Similar to Duke, Indonesia leaves a lot of doors unlocked… During my last week in North Sulawesi, I emphasized going out and seeing more of the city and surrounding land. Few people

In one of our Building adventures, I bumped into an artist named Oce. From the looks of his situation and our off-the-beaten-path location, I assumed Oce was living in this building that he turned into an art studio. The rest of my group kept moving, but something told me that this guy had something to say. I struck up a conversation by saying hello, and to my surprise, he spoke very impressive English. We made small talk about Indonesia and how he finds inspiration in the city for his art. I even helped Oce with his English after he told me he struggled to pronounce “r” correctly.

Eventually, I had to catch up with my group so I left Oce. We stumbled upon a library with children's books and religious books like the Quran. With spooky corridors and large rooms, we had a blast exploring around. Near the end of the night, I went back to Oce and bought a piece of art from him. I feel like such a traveler buying art in foreign countries.

While I was having fun exploring the city more and more every night, I jumped on the opportunity to meet up with my friend, Taya, whose family has a house in Tomohon, a town in the highlands. She picked me up with family and friends: Frances and Bryan. The first night, we went to watch Bryan perform with his rock and roll band. After learning he has played the bass for 3 months and asking if he and his friends are performance ready, he told me “not really, but we will just go up there, play, and if I hit a wrong chord, all laugh because we are friends.”

There was plenty of laughing that night. I listened to the best live performance of Take Me Home, Country Roads I have ever heard, and also sang some karaoke after my dance battle. The locals were dumbfounded that a bole (boo lay “white person”) was being so extroverted, not ignoring the area, and having fun. They were all giving me captikus (a very strong alcoholic beverage) and encouraging me to party along. I felt at home being accepted and integrated into a group of people so quickly and naturally.

About three hours after the rock and roll ended, we were up again (3:30 am) to hike up a volcano (mt. Lokon) for the sunrise. There is a less fortunate history for white people on this volcano. One crashed his plane into the side and the other was doing lava research and couldn’t outrun the lava. However, we had a pleasant hike up and watched colors explode behind the mountains and surrounding volcanoes.

Next week, I am leaving Manado and traveling to Bali and then Komodo island. There is a tourism strike in Komodo so we will see if I end up there!

My family went back home this week. I had a fantastic time diving and being able to show them around Indonesia. We enjoyed traveling to Tangkoko reserve to see crested macaques, pigs, and the Tarsius. Squeezed in some muck diving and even saw two hairy frogfish in a single dive.

Eventually, though, we parted ways and I continued my journey through Indonesia. I have hit the point where I need to start saying goodbye to places and people. I left Lembeh and have no idea when I will ever be back in my life. Saying goodbye to Bangka island was especially difficult as I spent around half of my time on the remote island.

When I reached out to the owners of Murex Resort, I had no idea that I would end up in one of the best coral locations in the world. Nobody has put the quality of diving here into perspective more than the divers I have been with this week, Dr. Paul Muir and Vincent Chalias.

Vincent Chalias has worked in Indonesia for the past two decades and was the first to commercially culture coral in Indonesia. While he runs a business selling and growing coral, Vincent started a foundation called Reef Gardener where he shares knowledge obtained from 20 years of culturing corals. Students from around the world learn from Vincent about the intricacies of coral animals while also developing skills in coral farming. To date, he estimates his organization has outplanted over 200,000 coral fragments that were grown through his unique coral culturing process. While Vincent is conducting groundbreaking and effective coral farming, hearing him talk about the future of coral is quite gloomy as he offers little hope towards the ocean’s future.

Dr. Paul Miur was a research officer and collection manager for corals at the Museum of Tropical Queensland in Townsville. He is one of the leading scientists studying "staghorn corals" and researches deep reefs, coral bleaching, and coral taxonomy among other interests. Paul has spent his life exploring unseen parts of the ocean to identify coral species that may present coral bleaching susceptibility. He has reversed the narrative about mesophotic coral (coral in depths 30 - 170m) being sparse and not worth further exploration as well. Right now, Dr. Miur is working with Vincent to resurvey parts of Bunaken National Park as this area has more species of hard coral than the Great Barrier Reef.

