A Trip Across the Pacific

In 2018, my brother, his wife and I started talking about going to Indonesia. In 2019, we booked for November 2020, almost a full month was planned. As you might have heard, 2020 killed most trips even in the US. Well, we rebooked for fall of 2021 and then May of 2022, but no luck as 10 days of isolation on each island was not feasible. Finally, the areas we wanted to visit in Indonesia opened late summer of 2022 with no restrictions except for vaccinations.

In October of 2022, we made the trek to Orlando via car and then flew to Dubai, then to Jakarta, and on to Manado, North Sulawasi. We stopped for a seven-day dive trip to a place called Lembeh Straits. This is a well-known spot for what is referred to as muck diving. It is so much better than it sounds. We followed this by a day trip the Tangkoko Batuangus Nature Reserve and a week of diving on a liveaboard near Sarong in a place called Raja Ampat.

Every day was a new adventure: finding the creatures in the bottom in Lembeh, trekking in the nature preserve to find tarsier and macaques, and enjoying diving as well as land trips in the islands off Sarong aboard the Pearl of Papua.

I have included some of the interesting creatures we found.

Touring the Tangkoko Batuangus Nature Reserve (Evening Tour), we saw three of the creatures we ventured to observe. We saw a family of tarsiers,

a troop of over twenty juvenile and adult black-faced macaques,

and a flying Sulawasi hornbill.

Donna McGrew has been a teacher since 1981 and a diver since 1994, “working” in places that many divers can only dream of visiting.  She joined OLLI around six years ago when she retired.  Her favorite classes have been Great Books, the zoo and OLLI’s aquarium classes.  She’s part of the online Game SIG, the Movie SIG and the OLLI Outdoors SIG, and is on both the Finance Committee and Membership Committee.  She will be teaching a class with Diane White in May on photo composition, including tips and practice.