest roster. Like the tide, we wash in and out of the common areas, lingering, chatting. As is the norm, there’s plenty of dive chat—the fish was this big and all that. Dive sites from around the world roll off tongues—Zanzibar, Mozambique, Australia, Thailand, even Denmark. But, like listening to another recounting their dreams, the sites’ magnitudes can be hard to grasp.
Conversations splinter, coursing and radiating out like the fan corals we admire beneath. How does one get from discussing a boat running aground a little down the island from where we sit, to having a gun held to one’s chin in Guatemala. I don’t know—but we manage it. Daily.
Don’t get me wrong—this isn’t a competitive traveller scene, something divers in particular can be prone to. More, it’s a scenic road from here to there, and there’s many a stop along the way—especially when the WiFi is down.
Swimming with this mob was fun. Photo: Stuart McDonald.
3. Our goal is a little deep, between 35 and 39 metres if I recall right, so we won’t have all that long down below. We glide down, as my ears pop and pop again, I look up through my bubbles as the translucent surface fades into more blue. The P-47 wreck emerges from the dark faster than I expect, at first I think it’s an outcrop, but then it sharpens. The propeller comes first, clear as a bell it stands, each blade wrapped in a living glove. Behind it the cowling, then the wings, leading edges not quite as smooth as when it rolled off the factory floor.
Out of fuel in 1944, the pilots ditched into the sea off the coast of an idyllic tropical island. This, the better preserved of two wrecks, is the stuff of schoolboy dreams. The P-47 is upside down, and the photographers busy themselves at the cockpit, but it’s too tricky for me. Instead, I glide atop the midsection, watching their air bubbles dash to the leading edge, then balloon past me. Tiny fast-moving streams escape through corroded sections of the wing and fuselage. They form a near unbroken rising in front of my eyes, like diamond strings, they hypnotise. I pause my breathing, watching, in near silence as they rise. Then my dive computer beeps—my time is up.
At Fam Wall. Everything on the whiteboard I’ve forgotten by the time I’m wet. Photo: Stuart McDonald.
4. One day, hiking up to the region’s most famous viewpoint, I’m chatting with our dive master. Like our entire dive team, he’s Indonesian, in his case, born in Sorong, with a Javanese mother and Floresian father. He’s been diving for a decade, before that, boat driver, before that, unclear. He’s a funny guy, with a quick smile and a faster laugh—he gets my (bad) jokes. In him I find that ease of falling into familiarity so common in the archipelago. He’s also great underwater—which, to be honest, matters more than the familiarity stuff. Together though, it’s a winning combination.
Guests rotate in on a weekly basis, so there’s nothing in the way of single serving friends. A chat from Monday picks up again on Wednesday, then more on Friday. We hear about the births, deaths and marriages, the wins and the loses. Fuller pictures form, more tangible than what lies beneath the waters’ surface. I learn of the quirks of faraway lands through the lens of the person across the table from me.
Mandatory Nemo shot. Thank you Raymond for the pic!
5. Back at Fam Wall, the others lag behind me as a white scorpion fish gets the catwalk treatment. Perhaps twenty metres ahead of my guide, I spy a magic wand. No, this isn’t some narcosis slipping in, rather a piece of wood—what else does a wand begin as?
It’s about thirty centimetres long, the diameter of my finger, standing on end in a crevice. From head to toe it is encased in some kind of a near-smooth white coral. At its base, the finest tendrils of gold reach up from the wall, they fold and wrap around the end to form a solid ball, holding it fast. A few run up towards the tip, gold strands wrapping around it, between them a sprinkling of reds and purples. Harry Potter would have been proud.
I gesture to my guide that I’ve found something, and he floats towards me. I point at the wand, but he can’t tell what I’m pointing at. As I don’t know the diving hand signal for magic wand, we’re stuck. We move on. Maybe it is the narcosis after all.
Raja Ampat’s most famous viewpoint. Not too shabby. Photo: Stuart McDonald.
7. One night the photographer gives a presentation. They’re one of the cream of the crop our planet has grown, illustrated early on by a photo of their gear—and that’s just half of it, they quip. Think life story told through photography—the photos as spectacular as the diving. There’s a story behind each and they pause now and then to tell the tale. There’s joy, horror and all between, the practiced stories delivered with a verve from the heart, but it’s the images that do the heavy lifting.
The solemn face of a trafficked mountain gorilla, a single bead of sweat dropping from the chin of a palace guard, the magnificence of an Antarctic shelf. At one stage they play an audio track of the haunting call of a Weddell Seal that lives under the ice. Listening to it, time stands still.
Slow down and grab a paddle. Photo: Stuart McDonald.
Later, after dinner, one of the other guests is talking about diving in iced-over lakes in the Netherlands. I ask if you can see through the ice and they say if it hasn’t snowed you can, but if it has you can see nothing. I sit there thinking about the seal, swimming under enormous ice sheets, its call in my mind.
I realise I’ve been all the while wrong. For the travel writer to see everything and experience nothing is a choice. Time to slow down.
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Couchfish: Slowing Down