We are for Scuba!

When we first moved to Indonesia, one of the most common questions people would ask us was if we were divers. Initially we thought it was kind of strange that people mentioned diving so much, but we quickly learned that Indonesia is home to some of the best scuba diving in the entire world. Sadly, despite this newfound knowledge of Indonesia's glorious diving, our answer to the diving question was always the same: no, we are not divers. Well, that all changed in March.

After the the Bromo trip, I trudged back to Jakarta, and Gloria was still in London for work. So when Chris asked me if I wanted to come meet him in Bali the following weekend I jumped at the opportunity. He found a place to stay in a small town called Amed, which is on the Northeast side of Bali, and on Friday, I headed out for the quick trip. The place where we were staying is a dive resort called Puri Wirata (in conjunction with Bali Reef Divers, and while we were there we decided to check out a Discover Scuba course. Basically this is an easy, fun way to experience scuba diving. If you have never done this I can't recommend it highly enough. It was an absolute blast. You start with some basic scuba instruction in the pool, then you head out to the ocean. Oh, also you get to wear wet suits, and everyone knows we all look better wearing skin tight body suits.

True Bromance

Fully adorned in our matching wet suits, we ventured out for our dive. It was pretty sweet. We went to the "Japanese Wreck" site, just down the coast from Amed. The history of the wreck is mostly unknown. Nobody seems to know how or when it sank, and supposedly even the fact that it's referred to as a Japanese ship because someone found an "Asian style" toilet on the ship and assumed it must be from Japan. Seems legit. The dive site itself is pretty spectacular. We saw tons of fish, a moray eel, a stingray, etc. Sadly I did not have an underwater camera with me, so here's a couple images courtesy of Google Image Search.

The ship's propeller (photo credit here)

photo credit: here

And here's a video of the site from the dive company we used:

After Discover Scuba, I was hooked, and as soon as I got home I told Gloria we have to do this. So we made some plans and few weeks later we were back in Amed to get our PADI Open Water Scuba Diving Certification. We stayed at the same place, which turned out to be a great decision. First of all, because it is an absolutely beautiful place.

Check out the view of the sunrise from your room! I made a little time lapse of it that turned out so-so.

 Our instructor Tom (who also helps run the place), is a great guy and was an awesome instructor.

Tom, our Belgian, metal head SCUBA instructor

Also, we were really fortunate that there were two people there, Olga and Jarno - a fabulous couple fron Finland, getting their dive master certifications. So we essentially had 3 guides for just the two of us. Score! 

Olga & Jarno, our Finnish dive master student instructors

Getting geared up

After taking care of all the initial pool tests and learning the basics, we headed out to the ocean for our first official dives! As you can see, for this trip, I brought along my GoPro camera, and my plan was to take all sorts of underwater photos & videos. Here's a few from our first dive.

Gloria, with our guide Tom leading the way

Tom up ahead of me. The underwater world is truly beautiful 

And here's a little something I threw together of us diving.



Despite these turning out ok, I learned something very important on that first morning: trying to shoot photos and videos while simultaneously learning to scuba dive doesn't work at all. So after the first morning, I left the camera at home and focused on diving. Fast forward 3 days and we are officially Open Water PADI certified divers! Many thanks go out to Tom, Olga, and Jarno for all their help.

Lastly, I want to make note of how proud I am of Gloria. She was a little apprehensive ("totally chicken shit" - Gloria's words) when we first started diving and during the first few dives she had to take a couple minutes to calm herself every time we submerged. But by the last dive, she was more relaxed than I was and was doing much better than me. She did a fantastic job and I couldn't be more proud. My wife kicks ass!

So there you have it. We are certified SCUBA divers. Seriously. Marine life, be warned: we're coming to find you.

BROMOOOOOO! (+Sara)

(at the end of the Kuala Lumpur post I wrote "to be continued...", so here goes!)

