I taught high school chemistry in Modesto for twenty-nine years, and I’ve carried the same dive logbook since 1989, a green vinyl binder with a Monterey dive shop’s sticker peeling off the front cover. My first entry is a forty-one-foot dive off Breakwater Cove in a seven-millimeter wetsuit I can still smell. I turned sixty in February. My wife Linda doesn’t dive, and when she asked what I wanted to mark the year, I said Komodo before she’d finished the question. I’d read about the currents for a decade and wondered whether I’d left it too late. I went in April to find out.
Komodo National Park is in eastern Indonesia, east of Bali, and you reach it through Labuan Bajo, a harbor town on the island of Flores. We flew in from Denpasar on a propeller plane that left forty minutes late.
Before I left, I spent more time choosing a room than choosing a boat, which tells you how much I understood. In Komodo, a hotel’s location can matter more than its room category, a distinction worth considering when comparing Komodoresort.com with other Komodo Island hotels, where access to the archipelago’s attractions often begins with a boat journey. I’d have saved myself some trouble if I’d read that first and booked second. The good dive sites are spread across open water, and some of them are two hours from the harbor. A room can have a bathtub and a view of the bay and still be the wrong room. I found that out the first morning.
The Room I Shouldn’t Have Booked
I booked three nights at a hillside Komodo Island hotel above town and paid $1,143 for an ocean-view suite, about $190 a night more than their standard rooms by the water. The dive shop’s boat left the harbor at quarter to seven on Wednesday 22 April. The hotel shuttle didn’t start running until seven. I paid a man at the front gate 150,000 rupiah to drive me down the hill in a car with no working seat belts, and I made the boat with four minutes to spare. That evening the ride back took fifty-two minutes in traffic, and Linda had already eaten. The second morning, I asked the front desk about moving to one of the rooms down by the water, and the manager told me the suite was nonrefundable. For the next two mornings, I walked down the hill at six with my fins over my shoulder, a twenty-two-minute walk each way.
I’m still not sure whether Linda’s view of the bay made up for my mornings on that hill.
Diving From the Hotel
The diving itself was everything I’d read. On the first day, the boat ran nearly two hours to a site in the middle of the park, and the current there moved faster than anything I’ve felt off California, even at Point Lobos in a spring swell. The guide, a young man called Ferdi, kept me close and signaled every change before it happened. I did two dives and slept most of the way back. Same pattern for all three days.
What the day boat cost a sixty-year-old.
- Roughly four hours a day on a bench in transit.
- A steep stern ladder that I climbed with my fins in one hand, since the crew was busy with six other divers.
- Two dives a day.
Three Nights on the Boat
Linda flew home on Saturday, and I moved onto a three-night Komodo diving liveaboard. It was a wooden phinisi with eight guests, the oldest of them a retired pilot from Brisbane who was seventy-one and dove more than I did. The difference showed up on the first morning. I woke at anchor with the site two hundred yards off the stern, and I was in the water by quarter past six with nobody else around. Komodo Island scuba diving from a boat that sleeps at the sites runs at a different pace altogether (I logged eleven dives in three days, against six from the hotel), and the crew handled every tank. But the cabin was the size of my old classroom supply closet, and the shower ran out of hot water by the second guest.
What made the boat work at my age.
- No commute.
- Crew who lifted the tank onto my back before every dive.
- A lower bunk.
- I napped between the second and third dives every day, because the sun had done its work by then and nobody minded.
- Briefings with a whiteboard drawing of the current.
Small digression. My logbook has a stamp in it from a dive shop in Cozumel that closed in 1998, and the pilot from Brisbane recognized it. He’d dived with the same shop in 1994, and we spent half an hour over dinner working out whether we’d had the same divemaster.
What I’d Change
If I did it again, and I’m already looking at dates, I’d pick from the Komodo Island hotels down by the harbor or out on the islands before I looked at a single room photo. The boat should come first and the hotel second, so the hard diving happens while I’m fresh and the commute doesn’t matter. And a refresher in Monterey before leaving is worth the cold water, because the currents here are no place to find out your buoyancy has gotten rusty.
- Choose the hotel by its walking time to the jetty, since the room photos won’t tell you that.
- Pack a thicker wetsuit.
Most of the divers I met on the boat who’d done Komodo Indonesia diving more than once had made my mistake on their first trip. I still haven’t decided whether to bring Linda back for the view or go alone next time and stay by the water.
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