Philosopher without Locus & Writer without Focus. Former Features Editor @ Brown Paper Bag. Feminist, Foodie & Scuba Enthusiast. I Travel, Therefore I Am.
#ThePoetryProject is a hashtag I run on Instagram matching photographs that I take, with poetry that I love or write myself. For more private poetry, follow the hashtag via @reachnisha on Instagram — trespassers welcome.
Seagull takes flight. Pangong Tso, Leh.
How it happened that bird woman became
fish woman is unknown yet. Among the
hypotheses a Latin transcription mistake,
from pennis (feathers) into pinnis (fins).’
Bird-woman didn’t know water,
had never tasted sea. Landlocked,
sky bound – no man would ever spy her in the
noonday wink of hunger and sun and think
mermaid. She came from air, from tree.
Her wings were freedom, her sky everything.
When she was struck down, she thought the sky
had rejected her, a lover grown bored and
her left forced to move on feet unused
to gait or step. Picking a direction,
she walked until she found shore.
Here, the blue fell downwards, and mirrored
up in confusion. Bird-woman saw two suns,
two sets of sky reflecting. The second seemed
colder and more solid; grounded.
When she was held up to her waist
cradled by this heavy sky, she found
she had no need for wings.
#ThePoetryProject is a hashtag I run on Instagram matching photographs that I take, with poetry that I love or write myself. For more private poetry, follow the hashtag via @reachnisha on Instagram — trespassers welcome.
Portrait. “Homecoming”. Madras, India.
Wasn’t that your cheek against mine last night,
Gin Streetlight when somebody loves you,
Impossible.
When you reach the broken paddock fence,
the sign will say,
Impossible.
The color God painted my eyes,
A cross between storm and ewerstream,
Impossible.
All your wrong lovers without certificates,
Stamped across their foreheads,
Impossible.
Dear Torch received your kind invitation,
Regret conflagration,
Impossible.
You must mean a phantom hand at her waist,
Your ache at her absence not mine,
Impossible.
A holy place in the emperor’s city,
A peach in a stone,
Impossible.
You the mask of a ram I the mask of a bull,
Horn chips Mischling Torn doors,
Impossible.
Dance without footprints dance with no name,
In a room with no lovers touching,
Impossible.
Your eyes one protecting your sleeping son’s dreaming,
One torchlit and trying to close,
Impossible.
Dear Lion here’s a gazelle,
Hold her in your teeth but no biting,
Yours Impossible.
#ThePoetryProject is a hashtag I run on Instagram matching photographs that I take, with poetry that I love or write myself. For more private poetry, follow the hashtag via @reachnisha on Instagram — trespassers welcome.
Monsoon. Fort Cochin, Kerala.
I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as one loves certain obscure things,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries
the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,
and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose
from the earth lives dimly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you directly without problems or pride:
I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,
except in this form in which I am not nor are you,
so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,
so close that your eyes close with my dreams.
#ThePoetryProject is a hashtag I run on Instagram matching photographs that I take, with poetry that I love or write myself. For more private poetry, follow the hashtag via @reachnisha on Instagram — trespassers welcome.
Cotton Seeds in a Pod. Madikeri, Coorg.
Where does such tenderness come from?
These aren’t the first curls
I’ve wound around my finger—
I’ve kissed lips darker than yours.
The sky is washed and dark
(Where does such tenderness come from?)
Other eyes have known
and shifted away from my eyes.
But I’ve never heard words like this
in the night
(Where does such tenderness come from?)
with my head on your chest, rest.
Where does this tenderness come from?
And what will I do with it? Young
stranger, poet, wandering through town,
you and your eyelashes—longer than anyone’s.
~Marina Tsvetaeva (1916), Translated by Ilya Kaminsky
#ThePoetryProject is a hashtag I run on Instagram matching photographs that I take, with poetry that I love or write myself. For more private poetry, follow the hashtag via @reachnisha on Instagram — trespassers welcome.
Cape Town, South Africa.
Confined to sex, we pressed against
The limits of the sea:
I saw there were no oceans left
For scavengers like me.
I made it to the forward deck.
I blessed our remnant fleet –
And then consented to be wrecked,
A Thousand Kisses Deep.
#ThePoetryProject is a hashtag I run on Instagram matching photographs that I take, with poetry that I love or write myself. For more private poetry, follow the hashtag via @reachnisha on Instagram — trespassers welcome.
Photo Credit: Siddharth Choudhry, Singapore.
You’re a horse running alone,
and he tries to tame you
compares you to an impossible highway
to a burning house
says you are blinding him
that he could never leave you
forget you
want anything but you
you dizzy him, you are unbearable
every woman before or after you
is doused in your name
you fill his mouth
his teeth ache with memory of taste
his body just a long shadow seeking yours
but you are always too intense
frightening in the way you want him
unashamed and sacrificial
he tells you that no man can live up to the one who
lives in your head
and you tried to change didn’t you?
closed your mouth more
tried to be softer
prettier
less volatile, less awake
but even when sleeping you could feel
him travelling away from you in his dreams
so what did you want to do, love
split his head open?
you can’t make homes out of human beings
someone should have already told you that
and if he wants to leave
then let him leave
you are terrifying
and strange and beautiful
something not everyone knows how to love
#ThePoetryProject is a hashtag I run on Instagram matching photographs that I take, with poetry that I love or write myself. For more private poetry, follow the hashtag via @reachnisha on Instagram — trespassers welcome.
