Chapter 5 - Meeting the rest of the "Wicked" gang and leaving Bira (well, trying to!) 1st November: Just a very quick introduction to the people I'll be spending the next 2 weeks with. Hope I don't offend any of them by what I do (or don't) say about them. Well, actually, I don't mind offending Phil and Howard. From Germany, there's Uwe, whom we've already met, as he picked me up at the airport. He lives in Denmark. Well, technically he probably lives in Indone...

Chapter 4 - ship-building in Bira - for your inner boat geek Our Wicked Diving expedition from Bira to Sorong will be on a beautiful wooden boat called the "Jaya". The Jaya was built in Bira and, after many trips round Indonesia, Komodo and Thailand, they've brought it back home to the experts for repairs and renovations. As Wicked say on their website, she combines the beauty of tradition with modern safety additions: "She is an expedition boat. From her ...

Chapter 3 - bumming round Bira So, having accepted the kind offer from a French local, we head off to explore. And we have a brilliant day! First of all we go to the ship-building beach (sooo different to Camel Laird's back in Birkenhead) and visit James' (a friend's) boat, still in construction. We climb a ladder and walk around through wood shavings, saying hello to the workmen happily smoking away. Not for the first time since I arrived in Indonesia, I hea...

Chapter 2 - Culture and temperature shock 30th October - I arrive in Makassar and a wall of heat hits me. I am shuffled into a little office in the airport to get my visa and offered a seat. The printer won't play ball and is printing in landscape instead of portrait. It takes 3 very friendly, smiley and totally unflustered people to sort it out, nice and slowly, as the queue of foreigners gets longer. As I sit there observing, I start to shake off London and ge...