KBR Day 5

Today was just an amazing day. All four dives were fantastic and chock full of critters. Even got to play around with a couple octopi!

The first dive of the day was at Kapal Indah ("Beautiful Ship"), a wreck dive where we found a pigmy seahorse.

The second dive was at Jahir 2, where the highlights were a frogfish and a leaf scorpionfish (no good shot of the latter though).

For our third dive, we went to Hairball. Spent a long time here with a seahorse and an octopus.

If at first you don't succeed... Went back to Aer Prang 2 to try and catch the mandarinfishes going at it. And joy of joys, there were feeling frisky tonight! As an added bonus, an octopus came by to play while we waited for the mandarinfish to do their thing.

KBR Day 4

Did something unexpected and different today -- drove to the northwest side of North Sulawesi to dive at Pulau Bunaken. Another couple had made all the plans and I just tagged along. It's a completely different sort of diving there, all wall dives where you just drift along the current.

I'd hoped this meant that I'd be able to put my wide angle lens to better use, but the visibility there was working against me and most of my shots came out less than satisfactory. It's entirely possible that I just don't know how to take these kinds of shots/how to work with these conditions...

The first dive was at Mandolin; a fun, relaxing and enjoyable affair. The wall was teeming with life of all sorts, and there were large schools of fishes everywhere (very unlike what I'd been seeing in the Lembeh Strait), but I have to report that there was nothing really impressive per se. This of course only in comparison to the amazing critters I'd been seeing the past couple days.

The second dive at Lekuan 2 was a little better: saw an orang-utan crab as well as a green turtle which swam by us in the open water. Tried to go after it, but couldn't really get a good shot (the visibility issue).

Totally unrelated to diving, but still pretty cool nonetheless was who I went to Bunaken with: Joshua Marston, the writer/director of Maria Full of Grace, who was nice enough to talk a little about the movie business.

I made it back to KBR just in time to go watch the mandarinfish perform their mating dance at twilight. Unfortunately, they weren't in the mood tonight and we ended up spending a really boring 45 minutes hanging out underwater before we called it quits and cruised around for another 35 minutes. The only shot I was happy with from this dive was of a couple nudibranchs:

KBR Day 3

Did another four dives today, one more than anticipated because I wanted more practice with the camera. My discovery for the day is that diving with a big dSLR housing is not exactly a walk in the park. The first dive was a complete blur; all I remember was struggling with the camera and buoyancy control. The good news is that I'm improving with practice and am getting reasonably comfortable with it. My biggest challenge now is that I'm muck diving and only have a wide angle lens instead of a macro lens to get up close and personal with my subject. I may not have be able to get really nice shots of the 4mm pigmy seahorses we found, but I think I managed to get some pretty pictures nevertheless.

A few more numbers for the day:

• spent a little over four hours underwater
• saw two pigmy sea horses (we're talking about 4mm or so here!)
• saw the biggest lobster I've ever seen: about 3 ft in length, not including it's whiskers, which were another 3ft in length!
• saw 1 electric clam wedged into a crack
• saw 1 octopus with 4 legs
• saw 1 cuttlefish with hundreds of colors

KBR Day 2

It's 10pm right now and it's definitely time for bed. Some numbers for today:

• 4 dives (3 day, 1 night)
• almost 4.5 hours spent underwater
• maximum depth of 81 feet
• 3 sea horses (never seen them before)
• 2 cuttlefish (never seen them before either)
• 1 huge puffer fish with a remora latched on to it (totally cool)

And that's just the first day! There were also many moray eels of all kinds, lots of puffer fishes (kept thinking fugu! every time I saw one), and basically a ton more life than I've ever seen any where underwater. Definitely some of the best diving I've ever done.

Tomorrow I'll be bringing my camera along...

KBR

After many hours of travel I'm finally at my home for the next 8 days: Kungkungan Bay Resort in North Sulawesi, Indonesia, where I'll be diving for the next week. Woo-hoo!

The room is amazing, as is the view out my porch. All I'm interested in right now though is some food, a shower, and sleep...

