We flew to the northern most tip of Sulawesi, to a town called Manado and from there got a boat to Bunaken. We spent 8 blissful days there. I did my open water there and we pretty much dived a couple of times every day. The dives there are incredible, really beautiful and good condition coral, and teems of fish. We also saw small sharks and a few turtles, one was enormous and the locals had named it Rambo.

We stayed in a great little place with beach huts overlooking the mangrove trees to the sea, good food and a really nice team of people working there. We had a few good evenings drinking the local booze and singing round the fire - we even got Chris on the tambourine!!

All in all it was a fantastic start to my diving and has got me completely hooked!!

From Manado we got a car to Gorontalo and then a ferry to the Togean Islands for another week of blissful paradise. We did a fair bit of diving there and managed to see an eagle ray and swim amongst a school of about 30 snapper which was pretty cool. I also discovered on one of the diving trips that i get seasickness and ended up feeding the fish about six times before my dive....luckily for me (and for you) there are no photos ;0)

From the Togeans we got the oldest most rickety ferry (made of wood!) back to the mainland and then drive to southern central Sulawesi and a region called Tana Toraja, staying in a town called Rantepao. This is such a beautiful area, set amongst majestic mountains and lush green vegetation. The ares is famous for their funerals ceremonies which were quite incredible and the graves built into rock faces with life sized effigies to represent the dead. We first of all visited a few of these graves, the effergies were really quite odd. They looked a bit like scary people that jump out at you on a ghost train ride at the fair!
The funeral ceremony itself was something else, it goes on for quite a few days and often the deceased will lay embalmed in the family home fro months until they can afford the lavish funeral. It is set up like a big fete and local villages will bring pigs as an offering to be slaughtered and cooked for the funeral feast. In addition the family will also buy and slaughter buffalos, as a result buffalos are big business and sell for very large sums of money. I didn't have a good look at the slaughter tent being a bit queasy but with blood, guts and the odd buffalo head floating around you can get the idea. of it all. One particularly buffalo caused a few issues resulting in a lady breaking her leg, a guy getting his cheek pierced, the buffalo running wild round the funeral scattering people everywhere. Fred and Chris were of course in the thick of it trying to see what was going on, Charlotte and I were hiding in one of the tents with some of the family. They ended up shooting the buffalo in the adjacent field to stop it! At the time it was pretty scary but we had a good chuckle about it after wards.......;0)

From there we got a bus down to the capital Makassar for our flight to Kalimantan.