There are some bucket list items that one always wants to achieve but keeps on postponing in life. When one is finally ready to go for it something pops up and one has to postpone it again. For us this bucket list item was diving. We wanted to do our PADI Open Water Certification for so many years, yet we never managed to find the time. When we finally had the time one of us caught a cold and we had to cancel. Then when we started travelling in 2018 we decided now is the time! However when we reached the Andaman Islands in Spring 2018, with the PADI Open Water licence at the very top of our list, the government put a ban on all diving activities for a couple of weeks (to regulate the market or something). We personally believe they did it to screw us over.
Not this time, not in Indonesia! We decided to go to Sumatra with just the mission of going diving. We were recommended by many other travellers to go to Pulau Weh in particular. (Pulau Weh is so far North in Sumatra that it could be one of the Andaman islands). And so we went. This blogpost is about our time on Pulau Weh and Britt’s bad surprise after the course.
We flew into the town Banda Aceh in the Indonesian province of Aceh. Aceh is the most northern province in Indonesia. Not many travellers make it so far north. From Banda Aceh we took a ferry to the island of Pulau Weh and signed in with the diving school Lumba Lumba (which translates to Dolphin).
Eager to dive right away we had yet another setback: After I, Alex recovered from my little fever I got in Malaysia it was Britt’s turn to get a slight fever. It is like we were jinxed. But we brought time and could start the diving lessons after a couple of days, when Britt was fit again. But it was not only diving on Pulau Weh.
Since we brought time for the course we could stretch the course to over a week, leaving us with lots of time to discover the island on scooter. Pulau Weh had little traffic and still many narrow, paved roads that connected the villages on the island. There were little jungle walks, nice touristy beaches and wildlife, which consisted of mostly huge monitor lizards and gangs of unfriendly monkeys. Their facial hair made them look like wise old men (who played with their wieners). Our most interesting discovery was a little vulcano. It was in an area with no vegetation amidst the dense jungle. One could walk around the landscape without any barriers. We were the only people there and could discover the landscape by ourselves with the typical sulfur smell and and hot steam rising up from the surface. It looked like a different planet. That was cool.
Back to the highlight: diving. After one week of learning about underwater physics, diving procedures, doing practical training with our friendly, funny and competent instructors and hanging out in the dive school (that is part of being a diver) we completed the course!!! Finally we are underwater ambassadors! A whole new world ready to be explored is waiting for us. During the training we saw many creatures for the first time (alive!). There were schools of barracudas, snowflake moray eels, see snakes, blue spotted stingrays, scorpion fish, schools of super vivid fish we cannot name yet, the amazing feeling of neutral buoyancy underwater and, and, and. Really cool.
By the way, my sister Anna and her friend Tobi gave us a push in the right direction and contributed to our motivation to go diving by providing us with a discover scuba diving voucher back in Germany. We did a training dive in a swimming pool in Germany and liked it enough to proceed with the course. Thank you guys!
We are super glad that we finally did it.
Good news came not alone. It had company! The bad news we learned on the same day we finished our course: To complete her university registration, Britt had to go back to Germany, just to get a form proving that she is residing in Germany. No work around possible – we spent several days trying, she had to be there in person, what a pain in the ass! And there was a deadline. Britt had less than one week. So we booked a super last minute flight to Germany for the next day. The plan was that we both leave the island for Banda Aceh, the next town with an airport. Britt would then fly via Kuala Lumpur and Muscat to Germany to get the paperwork ready and I, Alex, would stay in Indonesia. We would meet 7 days later in nearby Kuala Lumpur again. So we left Pulau Weh, but this time not empty handed. 🙂