...after the KL trip we headed home while Jim & Sara galavanted off to Komodo Island. A week later Gloria was off to London for work, and I flew out to Surabaya to meet up with Jim, Sara, and our other friend Chris. We had a volcano to conquer! But first, Taman Safari. Taman Safari is a safari park in Indonesia (there are a couple of them) with animals from around the world. It's sort of like a drive thru zoo, except some of the animals come right up to you, and you can feed them. What do you feed them, you ask? Apparently that's a good question, as we learned from Jim. On the way to the safari, there were people on the side of the road selling bunches of carrots to feed the animals. We decided to stop and buy some, and since Jim was in the front seat he handled the transaction. About 5 minutes later Jim exclaimed, "I'm at idiot!". Naturally we were caught off guard, so we asked him what that was all about, and Jim explained that while he thought it was a little odd that we all wanted carrots so much, he was a little hungry. He was about to bite into one when he realized they weren't for human consumption. Yep, Jim thought we stopped and bought carrots along the side the road, just before an animal safari, because we wanted a snack. Good ol' Jim. Nothing slips past him.

With that crisis averted and everyone now understanding that carrots are for animals (you better believe we gave Jim some crap about that one), it was on to the safari! 

There were all sorts of animals: llamas, tigers, orang utans, weird creatures I don't know the names of. Good stuff.

Welcome to safari. Now, feed me!

As you can see, just like in a zoo, most of the animals are kept away from the people. Certainly all the dangerous animals are. Only benign creatures like deer, llamas, etc. come up to the cars. They wouldn't let lions, or tigers, or BEAR!

Yep, that's a bear just sitting in the middle of the road. Seriously. A freaking bear. We waited for the safari employee to get the bear to move off the path and made our way past him. Freakin bear. 

Moving on there were all sorts of animals: deer, monkeys, zebras. Lots of them came up to the car to have some of Jim's carrots. 

Zebras are VERY aggressive about carrots. Notice Chris is leaning back away from them. It's the stripes. Terrifying.

Then we came across the big guys.

Sara was insistent upon getting them to come over to the car. The rest of us were slightly concerned about an elephant crushing us. Undeterred, Sara called the big ol' elephant over, and what do you know it ate right out of her hand!

Sara was also determined that she could coax a giraffe over to the car. She kept swinging Jim's carrots out the window to get the giraffe's attention.

Jim was not pleased his carrots were being so frivolously flung about

The general response from the giraffe was something like this:

Why? Because giraffe. That's why. GIRAFFE!

After viewing all the animals from the car, it was time to get up close & personal. 

Chris: Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Monkey: Dad?

Jim putting on a smile after the monkey sneezed in his face.

Getting pictures with the baby animals was a neat experience. But being up close with them, I'm pretty sure the poor guys were drugged or something because they seemed way too docile. Sad really.

At that point, we finished up our time at the safari and continued on for a 3 hour drive to the village near Mt. Bromo.  Wikipedia break!

Mt. Bromo is an active volcano located on the Eastern part of Java (Jakarta is in West Java). It stands at 2,329 metres tall and sits in the middle of a vast plain called the "Sea of Sand", which is a protected nature reserve. It is one of the most visited tourist attractions in East Java. 

One thing to understand about Mt. Bromo is that it is truly an active volcano. There are lots of volcanos that are technically active, but haven't erupted in decades (like the one we climbed in Bali). Bromo is a bit different. It has erupted several times since 2004, the most recent being in January of 2011. It looked something like this:

This is the actual Bromo eruption on Jan. 22, 2011 (source: Wikipedia)

Not to worry though. Before we went we checked with the Indonesian Centre for Vulcanology and Disaster Hazard Mitigation (catchy name), and there were no indications of any impending danger. So we were in the clear. Not only that, the truly best thing about visiting Mt. Bromo is the name. We may or may not have yelled out BROOOMMOOO! a time or ten over the course of the weekend. It was glorious. BROOOMMMOOO!!!!! Ah, it's almost cathartic....Bromo....wait, where was I? Oh yeah, the car ride.