Ducks feeding, Stratford-upon-Avon
IN MEMORIAM
We are never playing this game again,
Especially because I always lose.
And this morning,
the wager is breakfast.After all these years it seems
That scissor still beats paper,
Well, at least my jazz hands look cooler.
I sulk, as you dribble syrup
Strategically over the pancakes,
So that they wink and smile
And wag their tongues
At my reluctantly seated presence.
But it’s the coffee you pour that does the trick –
Two sugars and just enough cream
To win me over,
And in my favourite cup no less,
Picked out from the two dozen jumble
With the assured certainty
That never quite disappears,
Between old lovers.
The first pang comes
When without my asking,
You unfailingly pick,
The tomatoes off my plate.
It’s what you always did for me,
Since my confession that summer –
Impassioned, in the way
Only a teenager’s can be,
That I absolutely despised them.
How many afternoons did we squander you think,
That same sultry July?
Kissing in reckless abandon,
Under the mango tree in the schoolyard
We loved so dearly?
At long last,
The appreciation
Of how miserable I’ve been –
Obliged as it were
All these in-between years
To eat my own tomatoes because you’ve been gone.
It leaves me suddenly breathless
Like the crashing storms
We could get so drunk on,
Their baffling intensity
Staining our summers green.
And right now,
More than washing up
I want to lie beside you,
On the grass that grows by the stream.
We’d feed the ducks
And give them funny names
While the sun melts away the winter
Of years of discontent.
I picked up Following Fish at an airport bookstore, drawn primarily by its beautiful cover, the author unknown to me. At the time, it also seemed appropriate to spend over eight hours on a transatlantic flight reading about travels around the Indian coast. Less than four pages in, I was hooked. No pun intended.
Soon, I found myself devouring Samanth’s essays (they appeared intermittently online), and pre-ordering his second book – This Divided Island. And by the time I’d read the latter through, there was no longer any denying – yes accidentally, but equally fortuitously, I had stumbled upon an immensely gifted writer with a staggering eye for nuance and detail.
Samanth Subramanian
And so it happened that when I met him at the Jaipur Literature Festival, it was all I could do to restrain my smitten gurgles. Samanth of course, humoured me with the utmost kindness – an absolute gentleman to the end. He made conversation, despite the fact that his time could have been spent talking to people far more important than me. He made jokes and flirted in that assuredly suave way, that I recognized instantly and frustratingly, as designed to go absolutely nowhere. Then without batting an eye he signed my bruised and battered copy of Following Fish, asking me to be in touch with a smile that hammered the last nail into the coffin of my utterly doomed fan-girl worship of him.
Anyone who encounters Following Fish – a delicious compilation of rich journalistic investigations conducted over several years, brimming over with wit – instantly knows it to be more than worthy of the Shakti Bhatt First Book prize that it won. Pulsating with pleasure, adventure and discovery, and tempered by nostalgia and loss, here was a book that spoke as eloquently to armchair travelers as to lovers of the sea and its lore.
This Divided Island contrarily, is much darker, starting off in Colombo but ranging wide and far in both the witnesses it seeks out, and the stories it tells of Sinhalese majoritarianism that sparked the Sri Lankan conflict. A book vastly different from his first, yet undoubtedly one that displays the very same meticulousness and finesse that is so characteristic of Samanth’s fine journalism.
In any case, an impulsive email that I wrote him, taking him at his word to “be in touch”, led to us having a meandering sort of conversation, on everything from the research methodology he employs, to the writers that he reads, to his travels, which happily, have now found their way into this piece about Samanth and his books. Below are excerpts, produced verbatim, bound together, only by my own curiosity and mostly arbitrary questions.
Q: Let’s begin, at the beginning – did you always want to be a writer? Where does the impetus to write come from?
A: “I can’t say I’m one of those people who dreamed of being a writer even as a child. Certainly I always read a lot, but it never struck me that I too could – or even wanted to – write. But there was a series of little incidents. When I was picking a major while applying to a bunch of American universities for my undergraduate studies, I chose journalism entirely as a placeholder, thinking I’d switch it later. Then I took a couple of classes and enjoyed them, so I persisted. Then, a few years later, I began to get immersed in a stream of journalism that I really enjoyed, both as a reader and as a writer – these long magazine stories that combine the pure ability to tell a story with the diligence of doing research at great length. Once I lucked into this, I didn’t want to do anything else.”
Q: You started your career writing elegant longform, and now you have two hugely successful books out. How did you make the transition from journalism into books? Tell us a little about your process?
A: “The books are really an extension of my journalism. They’re still non-fiction, still based on reportage – they’re just longer, and they’re conceptualized differently. So in that sense, I don’t think there was a transition from journalism to books. I’m a journalist through and through.
