I am reaching my last few days here in Indonesia and managed to get one last new visit to the thousand islands. My good mate Mark had a free weekend which got opened up due to relatives not being able to visit on their planned date. When this happens and you have a free weekend what do you do ? Naturally where else would you go other then Pulau Seribu 😛 It’s perfect , its cheap and its fun !

I will describe the actual trip, the logistics of how to get there and the location we were at in a later post when I create a mini documentary about the whole trip but in this specific entry I will just talk about Pulau Perak or (Silver island) and the free diving experience there 🙂

There are many ways to reach Pulau Perak depending on which island you reside on. In this particular trip I stayed at Pulau Harapan or (Hope Island) and would boat to all the different islands in the location. Pulau Perak looks to be an uninhabited island accept for a small hut right on the shore. I asked our boat driver if we were able to camp on the island and he said it was possible. In the future when I come to the thousand islands I might bring my camping gear just to spice it up. This way we can catch our own food and cook it on the open fire in a beautiful oceanic, natural island setting.

The diving site was just of the coast of the island. We boated a little past the island and continued on into a sandy patch right in the middle of Pulau Perak and another island. Along side the sandy patch there was lots of great coral and the wildlife was alive and busy. Whats sad is because it was morning the angle of the sun didn’t penetrate the water as it would during the day so the pictures (accept those taken right on the surface) don’t do the underwater scenery justice.

We basically started in the middle of the sand bank and made our way to the steep ridge drop offs which seemed to have the most life and best looking coral. As a customary dive I usually try to dive to the bottom just to gauge the depth. On the first dive I went all the way to the bottom of the ridge and it seemed to be about 17m – 20m in depth. The water had about 10m visibility so it wasn’t great but it wasn’t terrible either. For camera work though, it doesn’t turn out to great at anything past 10m.

As usual the water was above 26 degrees Celsius and just completely warm for my standards. I was thinking about putting my wetsuit on but when the guide told us its not jelly fish season yet I didn’t bother. Having the water on your skin just feels so great and without a wetsuit you just feel more free to move. We did however get stung a couple of times by some tiny jelly fish but whatever … it wasn’t to bad so we just ignored it and kept diving throughout the day.

This was the second day of our trip so we could not stay to long as the boat was about to depart from the docks at the main Harapan island were we stayed at 1:00pm. We got up at about 5:30 that morning to check out the sunrise and arrived on the Pulau Perak at about 6:30 after having something small to eat and packing our gear. This allowed us about a good solid 4hrs so we were happy.

Mark had done some training and was looking to try to get to some depths this time and managed to get to what looked like about 5-6 meters. Not to bad and it seemed most of the things people have issues with such as kicking down (and not floating up all the time) and equalisation was not a problem. I think a bit of breathe hold training (Not in the water on your own mate) is enough to get some good depth 🙂 After this we can do some real exploration down the depths 😛

Freaking great weekend and the weather was perfect ! Next time I visit these islands might bring camping gear. It will reduce the cost of the weekend dramatically from $60 AUD to probably $15 AUD ! A whole weekend of fun in an sunny island setting, with white sands, blue waters and perfect weather for $15 – $60 AUD ? Where else but Indonesia !

Love my country, love the people and I hope you enjoy the video !