As I said we were headed to the village near Bromo. The plan was to crash at a hotel within walking distance of Bromo, then get up early and hike to catch the sunrise, as that is when Bromo is most beautiful. We were hoping for views that looked something like this:

This is what Mt. Bromo looks like on a clear, beautiful morning (source: Wikipedia)

Things didn't quite go as planned. First, as we're approaching the village, our driver unexpectedly stops at what appears to be a checkpoint or something. We knew that Mt. Bromo is in a National Park, so we figured maybe this was where we had to buy permits or whatever was required, so we didn't think much of it. But, after about 15 minutes or so, we realized he was just chatting and having a smoke.

Our driver taking care of "official" business

He then gets back in the car and proceeds to turn around and head back the way we came. We asked him where we were headed, and in very broken english, he explained that the road was blocked or something, but it was no problem because it was only 10 more km and would take "only" 3 more hours. Wait, what??!! The next few minutes was a scene of mass confusion. We were freaking out a bit and were pretty sure we were getting ripped off, so we had him pull over while we tried to figure things out. We settled on him taking us into the nearby town where we'd find a place to stay, which turned out to be a perfect spot. We found a place called Bromo Cottages that had great views and had an off-road truck to take us to Bromo in the morning. Problem solved!

The view from the cottages

We spent the night in the cottages, and the next morning got up bright & early to go see the majestic sunrise views of Mt. Bromo. Mother nature had other ideas.

Beautiful isn't it?

Yep, somewhere out there is Mt. Bromo. We got some lovely views of a lot of wet, cold people. This wasn't going to stop us though, and we soldiered on, hopeful the clouds would lift.

After making our way down from the viewpoint. The base of Mt. Bromo is behind us.

We hopped back in our jeep to cross the Sea of Sand, and things started to look up.

Quite the crew...

Do a funny one!

One funny thing happened on our way. There are a bunch of guys waiting to rent you a horse to ride up the mountain. We decided we didn't want them, but the salesmen were not so easily swayed. They literally chased us as we drove away from them.

You will ride my horse!

It was crazy. We were all laughing pretty hard, and a few minutes later we made it to the base of the volcano and started our walk to the top.

A river wash we crossed to get to Bromo

One of the horse guides. I really like this picture.

One thing I want to take a moment to note here: those who have been following our blog will remember how I've been asked many times to take pictures with the local people. Well, on this trip I was just one of several picture targets. I have to admit I quite liked being able to step back and watch Jim, Chris, and Sara be the subject of the locals' fascination. 

Jim with some new friends

Not only were they taking pictures with them, every now and then they just took pictures OF them, like zoo animals.

Dance, monkeys!

After picture time, we finally finished our climb to the top. It was pretty spectacular. Seeing the steam rising from the crater was pretty cool.

Notice the foot path continuing beyond the guard rail. People hike the entire crater rim. Not so much for us.

The scenery around the volcano is pretty nuts. On one side: a greenery covered mountain; behind you: a steaming crater; down on the ground: volcanic ash covering everything making it look like a scene from another planet.

We had a good time up on the rim, taking it all in. 

I'm very happy to be here!

Yeah, that's a volcano. I climbed it. No big deal.

Sara's a celebrity!

Repping FuquaVision and Blair Sheppard!

Blissfully unaware of the "tragedy" about to befall me

A couple minutes after the above picture was taken, I'm standing on the rim when a gust of wind blows my hat clean off my head and rolls it down the side of the volcano. 

I was pretty bummed. This is my Duke hat that I got during B-school. I love that hat. Now it was gone. But wait, this is a Duke hat. You don't just let something like that go. Volcano or not, I'm getting that sucker back. So I walked partway down the volcano and climbed across the side of the mountain to see if I could get it. It was pretty steep and very slippery. Let's see how it went.

Yep, got my hat back. Needless to say I was very happy.

Post hat-retrieval joy

With that, we headed back down to the car. We decided to walk along the river wash on our way out for a little different view.

I'm Chris Geurtsen. I conquer volcanos. Boom.

With one last trip back up to catch a view of Bromo, our weekend came to a close. It was a great trip and a fantastic way to cap off our meet ups with our Fuqua friends. Now, who's coming to visit us next?

BROOOOMOOOOOO!!!!!