The process is always the same, in essence. First the research; then the writing. I can never begin writing until I’ve finished every ounce of research I think I’ll need. I may find it necessary to read more or look more things up mid-writing, but I will rarely do fresh interviews. As a result, I over-report – I gather more stories and material and interviews than I will use. But that’s all right; it gives me a feeling of security to have that much research stashed away.”
Q: If you had to bottle your writing into a genre – what would it be? What style do you veer towards most naturally and why?
A: “Narrative non-fiction? It’s a clumsy term. But it is functionally descriptive. I write non-fiction, but in the writing of it, there’s an emphasis on narrative, on the storytelling. And I love what the genre can do. It’s nimble and effective; a practitioner can take a set of fundamental skills (reporting, research, writing) and apply them to any subject that catches her fancy. This suits me well. I’m intrigued by many different things at once, and I’ve never possessed the skill that the beat reporter has, of being able to stick to just one beat. I like to hop from topic to topic; it keeps the work fresh for me.”
Q: Following Fish is about food and travel? What is your personal relationship with food? And what of travel?
A: “It’s sort of trite to say, I guess, that I love food and travel. Nearly everyone loves food and travel, after all! So I won’t say that. What I’m interested in is the lives we encounter around the food and the travel. I always want to know more about the social context in which something is happening. So with food, there is a universe of customs and history and emotion with the simple act of cooking and eating a particular dish. That’s what grabs my interest. Similarly, I’ve never been the kind of person who can travel through five cities in ten days. I’m much more inclined to stay put in a single city, to try as much as possible to see what it would be like to be a resident there – what the texture of life and society is. ‘Following Fish’ married those two interests of mine.”
A boatyard in Gujarat. Photo Courtesy: SamanthA Signboard outside a Toddy Shop in Kerala. Photo Courtesy: Samanth
Q: What kind of research went into Following Fish? Tell me more about the journey – how do you go from scribbled notes to beautiful travel essays?
A: “At the granular level of research logistics, it was quite simple. I knew the broad structure of the book – that there would be nine essays, nine chapters, roughly one per coastal state. So I set about trying to think about ideas for each of those chapters, based on just reading, talking to people, things like that. Then I would set out for these states with a vague idea of what I wanted to capture. Invariably, these ideas fell apart once I got there, to be replaced by a new idea based on what I was finding. I made notes of conversations, of the landscape, of my own thoughts; I took photos. Then I would get back home and do more reading, more interviews on the phone, perhaps take another trip to the place. The writing was done in chunks, since each chapter stands alone. I would do this in the mornings and on weekends, since I was working as a journalist with ‘Mint’ at the time.”
Q: Do you have a favourite essay from the book?
A: “My favourite chapter was probably the one about the fish cure in Hyderabad. I remember taking great pleasure in writing those opening pages about my grandfather, and then again in describing the Bathini Goud family that administers the treatment. That entire week I spent in Hyderabad was such fun – going behind the scenes of this annual event, exploring these questions of faith and superstition. It exemplified what I love so much about my life as a journalist: this ability to go deep into these slightly odd environments, which would otherwise be closed off to people.”
Q: In the Hyderabad fish cure story, you actually swallowed one whole! That’s one experience I was glad to have had through someone else’s eyes, words and story, especially since it takes (pardon my French) some serious balls to go through with something like that! How much of research and storytelling actually spills over into the turf of adventure? In your opinion, can you be a good but unadventurous writer, especially when we’re talking about experiential writing like in food and travel?
A: “The question of whether you can be a good but unadventurous writer is very thought-provoking. I don’t know if I have an answer, actually. Certainly in the kind of work I do – journalism – it is always rewarding to push beyond your comfort zone, to get as far out of your comfort zone as possible in fact. That’s where you encounter the most unfamiliarity, which makes for a certain richness in the stories and details you narrate. The journalist’s work after all is predicated on finding unknown or little-known stories. That can only be done if you are, in some way, adventurous.”
Sri Lankan Tamil Tiger Rebels in Vanni in 2006
Q: This Divided Island also ‘travels’ in a certain sense. It’s set in a whole other country. It’s also much more political than your first book. Why Sri Lanka?
A: “Sri Lanka was a very specific choice, because of the circumstances the country found itself in. A long and brutal war had just ended. In 2009, it was suddenly possible to travel around the island again, and to talk to people who (often, but not always) felt freer to tell their stories than they had in three decades. I’m Tamil, so I’ve grown up with this conflict inhabiting the suburbs of my consciousness. Writing “This Divided Island” was, in one sense, a way of getting to find out what it was like to live through a war like this – to fill in the details in the picture that had, for me until then, just been outlines. But it was also a way of narrating these details on to the world. I think that’s an imperative part of a journalist’s job – to tell these stories, to add to the world’s larger body of knowledge about something as destructive and ruinous as a war.”
Q: What kind of research went into This Divided Island. Was this book journey different from your first?