I have had the pleasure to SLIGHTLY assist and observe these two scientists in their efforts to resurvey the luscious reefs of Bunaken National Park. The data is all qualitative and results are showing a significant increase in the park's overall coral health since the last survey 30 years ago.

In other news, my friend Matt from Poland and I had a fun night with what turned out to be an Indonesian gang member at an amusement park. I learned how to play a classic Indonesian card game called Jendral. Drank the local liquor called Captikus which can have an alcohol content ranging from 40% to 70%. Sadly, I wore socks twice in one week which was a mental shake-up as the last time I wore socks was over a month ago.

I decided not to post last week since my family arrived in Indonesia. I had not seen them for more than a few days since January so I was excited to finally be able to share experiences with individuals I can connect with at home. I do not have a whole lot to report from these past two weeks. I saved a turtle on a dive by cutting away fishing line that was tangled in its fins and neck such that it was pinned to the reef. Built a massive sand castle. Met “The man” for Hong Kong billionaire Eric Hotung. Went to the sketchiest popup amusement park I have ever seen and lead my family on some dives.

I had an interesting misstep in leadership on a night dive as well. I was leading my brother and friend Andrew for a fundraiser dive and everything was going well until near the end. Since we did not see a whole lot during the dive, I decided to turn our lights off so that we could play with the bioluminescence in the water. Well, we became a little distracted by the magical specks of light and played around for a minute.

Due to not having any reference underwater because of the lack of light, I did not realize that a current was picking up and we ended up drifting farther than I expected while our lights were off. To make matters worse, as we turned our lights on, an intense down current picked up. I was not really sure where we were relative to our exit point but knew we had to shallow up and make it to the beach as surfacing too far from the beach could mean being flung out to sea. About ten minutes later, we were fighting a current by clawing our way from rock to rock. I was trying to use a compass to navigate and find the exit point underwater all while we rapidly depleted our air and energy supplies. Eventually, everyone made their way back to the beach. Somehow I ended up nailing the navigation and ended just a few feet from our exit point. We all came up laughing, smiling, and catching our breaths as relief set in. Gnarly dive.

I learned valuable lessons though about being a scuba guide. First and foremost, never put yourself in a situation that makes you lose your bearings or direction when you are the leader. I recommend "losing yourself" in life and throwing yourself in situations that make you lost and force you to find direction, but underwater, losing your sense of direction is scary. I also learned how to better keep a calm manner underwater. Scuba diving is funny because, in a stressful situation, your body naturally wants to breathe more and supply oxygen to the brain. When you have a fixed amount of air, you need to calm down quickly and efficiently, otherwise, you breathe a bunch of air, become more stressed from the more limited air supply, and become caught in a vicious cycle.

I have passed my ⅔ mark here. The realization that my time will soon be coming to a close is dawning on me so my networking and adventure efforts have increased. I have some crazy ideas for these final weeks as I fill them with randomness and excitement before school!

While I have been leading many dives recently, I have also had the pleasure to teach the employees at the resort, assisted by an instructor-level diver studying marine biology, how to scuba dive. Since I work at a dive resort, my boss wants his employees to better connect with guests through their shared interests in scuba diving. Plus, almost all of the dive guides here are "homegrown" meaning guides started as landscapers, compressor workers, or servers, learned to dive, and then became dive guides. I am amazed how these individuals go from barely knowing how to swim to being recognized as some of the best-educated, composed, and skillful dive guides in the world.

Teaching people to scuba dive is no easy task though. Some of these students are not fully confident in the water and when they have mysterious equipment on and fins, the learning curve is steep. Patience and sternness have been vital to getting my teaching style across. Even though all the employees/scuba students are older than me, when they go into the ocean and realize they can breathe underwater, listening becomes a struggle. I use the excitement from the students to take control of the situation. If someone is freaking out, I tell them to look around and calm down from the scenery. If a student does not want to listen and would rather attempt swimming around, I explain that once we get the skills down, we can swim around the much better locations.

