Wakatobi Trip Report

Blogged by Simon on November 15, 2009 5:18pm | Last updated by Simon on April 19, 2010 11:33am | Category: Trip Report

Lintea Island SunsetTina and me recently returned from a 11 day trip to Wakatobi, a resort on Tolandono island in remote South East Sulawesi, Indonesia. I had booked it mainly after reading recommendations on wetpixel and scubaboard which described it is a world class diving and photo destination for macro, with an intact reef system – turns out we weren’t going to be disappointed. Wakatobi proved to be all that and more.

Getting There

We took our international flight from Sydney to Denpasar, Bali and stayed there overnight. You could obviously spend any amount of days in Bali and see alot more, however we were eager to get away from civilization for a few days. The only reasonable way to get to Wakatobi is by charter plane and the resort runs a regular flight between Bali and their private air strip on Tomia island once a week. There is an alternative overland/boat/bus route that reportedly takes up to 3 days, but hauling 60kg of UW photo & dive gear around we were quite happy with the flight option. Once on Tomia, Wakatobi is only a few minutes by boat and the welcome drinks are already waiting.

The Resort

After two days of travel you can finally take your shoes off and it slowly begins to sink in just how remote south east Sulawesi is. You share the resort with up to fifty other guests however there is no other tourism in the area at all. For the duration of our trip, only twenty-four guests stayed at the resort, which quickly formed even smaller dive groups of up to six.

Then there are the resort staff. Wakatobi employs around 170 locals from the surrounding villages which makes them the biggest employer in the region. There is a dive team with qualified instructors, a separate tank filler team that makes sure you always have fresh Nitrox 32, the restaurant team preparing 3 meals a day, boat crew, gardeners, even professional child care for families with young children (hey Sam).

Whatever you may ask for during your stay, it is likely that Wakatobi has someone already employed for it, i.e. I unsuccessfully tried to carry my heavy SLR camera onto the dive boat several times, but soon realized I’m taking someone’s job away from them…oh well, better hand the thing over then :)

Next to friendly, helping hands everywhere, the resort comes with a large open air restaurant, a dedicated camera room for setting up your gear, up to 4 large dive boats that bring you out on the reef every day, a separate, dedicated, liveaboard yacht “Pelagian”, a local boutique, and and air conditioned lounge with internet access as I discovered only on the last day, however I can’t say I missed the net very much.

Other than that, Wakatobi is sand, palm trees and a stunning house reef that is only meters away from your beach bungalow.

The Diving

No description of Wakatobi would be complete without mentioning the house reef. The resort was built around it and after looking at it once, it is immediately clear why. There are plenty of fish, the local coral life is healthy, thriving and nothing less than stunning. A cool current brings in water at an optimal 27 degrees celcius from the south and as a result, Wakatobi has never experienced any bleaching events.

During a conversation with Lorenz, the resort’s founder, he explained to me how Wakatobi works with the local authorities to keep commercial fishing boats away from the reef (which is a marine park) and how dynamite fishing has been abandoned by the locals because a healthy reef and the guests it attracts is now more valuable to the region. I separately learned how the local instructors go diving on their day off to collect Crown-of-Thorns Starfish (Acanthaster planci), the reef’s biggest predator, and remove them from the ecosystem. Marine conservation in real life, interesting. Sadly, the only exception to a healthy marine ecosystem are the missing sharks, which have been fished (for the shark fin trade) to near extinction before the resort got started in the 1990s. On our entire trip we’ve seen only 4 juvenile Blacktip Sharks (all in one dive), which isn’t a lot. The good news is that without the fishing boats, sharks are beginning to recover and at least their numbers are slowly on the rise again.

But back to diving and photography. At the beginning of our trip we were assigned to smaller dive groups that stayed together. While this looked random to me at first, I soon realized they had paired me up with lots of experienced divers and a professional UW photographer, excellent!

Our dive group consisted of Jerry, a dive travel salesman from the US, Dale, the photo pro from Vancouver, BC, Alistair&Alison, a divemaster couple from Sydney, and not to forget Tina who discovered that snorkelling in Wakatobi is just as good as the diving. While diving as a group was lots of fun, it is worth mentioning that Wakatobi staff never insisted on keeping formation as long as you dived with your buddy. As a result, Dale and me would often drift off into the blue with our cameras, see what else we could find.

Every morning at the dive briefing, you had the choice of either diving from one of the boats or on the house reef. There are usually three dives a day scheduled, two in the morning and one in the afternoon, which leaves enough ample time to do another dive on the house reef or simply have some free time on your holiday! I initially wasn’t sure about doing “only” three dives, having had four or five on liveaboard boats, but soon realized that what Wakatobi was really all about is relaxing, and three dives allowed me to do just that.

There is so much more about all the dive sites and marine life I honestly don’t know where to begin, but suffice it to say after eleven days, 30 dives and about 2200 raw images later, I am still sorting through what I photographed. Wakatobi proved to be a treat and provided fantastic opportunities for both wide angle and macro photography that will keep this blog updated for a while. Watch out for new posts in the coming weeks.

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