A: “For This Divided Island, the process was different and more immersive. I moved to Sri Lanka in August 2011, and I spent nearly 10 months there over the next year or so. I lived in Colombo, and I travelled a lot across the island. The travel was more open-ended. Sometimes I went somewhere with the express purpose of meeting someone. But more frequently, I would ask people to introduce me around and just have conversations, to slowly build a picture in my head of the kind of history the island had witnessed during the war. As that picture grew fuller, I got some sense of how I could write about those decades through the lives of particular people, and then I spent more time with them, to get to know them better. Living there was essential, I think. It wasn’t for as long as I would have liked, but it helped very much to absorb some of the rhythms of the country.
But the book was more difficult to write than Following Fish. The people I was writing about were sometimes living in delicate situations, perhaps under threat or afraid, and it was my responsibility to be sensitive to those situations. They were very often not well off. They were exhausted and frustrated after the ordeal of surviving the war. Some of them were, at the outset, not very sure what I was there to do, so I always wanted to spend the time to communicate that clearly, and to earn their trust over days or weeks. This was all very different from the process of researching Following Fish.”
Q: Tell me a story about This Divided Island that nobody else knows. Perhaps something you wished you had been able to keep in the book, or wrote in the first few drafts, but later edited out?
A: “Somewhere in my notes, there’s an interview with a Sinhalese man who fell in love with a Tamil woman, in which he talks about the difficulties they faced in being together. It was a story with a happy ending. I never found a way to put it into the book, so I left it out. I hope I’ll write it up some day, though.”
Q: Do you think writers have a responsibility to address the political or is the marriage of your writing with politics, in your second book, a happy coincidence?
A: It’s impossible to avoid the political in any writing, I guess. But for me at least, it’s important to make the writing not just about politics. We come back to this notion of discovering and describing lives as they are lived, whether under ordinary or extraordinary circumstances. That is forever front and centre in my writing – or at least, that’s what I attempt to do. So I don’t think of myself as a political writer. I think of myself as a writer who writes about people, and inevitably, politics is a part of the superstructure of their lives.”
Q: And what of art and literature as tools for social change? Should they serve a greater political purpose, do you think? Or is art for arts sake good enough?
A: “I’m hesitant to plump for either option. What an artist wants to do with her art, and why she wants to create art, should be entirely up to her. We cannot demand of artists that they be political or that they have a social conscience; we also cannot sit in judgement and deem it “good enough” or “acceptable” that art has been created for art’s sake. What we should do is create an environment that is conducive to making art. If that happens, there will be enough artists to fill both categories, as well as several other categories in between.”
Q: People have said your words have ‘a magical, transportative quality’ to them? How do you inspire such potent emotion in readers?
A: “In truth, I’m not sure anyone sets out to inspire that kind of emotion. The primary duty of a writer is to write honestly and clearly. If a writer can do that, I’d like to think, then the writing will have a potent and transportative quality to it. That’s a broad answer. The narrower answer is, as simplistic as it sounds, to think very hard about the words we use when we write. Avoiding clichés and paying constant attention to the cadences and rhythms of sentences are both integral aspects of writing, and they can help create the kind of effect you talk about. But honesty in writing is, by far, the most important thing.”
Q: Following Fish won the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize in India and was shortlisted for the 2013 André Simon Award in the UK. This Divided Island has been shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize. All a very very big deal! Do you ever worry that the next book must be even better? Do you ask yourself, ‘how do I top this’?
A: “You’re very kind, but in truth, there’s no pressure at all. I suspect every writer is an insecure wreck about his or her work, so the question of feeling the pressure to win awards pales in comparison with the self-imposed pressure to just write something that isn’t awful. I do worry that the next book must be better, but only insofar as I want to write a book that is meaningful, and that doesn’t make the same mistakes as my previous books. All writing is a learning process, so you’re constantly trying to improve yourself. And there’s always, always plenty to improve. Plenty.”
Q: Who are your favourite writers and how much of an influence do they have on your own work? What are you currently reading?
A: “At the moment, I’m reading a novel called ‘The Great Swindle’ by Pierre Lemaitre. It’s translated from the French, and it’s spellbinding. It fell into my hands entirely by mistake, but I’m glad it did! It’s about these French soldiers who return to their lives after World War I, and about these swindles they think up to enrich themselves, all the while trying to shake off the horrors and trauma of the war they survived.
I can never list enough writers when asked who my favourites are, so I name a different one each time. On this occasion, let me cite Rebecca Solnit, the essayist, critic and journalist. Actually, it’s difficult to classify her work. It’s a wondrous mixture of research, history, social analysis and her own, highly original thought and philosophies – and she manages to weave these various threads into one strong narrative. Her prose is beautiful. I re-read River of Shadows earlier this year, and marvelled again at how sophisticated and entrancing her books are.”
Q: As readers what can we look forward to next?
A: “Just a raft of magazine stories for now, I think. I haven’t begun working on a new book yet.”
Q: Advice for writers?