While I keep a calm composure with the students, internally, my stress levels are incredibly high. I am keeping track of multiple students, teaching them new skills, conversing with a language barrier, accounting for current and waves, and supporting people who are less than ideal swimmers. The stress is more closely related to hyperawareness, but I would be more fatigued from one dive class in the ocean than a full day of diving.

This time spent is well worth the effort. The awe and stunned reactions of the students once they finally get into the water and begin swimming around is heartwarming. For most, diving is the first time they dip below the surface of the water. For some, diving entails seeing underwater for the very first time. I could see passion evolving in a short matter of time and a definite hunger for more scuba diving in the future. I am so thankful to have picked up the skills to “teach” from Denver Divers and be a part of this memorable time in people’s life.

Besides teaching, I continued working on the coral project and have transplanted hundreds of corals. I am on a 5 day night diving streak and have witnessed unusual behavior like a moray eel and reef octopus fight and a cuttlefish fight. On the surface, I witnessed unusual behavior as I learned one guy traveled here with night vision goggles, the strongest laser pointer I have seen, he put mine to shame, and temporary tattoos. I fear this will be me in the future.

Travel tip from my friend Nate: "A little political instability is a good thing… Keeps the tourist away."

Scuba diving is fun, but working on a task while scuba diving creates a sport full of challenges like communication and precision. I worked with my employer's son Andrew and a dive guide to revitalize the coral nursery they set up in Bangka a few years prior. For the past week, I have been scrubbing ocean squirts off of the rebar spiders that support the coral fragments for growth, breaking off dead coral, harvesting coral fragments from the nursery and then zip-tying them to coral spiders at the transplant site, and creating a new surveying and tracking method to measure the growth of coral overtime while determining the optimal genus and location for growth.

Work like this is being conducted all over the world and has created a community of coral farmers sharing information and ideas to optimize coral growth. I find this type of “farming" fascinating as the coral nursery and outplanting site here is entirely different from the one I worked on in Curacao. Nursery and outplanting techniques are limited by available resources, funding, and creativity. Nobody has found a groundbreaking and widely applicable way to repopulate coral so the strategy of trying as many techniques and iterations as possible, and then documenting and sharing your findings, is integral to the advancement of the field.

Andrew and his twin sister Samantha brought along two friends for the week. This was the first time I have been able to hang out with people my age since arriving in Indonesia. We traveled around the city of Manado more, watched the new Top Gun for less than $3 USD, and played Indonesian Hide and Seek. I won one of the rounds by hiding in the ocean.

I have been very thankful to spend my time in Indonesia this summer. I was excited to hear that the Colorado Avalanche won the Stanley Cup and the Colorado Mammoth Lacrosse team won the NLL title but I have been dumbfounded by everything going wrong. While I support any movements to fix the livelihood of American citizens, I can honestly say that I am glad I am not living in the United States right now.

I was not able to dive a lot since I got sick and had swimmer's ear. I had the energy zapped out of me for a few days but am feeling much better now. My main job this week was serving as a model for the Lembeh Resort pictures. I had a blast pretending to be a guest in the fancy hillside villa drinking champagne and swimming in the infinity pool. I do not foresee a future in this job though as it was very awkward and I am not a natural. Regardless, I will enjoy looking back at the resort for years to come and seeing myself in a few pictures and videos. Even though my time in Lembeh was fantastic and the diving will live with me forever, I was happy to head back to Manado.

Lembeh was very comfortable and did not offer many challenges. I finished my business management project while there, but beyond that, only had English classes to teach. It sounds ridiculous to say, but I found myself getting bored, especially when I couldn't dive. Sitting around, I realized I needed to make some new life goals. Like I said at the beginning of this journey, my biggest goal in life was to go scuba diving in Indonesia and I have accomplished that now. While I will be returning to Indonesia since there are numerous places I want to visit, I need something new to work towards. I have always been fascinated by the idea of climbing a Himalayan mountain, specifically Annapurna 1, so I used these few days to really focus in and make a plan as to how people train and prepare for climbing 8,000-meter peaks. I have no rock or ice climbing experience and know climate change is making the mountains more treacherous to climb but I think the view from the top and everything I will learn as I venture through the suck of a climb would be well worth the effort I put into the journey. I have a lot to learn and practice before I get there, but one day I will summit Annapurna with a guide and ideally no sherpa.