Home

I'm home! Despite the allergy attack, it was a good trip. I'll be better prepared next time.

Going through my pictures, I'm surprised what a big difference five days made for the sakura trees:

The other thing that I was pleasantly surprised by on the trip was the Northwest Airlines flight I'd taken there and back - it was good! The food was decent, and better yet, they had a good selection of movies on demand. I managed to catch Atonement (better than I expected), There Will Be Blood (worse than I expected), P.S. I Love You (an excellent cry), The Great Debaters (nothing special), Bella (interesting), Saawariya (reminded me of Moulin Rouge), and Om Shanti Om (campy).

Kotetsu

On my way to the airport, I decided to give Kotetsu another try. Knowing it's exact location made it so much simpler this time, which was fortunate because it was raining and I did not have an umbrella with me.

Unfortunately for me, the menu was in Japanese only, and the waiter wasn't very good with English. The two basic choices were soba or udon, and I opted for soba and just went with the waiter's recommendation, which I understood to be soba with daikon.

What I got were two courses. The first one was a small bowl with soba in a hot broth, and the second was a big bowl with soba in a cool broth and daikon on top. I can't say I was terribly impressed. Especially from a place that had been given a Michelin star. The hot soba was a little soft, and both were ... very subtly flavored? Perhaps I'd just ordered the wrong thing for my tastes.

In any case, after lunch it was off to the airport to catch the plane back home.

Third Time's A Charm

Woke up at 5:00am today again to go the Tsukiji Fish Market for sushi. And finally! got there around 6:00am and still had a 40 minute wait. This place is truly tiny, with a long bar that only fits about twelve tightly packed people at a time.

And was it worth it? Having to wake up at such an ungodly hour (and if you know me, you also know how unlike me this would be) and still having standing in line? In a word: yes. This place showed me how amazingly good sushi can be. The biggest surprise I've had here is how tasty ama-ebi can be in, something I was never particularly fond of until I tried it here. Don't worry, I won't bore you with pictures of sushi.

Since we were there so early, we were able to watch the tuna auctions:

After this, it was back to the hotel. The wife had to get back to work, and I had to finish packing.

Back To Work

The wife had to go in to work today, but she did sneak out for lunch with me. We attempted to go to Kotetsu, which is supposedly well-known for their soba. It also recently got a Michelin star for its soba kaiseki, which is only served at dinner, but if it's good for dinner it must also be good for lunch, right?

Unfortunately, it took us forever to find the place, and by the time we'd located it with the help of some locals, they'd already closed for lunch. What a waste.

On our way back to the subway station, we ran across another tonkatsu restaurant, and thought we'd give it a try. It was good, but perhaps not quite as good as Maisen.

After lunch, the wife headed back in to work, and I went to Shinjuku to check out a couple used camera stores in the hopes of finding some gear for cheap. In theory, with everyone in Japan always on to the latest and greatest, the slightly old and used can be had at a steal. No such luck (at least for DSLR-related stuff). Everything in Japan costs more, including their used gear.

So it was back to the hotel and work for me as well. Not for long though, as we had a 7:00pm reservation at Rokusantei, the original Iron Chef Japanese Rokusaburo Michiba's flagship restaurant in Ginza. On our wait out, we ran into Mathieu, one of the wife's co-workers who'd just flown in and invited him to join us.

What can I say about Rokusantei... It was a novel, tasty, delightful surprise. Delicious in a distinctly Japanese way. There were nine courses in a wonderful progression of flavors. The highlights for me were the chawanmushi, the ultra-fresh uni (which was still moving!), the salad, and the beef. The uni in particular was a real surprise because I'm not usually a big fan, but this time I found the flavor to be very light and sweet. Oishii!

On our way home, we walked by Dalloyau, a pâtisserie well known for their macarons. Even as stuffed as we were, just the sight of those little morsels of scrumptiousness had me salivating. I would definitely have bought some, were it not for the fact that they were already closed. C'est la vie.