A: “I wish I had some advice to give here. The truth is, every writer’s life is a jury-rigged creation, cobbled together to achieve some measures of both financial and creative freedom. I’ve been immensely lucky, in that my daily journalism supports me enough to produce the books I want to write. I’ve also had fantastic editors who are deeply supportive of my longer projects. So I’ve never been in these situations you describe, and it would be presumptuous of me to prescribe advice for writers in such situations, I think. Perhaps the only category I can address is that of writers steeped in self-loathing and doubt. Here too, what I would say is: It never goes away! The best thing to do is to channel those qualities to improve your work. The more you write, the better you get at it. It’s the simplest equation in the world, and there’s no dodging it.”
I’ve always been that girl who believes everything deserves a one-time shot – you know, that person who always orders the weirdest thing on the menu? That chick! How else do you find out if you’ll even like something or not? Before you actually try? My first dive too, was exactly that – an experiment, an adventure… except, by the time I surfaced, I was undeniably, hooked.
Since that first dive in Bali, I’m 5 certifications, 9 countries and about 110 dives old – a complete novice. And yet, I’ve been back to Indonesia alone, four times.
Most travel-junkies have a bucket list, but divers have one that’s unique to themselves – made up entirely of certifications, dive spots, and marine experiences they can check off. So why go back to the one place over and over?
Short answer – because it’s impossible to ever really ‘be done’ diving Indonesia.
COULD I BE MORE PACIFIC?
With 80,000 kilometers of coastline, 3.1 million square kilometers of territorial waters, 17,508 islands, 3,000 species of fish and encompassing 20% of the world’s coral reefs, these islands are quite literally submerged in the heart of marine biodiversity. Crystalline waters, shallow reefs, gentle drifts, stunning drop-offs, coral walls, historic wrecks and the intoxicating possibility of bumping into whale sharks, hammerheads, gigantic schools of mantas, barracuda, tuna, bumphead parrotfish, reef sharks as well as rare individuals like the dugong or sperm whale, make these waters ideal for both beginners and seasoned divers.
The fact that Indonesia is an overwhelmingly friendly country, grants a visa on arrival for Indians, remains affordable even to the budget traveller, and has loads of dive-shacks, schools and liveaboards to choose from, all run very professionally, are just an added plus. With volcanoes (both on land and underwater), biking trails, architectural ruins, temples, sprawling coffee plantations, great food, and in most places, a bustling nightlife as well, Indonesia is also a wonderful destination to continue your vacation and celebrate your certification after you complete your underwater adventure.
But I digress.
Photo Courtesy: Nu Parnupong
The best diving in the world often means getting to some of the most remote corners of the earth. In my case, it involved a two-hour drive and 22 hours on-board three different aircrafts plus a stopover in Singapore, until I finally arrived at Manado. The jetty was another 45 minutes away, and then a dinghy would bring us to my first ever liveaboard – the gorgeous Raja Manta –which would sail all the way from North Sulawesi to West Papua.
Over the course of eleven days, we would cruise the open ocean from Lembeh, onwards to the Halmahera Strait, via the Cerram and Banda Sea to finally arrive at the coral triangle and Raja Ampat – the crown jewel of the oceanic world, a diver’s paradise, or as the World Wildlife Fund describes it, “a ‘species factory’ located at the intersection of the Indian and Pacific Ocean”.
AS THE BELL TOLLS
Photo Courtesy: White Manta Diving
A liveaboard is exactly what it sounds like: you room on a ship that has it’s own dinghies attached, that take you out to the most remote dive spots within a few minutes of your kitting up during the course of the day while you basically live the diving dream. Daily schedules are simply – eat, sleep, dive, repeat.
There is literally a dude who walks around the deck of the ship with a bell in his hand, which he ding-dongs to wake you up before every dive – four in a day, five if you’re lucky. Stumble out of bed, or get up off the sundeck, grab a banana or a coffee at the dive briefing, kit up (the crew will have got your gear pre-assembled for you), and off you go.
Compare this to resort life where just making your way out to dive spots and back, can take up more than half your day, cutting into precious underwater time And if its disconnecting from everyday life you’re looking for, nothing really beats sunsets out on the open ocean where most usually, your only connection to the rest of the world is your captain’s radio and a satellite phone for emergencies. Goodbye Twitter and good riddance.
SEA-RIOUSLY THOUGH
There’s usually only two reasons why divers shy away from liveaboards. The first is that they’ve never been on one before, and liveaboards tend to have more experienced divers than not. It’s therefore absolutely normal to feel a bit intimidated at first, and wonder if you’ll feel a bit like a fish out of water. I can now personally vouchsafe, (just like a half dozen other diver friends did for me, before I booked myself on my trip), that usually, the opposite is true.
Your skills will shoot through the roof, because it’s true what they say – practice makes perfect. Your buddies will be exceptionally kind because everyone has had a first liveaboard once upon a time too, and chances are you will make friends for a lifetime. I know I did.