This upcoming week I begin working with my employer's son to survey, rebuild, and reorganize the coral nursery. I am very excited about this new project!.

This week I hit the 1 month in Indonesia milestone. The challenge of changing your scenery and surrounding culture so dramatically forces you to become more aware of what you need in life to be happy and shows the vastness of how we can spend our lives on this planet.

I left Bangka this week as there were no guests at that resort. I took a boat with all the employees to a rural town on the mainland and then drove to Manado. As soon as I got to Manado, I was told I would be working with two French Journalists to help them create a story about the best scuba diving in the world. These journalists did not scuba dive so they needed videographers and people to interview. Over dinner, I made a plan for the next day of diving and shooting but mainly inquired about the incredible life you live as a journalist. They told stories of hiking in the Himalayas, working as a journalist in China and the constant threats from the government, working with locals in every country, and the obstacles of always being on the move in dozens of foreign countries. What a great life you can live by being a journalist. You are paid to travel and capture/tell stories. Unfortunately, I care about being an engineer too much to consider being a journalist, but if all else fails, that would be an appealing job.

Filming and interviewing with the Journalist went well and now I may be on TV in France! I learned that day though that I was being transferred to Lembeh resort as Manado was going to be fully booked. After diving, I packed up and traveled with my friend Jacob to Lembeh. The journey usually takes around an hour, but we took 4 hours as the Taxi driver decided to take a painfully inconvenient route. However, I saw more of Indonesia and held my breath for 4 minutes in the car!

The Lembeh resort touches the Lembeh Strait which is the muck diving capital of the world. Divers rank this destination as one of the best macro photography resulting in productions like Blue Planet filming here. Frogfish, octopuses, scorpionfish, mantis shrimp, etc. are the norm. I flooded my camera on a dive earlier this week after spotting two giant frogfish next to each other, a dream shot that will have to live in my memories, so I have not been able to record too much here. I am diving a ton though while also finishing up my business management project and teaching English classes.

Somehow every day surprises me. This month flew by but I think I am living in the moment as much as possible. The key has been talking with as many travelers and locals as possible to learn from their experiences and build a connection. I continue to approach everyone with a smile on my face and kindness which has resulted in wild stories being told, people offering me their scooter in Bali for when I travel there, and even more scuba diving opportunities. I find it funny, but simply being incredibly kind and engaged opens so many doors.

This week I have had the pleasure to assist professional photographer and rebreather diver Nicolas Remy and up-and-coming underwater photographer and videographer Jacob Guy.

Your time underwater is incredibly limited and everything is scared of your presence so Jacob and Nicolas have taught me skills in patience, quick thinking, and creativity to get the shot. Even though I am just using a GoPro for my shooting, I am learning how to frame shots, how different lighting techniques influence the final photo, and how to approach subjects underwater. Beyond that, I am learning an immense amount about the engineering behind underwater housing and strobes plus the high-price photographers pay for easily reproducible parts…

Nicolas wanted to photograph the house reef at night so I volunteered to guide him. Guiding at night presents challenges in navigation as you can only see what your light illuminates and critters can be much harder to find. We entered from the shore, swam to a buoy, and then descended to 50 ft. Despite the current skewing my idea of distance traveled underwater, I was able to use a compass to navigate back to our entry/exit point underwater. I did not tell Nicolas that this was my first time leading a dive in Indonesia as I felt that would only make him doubt my abilities. Regardless, I shaped up quickly as I was motivated to impress an accomplished scuba diver with $20,000+ worth of gear on them.

Oddly enough, my air consumption has been getting worse since I got here. Obsessed with finding all the small critters, I would have irregular breathing patterns as I stuck my head under rocks and coral to find organisms. Frustrated with this backward progression, I have really focused on my mental state underwater and studied where these critters live to improve my searching. Now I am concentrating on taking a more zoomed-out view of the reef, and when I see the slightest movements or color patterns, honing in.

