After just a few months in Koh Samui, Jennifer made a decision.  It’s time for some adventure!  She reached out to an old dive buddy and got a recommendation for a liveaboard dive trip to Komodo National Park in Indonesia.  Yes, the same Komodo which is home to the famous Komodo dragons.  Bonus!  Unfortunately her friend, Matt, wasn’t able to join us for the diving, but he vouched for Current Junkies, the diving company we were using.

After paying a paltry 30,000,000 Indonesian Rupiah (not a problem since we’re apparently billionaires), we were ready for a week of living on a 46′ boat and diving 3 three times a day in the World Heritage marine park.  The day of our trip we made it to the airport in plenty of time, and while waiting to board Jen looked at our boarding passes and said “We’re flying to Flores?  Aren’t we supposed to be going to Komodo?”  Instant heart attack!  Labuan Bajo (LBJ) is the name of the Komodo airport, but its actually on Flores, a different island.  A quick Google started our hearts again.

We first flew via Singapore to Bali, where we had a layover for the night.  When we got to our hotel I told Jennifer I found a restaurant that I wanted to visit.  Soon after we arrived, her dive buddy Matt wandered in.  Surprise!  A week before we left Matt found me on Facebook and told me he was able to make it onto our boat after all.  We coordinated a meeting to surprise Jen.  She was overjoyed with the reunion with a friend she hadn’t seen in over 15 years.

The next day we flew to LBJ and boarded the boat.  Besides the thee of us, the last diver was a young Dutch doctor, a nice guy named Martin.  Out hostess/divemaster, Emma, was a Scottish woman and friend of Matt.  The crew were an Indonesian captain, a cook, and an engineer/dive helper.  Jen and I got the main cabin with our own head and it was all quite comfortable.  Here’s LBJ from our hotel and the Busy Girl, our intrepid vessel:

I won’t describe all of our dives in detail, but in general the coral reefs were full of amazingly colorful life of all shapes and sizes.  It was so nice to see after some of the dead reefs we saw while diving in Hawaii.  Stunningly bright neon fish flitted around and spied us as we drifted by.  And we were usually drifting as there is a huge amount of current around the islands of Komodo.  We really discovered why our dive company was named Current Junkies.  The current can’t be captured in a picture, but here’s a pic of the types of reefs we were enjoying:

We did one dive where we had to use drift hooks to attach ourselves to the reef in order to watch the fish without being swept away in an instant.  It got a bit hairy as the current picked up more than expected and we got separated while hooking in.  I could only see Martin so I kept an eye on him to see when we should unhook.  Unbeknownst to me, behind him Jennifer and the divemaster were frantically trying to signal to us to unhook so we could get out of the current.  It felt like being in the center of a river rushing by at 20 miles an hour.

Martin apparently didn’t understand their signals as he hung out for another 5 minutes while we watched a huge manta ray swimming right next to us.  Finally, he and then I unhooked and got swept back to where Jen was cutting her fingers on the coral while trying to claw her way towards us against the current.  At that point I checked my air and found that I had gone from three quarters full to one quarter full in just 5 minutes.   That meant that we had to do an emergency ascent so I wouldn’t run out of air.  I’d been struggling so much with the current that I didn’t realize how fast I was breathing.  It was pretty stressful, but everything turned out OK.

One of the most amazing dives we did was at Manta Point, a well-named dive site.  We saw many manta rays swimming up to a cleaning station where little fish would clean and eat all the small organisms from the mantas.  They were huge, up to about 12 feet across, and we must have seen 20 or 30 of them.  Very cool.  Every now and then we’d also spy 5-6 foot reef sharks patrolling the perimeter of the reef, which added to the excitement.

Of course, when visiting Komodo National Park we had to visit Komodo island, home of the famous Komodo dragons.  We took our dingy to the dock and got tickets to have a guide show us around the island.  As soon as we started on our island hike we spied a small dragon ambling around.

They look like large monitor lizards, up to 11 feet long.  They have a unique method of hunting, and its not all about brute force.  They don’t need to kill their prey when they attack, they just need to draw blood.  It turns out that the dragons have such potent and deadly bacteria in their mouths, all they need to do is get that bacteria into the blood of their prey.  The prey will run away, but over they next few days it will die due to infection.  The lizard then just needs to sniff out the rotting corpse and go eat it.  Here are the brutes up close:

I know it looks like we can reach out and touch that guy, named Hercules incidentally, but we’re actually standing about 5 feet behind him.  Trust me, if he turned around, we’d be running away at full speed.  Luckily, the big boys were compliant for our photos and we left before things got ugly.  It was time to make our way back home.

One of the traditions on the Busy Girl is to end the trip with a skurfing session.  Skurfing is a combination of water skiing and surfing, or surfing behind a boat.  All the guests took a turn and failed to stand up on our first try.  Then our guide showed us how it’s done and had a few exciting laps.  So of course, we had to try again.  We all got up on our second turn and much fun was had by all.

Unfortunately, when I dismounted I managed to hit myself in the head with the surfboard, but it didn’t hurt and I didn’t think much about it.  When I got back to the boat, however, I was greeted by shocked looks.  I guess my face was covered by blood from the small but productive cut on my eyebrow.  They bandaged me up and I considered myself lucky that that was my only injury during the trip.

(Side note by Jen – first off … what is a skurf?  It is a surfboard that you ride like a wakeboard but it has no straps.  It is not easy to get up but once you are standing it is just a question of balance.  So that explained let me set the ‘skurfing’ stage…. on our second go-around, Martin was the first to try again and he was able to stand.  We all cheered him as we watched, he tamely stayed within the wake and followed behind the dingy but we were all impressed that he had stood up… next up was me, once I was up and stable, I zig zagged across the wake and rode the lip of the wake a bit … still tame but a bit more daring then Martin.  Last up  was Kev, once he got up he turned into a skurfing daredevil, he left the safety of the wake, held on with one hand and did the waterski style awesomeness of riding the side edge of the skurf while our captain went faster and faster, we were all hooting and hollering at his shenanigans and also dying of laughter.  In that moment, I wished I had a Go Pro to truly capture the moment but I can still vividly imagine it.  He finally let go in exhaustion and that was when the surfboard hit him in the head and caused his ‘bad ass skurfer” accident.  T’was an experience to remember.)

Jennifer, however, unfortunately developed swimmer’s ear at the end of the trip.  Her progressively painful earaches meant she couldn’t really enjoy our evening layovers in Bali and Singapore.  Oh well, I guess that just means we’ll have to return to those two places again one day for a proper trip.  We went straight to the hospital upon landing in Koh Samui and they fixed her up with antibiotics and pain meds.  I since learned that we should have rinsed the ears out with alcohol (any kind of hard booze will work) at the first symptoms.  Oh well, live and learn.

All in all, it was a great trip.  I would recommend diving Komodo for any experienced and strong-intermediate divers.  Beginners should probably avoid the current and leave it for the current junkies.  And if you’re a current junky, I would definitely recommend using Current Junkies.