The second reason is that liveaboards are much more expensive than dive vacations on resorts or shacks, so do your research and choose your liveaboard carefully. You will also need dive insurance in addition to regular travel and health insurance. I saved almost a year to be able to afford my two-week getaway, but I can safely recommend White Manta Diving as one of the most professional, friendly and considerate bunch of Dive Ninjas I’ve encountered in the past 6 years that I’ve been diving.
Meanwhile, the list of pros kind of goes on and on. For starters, it’ll be the lightest you ever packed for an international holiday, even if you choose to pack your own dive gear including a BCD plus your underwater camera with all it’s accessories, because you’re always barefoot and the only clothes you’ll need are swimwear and cover-ups or shorts. There’s always music streaming on the deck, and by nightfall someone has usually picked up a guitar. The food is mouthwateringly fresh – don’t ask, but someone spearfished just enough seafood for dinner (high fives all around for sustainable living). You gain a much deeper understanding of the richness of our ecosystem and learn how to support it – for instance the Raja Manta is equipped with marine toilets, provides ocean-friendly, biodegradable toiletries for divers (yet another thing you don’t have to pack), segregates and recycles everything, and also docked at Lembeh, where crew and guests jointly picked up trash and cleared a beach, just to show that even a little goes a long way. And you know how everyday has a sunrise and sunset – yeah, you’ll actually end up catching both, no matter what, and from the best vantage point that you could imagine too. Plus if you’re really lucky, there’ll be a day when a pod of dolphins find you, or you catch a rare salmon run. Welcome to the good life.
DIVED AND SURVIVED
I wish I could sum up my Raja crossing in a few hundred words, but the truth is, even after years of seeing stuff that’s plain magical – count ’em, wrecks from World War I & II, a whole underwater city from Byzantine times perfectly preserved in what is today a UNESCO World Heritage Site, migrating loggerhead turtles, flying fish that accidentally land in your speedboat and patiently wait for you to pop them back into the sea – everyday that I descended into the blue this time, I found myself wondering, if maybe someone hadn’t slipped a hallucinogen into my morning coffee.
The Raja Ampat archipelago (comprising more than 1500 small, beautiful, often isolated islands) is only one part of the Coral Triangle, also called the ‘Amazon of the Seas’, covering 5.7 million sq. kms, a mere 1.6% of the planet’s oceanic area. Powerful deep-sea drifts and currents funnel nutrients into blue water drop offs, delicate fringed coral reefs and sea-grass beds forming the foundation of the food chain that supports an entire ecosystem in this part of the world, allowing marine enthusiasts to observe raw, incredible wildlife in their natural habitats.
LOG THESE
1. Lembeh is the mecca of macro photography. With it’s dark sands, usually calm waters, and gradually sloping shallows it is home to an absolutely astonishing variety of critters and is pretty much synonymous with muck diving. For divers like me (obsessed with sharks, turtles and rays – always in changing order depending on where I am and what I actually see), muck diving was an eye-opener. I couldn’t believe what I was almost seeing after my first dive, until I went back on board and immediately purchased a magnifying glass!
We spotted flamboyant cuttlefish, hermit crabs, pygmy seahorses, ghost pipefish, the blue-ringed octopus, countless coconut octopus, cardinal fish, hairy frogfish, mantis shrimp, crabs, a spotted stingray and oh so many nudis.
Two American buddies who were onboard with us told me two amazing stories about Lembeh. The first, had dived from a resort here last year, and he maintained that with a good guide – locals tend to have more than 50,000 logged dives (and my educated guess is that by then you just stop counting) – diving in Lembeh was a lot like going to the supermarket with a list. You told your guide what you wanted to see, and soon as you made your descent, they took you right up ‘to the exact aisle’ and pointed it out! The second tale unfolded on our trip. A friend who surfaced close to the village during a sunset dive saw a little Indonesian girl playing with a sea-creature and giggling by the shore. He waded in closer hoping to capture a candid shot of what he thought would make a beautiful picture, given the gilded light of the sun, except he was shocked into immobility, when he realized that she was in fact tickling and teasing a blue-ringed octopus, one of four extremely venomous cephalopods especially when handled by humans. Funnily enough, the eight-legged invertebrate seemed just as thrilled with her company. For readers who aren’t scuba-nerds, let me put it this way: The blue-ringed octopus, measuring a mere 5-8 inches, carries enough venom to kill 26 adult humans within minutes; no blue-ringed octopus anti-venom has been discovered till date.
Protips: Stick to no more than two people and a guide and maintain great buoyancy so you don’t kick up too much black sand obscuring… well everything, from sight. Definitely carry a flashlight and preferably a muck stick too. Ask lots of questions before and after dives. Learn as much as you can about what to expect and consult a reef identification guide to make the most of your time. Diving in Lembeh is year round. There are strictly no gloves in Lembeh.