This constant growth of my approach to learning in Indonesia has forced me to reevaluate how I value experiences. At the beginning of this week, I dove with an engineer named Lisa who taught me to learn from as many different experiences as possible, not just get the “experience.” The jump from experiencing to learning is profound. To learn takes attentive effort, repetition, and failure. Experiencing simply involves keeping your eyes open. I do not think I have valued the act of learning more in my life than I do right now. "Education is one thing no one can take away from you" and between school and the fact that I am staying in one place while people are coming to me with a vast amount of knowledge in a range of subjects, I have realized that I am living in the peak time of my life to learn.

Highlight of the week: Battling the strongest currents I have ever witnessed and having to use my hands to "climb" up rocks underwater to get to a safe pocket away from the current for a safety stop.

When I researched the impact tourism has on the coastal waters of the Caribbean I was surprised to learn just how large of a pollution impact the locals create. This pattern continues in Indonesia as I watch the cycles of plastic floating past our boat or the trash that washes up on the beach.

This week we heard dynamite blasting while underwater. Despite being illegal, local fishermen acquire food by simply lighting dynamite sticks, tossing them into the ocean, and then scooping up their reward of fish killed from the shockwave. This practice destroys thousand-year-old reefs in less than a second and is illogical as the fishermen are eliminating their fishing spots. One can reason that this damaging fish practice continues because fishermen do not see the direct results of their actions but also because it is easy fishing.

I find it hard to criticize these fishermen too harshly, however. This approach of sustaining and increasing your fish returns while having no regard for the returns of the next generation relates to the companies and individuals negatively impacting the environment to reap benefits now. There are plenty of highly educated leaders in the United States with the resources to see their impact on the ocean, yet continue full speed ahead killing the environment, their future profits, and slowly the human race.

There is no reason to harp on human's impact on the earth as this truly does nothing to reverse the negatives impacting our environment. Thankfully, there are new generations determined to make a change. Two families are here from Singapore and I have been bonding with their young kids. After touring them around in the ocean, we took a break on the boat, and the kids took it upon themselves to use the boat hook to collect all of the trash floating past. This quickly turned into a game with the kids yelling on each side of the boat where the trash was and becoming devastated if any trash got past them. I was happy to assist and sustain the excitement to clean the ocean.

Besides environmental work, I led a scuba diving refresher course in the ocean, visited the third resort located in Lembeh, continued teaching English, started working on freediving skills, felt famous at a beach party, and played soccer with local kids after walking over broken bamboo bridges. I really miss pizza for some reason but have a lot to look forward to this upcoming week!

If you look at the ground long enough, something will move. I continue to be astounded by the sheer amount of life above and below the water. This week consisted of a lot of scuba diving with the couple from Holland: Mark and Jacqueline (all of the macro photos are thanks to Jacquline). I could not have asked for a better group to be a part of to start this journey. I have learned so many lessons about respect, kindness, carpentry, scuba diving, and their travel-filled lives. They greet me with a smile every day and have embraced the random addition to their trip.

I traveled to Bangka Island this week since Mark and Jacquline's next stop was the island. This private island has white sand, consistent weather, and immaculate vibes. Highlights of diving have been: pygmy seahorse, cuttlefish, mantis shrimp, a dive with 30+ green turtles, so many species of tiny shrimp, and nudibranch that exhibit colors and 3D features behind my imagination.

While the diving has been spectacular, the people I meet have been even better. As I said, the couple from Holland has been a blessing, but another life-altering figure has been the contract project worker Stuart. Stuart was in the Royal Navy and learned to be an electrician. He is a gifted builder, leader, and visionary full of knowledge and stories. After the Navy, he left the UK to become an instructor in Thailand after seeing diving and thinking “that’s cool”. For the past 20ish years, he has been traveling around SE Asia scuba diving, working, and living a life full of adventure, engineering, and randomness.