2. A storm in Halmahera had us change route and head west so we hit Bunaken National Park and Bangka next, both right beside each other, and neither disappointed. Bunaken is a great place to spot loads and loads of turtles so whatever you do, don’t leave your camera behind. We spotted the critically endangered hawksbill turtle as well as green turtles, sometimes up to three in one dive! Gentle currents in a landscape scattered with drop offs and giant walls of soft and hard corals make this a great place to drift dive. The occasional strong currents also mean you’ll see loads of schooling fish – tuna, jackfish, butterfly and triggerfish, snappers, fusiliers, even barracuda. At Ron’s Point, in southwest Bunaken – keep your eyes peeled for pelagic life. Right at the edge of the island’s fringing reef, is where you’re likely to spot sharks and rays like we did. The shallows here are also where you’re most likely to spot the elusive dugong. We tried thrice before we gave up, and only because our ship would have sailed into the night without us if we hadn’t grudgingly gotten back on board.
3. Sangalaki and DerawanIslands in East Kalimantan are best done together for a few reasons, not the least of them being that they’re placed fairly close to each other geographically. The coral in Derawan is second only to Raja Ampat, and what’s more you’re likely to encounter some really amazing big game here. Think giant turtles, mantas, barracuda bait balls and possibly even the incredible, shy dugong. And then there lies the irresistible draw of bumping into those gentle giants of the sea – the magnificient whale shark. Like anyone could resist.
For whale sharks in Indonesia, your next best bet would be to head on all the way over, to Cendrawasih Bay on the north side of West Papua. Or you could luck out pure and simple, like Nu (who shoots regularly aboard White Manta) did, and spot a juvenile whale shark being chased by a hammerhead shark in the Banda Sea! Some people…
4. Kakaban Island, less than a half-hour away by boat from Sangalaki, is packed with limestone cliffs and dense forests. I put Kakaban on my bucket list as far back as 2012 – because it’s home to Jellyfish lake.
Back in 2012 when I was first getting certified I got stung. The two hour plus boat ride back to shore was pure agony. In 2013 I was stung again. They say it get’s better, but I really couldn’t tell, what with all the sweating and clenched teeth and trying not to cry. And I’ve been terrified of jellyfish ever since. It’s strange how I would give up an arm and a leg to free dive with apex predators like the Great White given an opportunity, but freeze at the sight of a jelly underwater.So when I heard that Kakaban was home to at least 4 different species of jellyfish in murky, landlocked blue-green waters, that had evolved over the centuries to discard their natural defense mechanisms thanks to their ‘predator-free’ environment… to be stingless, harmless, painless… I knew I had to jump. I was going to embrace my fears, and I was going to do it the Batman way.
5. If you’re going to do Raja Ampat do it on a liveaboard, and if you’re going to do a liveaboard do it in Raja Ampat. It’s just that simple. The sheer abundance of what you will see here – soft corals, hard corals, sea fans, schools of colourful fish, bait balls, caves, wrecks, drop offs, plunging walls. shallows that are both sandy and some that are reefs, black and white sea beds, currents, drifts, calm waters, macro life, critters, nudis, turtles, rays, dolphins, pelagics and apex predators… the list just goes on and on. If you don’t like the diving here, chances are, you don’t like diving at all.
Photo Courtesy: Nu Parnupong
In Raja, a liveaboard offers the penultimate getaway because it’s sole focus is on the diving, and while you catch a quick cat nap or relax during your surface interval, the dive deck crew gets your gear prepped for your next backroll entry into the glittering blues. Your dinghy drops you off, often at the most difficult drop off points at the best moments (speaking in terms of weather and currents) and if fortune should favour you, you can pack up to four, maybe even five dives a day.
A sunrise dive before breakfast allows you to see a ton of marine life come out of hiding as well as sight those that were active by night beginning to take cover by day, while sunset and twilight dives allow you to see the magic of how light plays against water and in turn affect the activity around a reef. Night dives are particularly memorable because of the sheer volume of fauna you spot – the nocturnal animals are either coming awake or on the hunt, while the rest are asleep. We glided by a sleeping turtle, feeding stingrays and loads of fish in deeply relaxed states. Several were tucked away in nooks and crannies on the reef including a baby silver tipped reef shark. By night, everything is different, especially our own perception of our surroundings. Darkness alters our senses but also enhances specifics like sound. Divers have often claimed to have ‘heard a whole new world’ around them by night when even the more popular dive sites usually descend into silence.
Protips: Good divers never touch marine life, but this is even more important at night. Do not shine your torch too long at fauna by night, especially if the animal is resting.
Raja Ampat is a shark lover’s paradise. Right from reef sharks in the shallows – black tips, white tips, silver tips and greys, to every other kind that you’ve ever dreamt of interacting with in the wild: tawny nurse sharks, leopard sharks, thresher sharks, mako sharks, blue sharks, hammerheads, whale sharks… with time and luck, chances are you can spot them all. Chances are you won’t want to leave!
You’ll most definitely also spot the wobbegong shark that’s endemic to this region – and that’s something divers put on their bucket lists. Some days we spotted up to four on a single dive, along with reef sharks, but here’s the kicker – we always saw sharks on every dive that we made in Raja!
If you’re limited on time make sure you try and dive these very special spots in the Coral Triangle and Raja while you’re there, if only for a day:
Shark Rock is worth every bit of the work you put in, on account of the colder waters and stronger currents you’re likely to encounter. But with the currents and a bit of cold, the pelagics also come out to play! Whatever you do, don’t leave your camera behind.
Manta Sandy in a shallow lagoon near Arborek Island is unlike most other places in the wild that are home to manta rays. Settle down on calm white sands in warm crystalline waters where you’ll find, that surprisingly, there are almost no strong currents at all, and still, the Mantas will come. They arrive in threes and fours and fives, looping and gliding in perfect symmetry, like synchronized swimmers performing the most graceful ballet.
Protip:What you will need in advance, are permits (park rangers are now sensibly limiting how many people can dive here at the same time – about 20), and patience.
Melissa’s Garden in Raja Ampat is considered one of the best dive spots in the world. I saw my first wobbegong shark here, within four minutes of my descent at 17m! Just a little further we encountered schools of curious batfish, parrot and angelfish, surgeonfish, clownfish playing peekaboo in anemones, armies of soldierfish, large puffer fish, a blue lobster and still more wobbegongs. The clams here are large enough to sleep in! At it’s deepest, Melissa’s Garden is about 35m.The shallows, which are filled with beautiful soft and hard corals, and giant sea fans (home to the rare pygmy seahorse), eventually lead to a drop off where the currents are much stronger. Here we encountered barracuda baitballs, and at about 28m we had begun spotting whole schools of pelagics.
Protip: Dive Nitrox if you’re certified, so you have longer no-stop dive time where the currents are strongest and the sharks come out to play. Giant tuna, mackerel, marlin, barracuda… all these too, you’ll find, are where the currents are the strongest.
GIRLS JUST WANNA HAVE SUN
At the dock, while we waited for taxis to take us to the airport, each of us (finally) grumbling about minor cuts and scrapes and coral burns that we’d shown off for the past two weeks like cowboys sporting scars, or no-fly time (clearly our dopamine levels were dropping – there’s no diving for at least 18-24 hours before you fly), or long transit hours and the working Monday that loomed ahead of us, Kim (who I’d lovingly dubbed Kimmy Swimmy by now), my fabulous Nitrox instructor, nudged me to ask why I hadn’t picked pretty much any other flight out of Papua? “A half a day in Sorong is just so wrong, Nish” he laughed, and by the time my friends had left, leaving me to amuse myself at the dinky little airport, I knew it to be true.
Turning to the Internet for company was no fun either. Hey Instagram, guess what? #LiveaboardLife is probably the worst pun ever.
The glass of wine I nursed on-board my flight back helped to numb the reality of the 16-hour workdays that lay in wait for me, larger than life and patient as death. And yet when I closed my eyes, I discovered, that now, more often than not, I dreamt that I breathed under the sea
You gain a much deeper understanding of the richness of our ecosystem and learn how to support it – for instance the Raja Manta is equipped with marine toilets, provides ocean-friendly, biodegradable toiletries for divers (yet another thing you don’t have to pack), segregates and recycles everything, and also docked at Lembeh, where crew and guests jointly picked up trash and cleared a beach, just to show that even a little goes a long way. And you know how everyday has a sunrise and sunset – yeah, you’ll actually end up catching both, no matter what, and from the best vantage point that you could imagine too. Plus if you’re really lucky, there’ll be a day when a pod of dolphins find you, or you catch a rare salmon run. Welcome to the good life.
I wish I could sum up my Raja crossing in a few hundred words, but the truth is, even after years of seeing stuff that’s plain magical – count ’em, wrecks from World War I & II, 
We spotted the critically endangered hawksbill turtle as well as green turtles, sometimes up to three in one dive! Gentle currents in a landscape scattered with drop offs and giant walls of soft and hard corals make this a great place to drift dive. The occasional strong currents also mean you’ll see loads of schooling fish – tuna, jackfish, butterfly and triggerfish, snappers, fusiliers, even barracuda. At Ron’s Point, in southwest Bunaken – keep your eyes peeled for pelagic life. Right at the edge of the island’s fringing reef, is where you’re likely to spot sharks and rays like we did. The shallows here are also where you’re most likely to spot the elusive dugong. We tried thrice before we gave up, and only because our ship would have sailed into the night without us if we hadn’t grudgingly gotten back on board.
It’s strange how I would give up an arm and a leg to free dive with apex predators like the Great White given an opportunity, but freeze at the sight of a jelly under
Melissa’s Garden in Raja Ampat is considered one of the best dive spots in the world. I saw my first wobbegong shark here, within four minutes of my descent at 17m! Just a little further we encountered schools of curious batfish, parrot and angelfish, surgeonfish, clownfish playing peekaboo in anemones, armies of soldierfish, large puffer fish, a blue lobster and still more wobbegongs. The clams here are large enough to sleep in! At it’s deepest, Melissa’s Garden is about 35m.The shallows, which are filled with beautiful soft and hard corals, and giant sea fans (home to the rare pygmy seahorse), eventually lead to a drop off where the currents are much stronger. Here we encountered barracuda baitballs, and at about 28m we had begun spotting whole schools of pelagics.
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