Stuart has shown me the value of getting a mechanical engineering degree since I am taught skills applicable everywhere in the world. Stuart found contracts in countries all around SE Asia to fund his travels and picked up skills and experience that would be impossible to obtain working for a normal engineering firm. Hearing him tell about setting up the electricity for a UN helicopter base in Timor, establishing a dive shop in Vietnam by setting up the compressor in a military base, spending his free time in Bali building in a biker gang's workshop, even though he rides a Vespa, gives me the “that’s cool” reaction.

Besides diving, I began teaching English classes to the workers at the resort. Teaching is hard! Nonetheless, a large part of my job is simply conversating in English with the workers so I will make due. A friend of Stuart’s is coming to do electrical work for the dive center being built so I will be mentoring him to learn electrical installation skills this week.

I am definitely missing home, but I experienced a lot of love here and from home for my 19th birthday. I am very much out of my comfort zone but that is the way life should be!

Every great adventure seems to involve a mishap with immigration (Cuba 2014*), at least in my case. I used the word “work” when talking to the immigration officer and ended up spending over an hour in the questioning room getting grilled about what I was doing in Indonesia since my visa is not for working. The likelihood of me being sent back to the states was incredibly high, but thankfully my contacts were able to right the situation. Despite the uncertainty of the situation and the incredibly high likelihood of being sent back, I was surprisingly calm and had no doubt in my mind that I would not be let into the country.

I flew into Mando, the capital city of the Indonesian province of North Sulawesi and a much less popular tourist destination. Manado is incredibly blended; representing predominantly Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist religions, and Chinese, European, and Arabic people. The people here are incredibly humble, accommodating, will not sell to you, and greet you with a warm smile.

While I have been treated like a guest at Murex Manado, the dive resort I am interning for, slowly I am breaking down the barriers. My first two days consisted of meetings with management and understanding my surroundings. I have a fluid role and have the freedom to choose where and how I will be helpful and make an impact. Therefore, I have started on a track of business management, dive guiding/ coral restoration, and maintenance.

For business management, I am working with one of the resort managers on the company's career pathway, revising and editing the process to ensure employees can understand the promotion process and so that each step is a logical build on the previous. For maintenance, I hope to be working on minor repairs like fixing the bamboo bridges that span the streams cutting through the resort and fixing items like chainsaws or boat engines. For dive guiding and coral restoration, I hope to lead guests on underwater tours, pointing out and identifying the critters that make Indonesia so special for scuba diving. The coral restoration will involve revitalizing the coral farm on Bangka Island. I will be traveling to the resort on Bangka island on May 18 to see the coral farm and learn more about the second of three resorts.

So far, I have had the pleasure of tagging along on the tours the resort hosts. The only guests right now are a couple from Holland so I went diving with them twice and did a Highlands tour with them.

My biggest goal in life has been to scuba dive in Indonesia which motivated this entire journey. My first dive here was one of the most memorable dives I have had for that reason. We saw pilot whales on the way to the site and between the first and second day of diving have seen creatures like: white tip shark, leaf scorpionfish, winged pipefish, peacock mantis shrimp, candy crab, nettle cuttlefish, blue-spotted ribbontail ray, white mouth moray eel, green turtle, and so much more. Dives have been technically pretty easy with minimal current. Most of the species we have seen have been less than 4cm in length. Everything is so small here (my underwater photos do not show all above since I am learning how to take pictures of such small creatures)!

The Highland tour involved a lot of stopping and grabbing fresh fruit from the trees and 1) hiking to the top of Mt. Mahawu (a volcano). 2) Walking through the markets of Tomohon (saw the largest snake of my life, bats, a common household pet in the meat market, colorful spices on stands, knife stand). 3) Lunch over the water of Lake Tondano (sang a song with tour guide Rico in front of the restaurant). 4) Explored geothermal activities near lake Linow. 5) Coffee break and view of all of Manado from Makatete Hill.

Indonesia has been educational and quite a culture shock so far. I look forward to learning the language more, meditating, getting closer to locals, working, and continuing to explore!