Because Indonesia is the only place in the whole wide world where you can set out looking for an island populated entirely by midgets and land up diving with whale sharks. (Probably also the only place where the equivalent of the head of a county council will invite you to his house to meet the spirits of ancestral kings, too.)

I am currently “on assignment” as ponces have it, or “working” as I call it, on the arduous task of researching islands off Sulawesi for a mag. (I’m also setting up a tediously factual website devoted to Indonesian islands, one of many dog-ate-my-homework reasons you haven’t heard from me for a while.) I also have to research some food stuff, which is obviously terribly hard work, and some culture, and I’m collecting a few more stories as I go.

Anywise, this weekend I, quite literally, set out in search of an island full of little people and ended up diving with the biggest fish on earth. Here, have a splendid deserted beach pic. I’ve got loads more where that came from.

In the course of researching islands – AKA talking to people and then more people until you find someone who knows or conclude that the only thing to do is get out there and have a look — I came across two possible amazing stories. One is true, and one, the island of the midgets, is less so.

But let’s start with Pak Ilham. Ilham’s father, major-general Andi Mattalatta, was known as the Rooster of the East during his heyday. This was a tribute to Sultan Hasanuddin, the 17th-century leader who managed to unify Sulawesi’s population, most of whom were more interested in piracy (coast), blood sacrifices (highlands), fishing (islands) and internecine strife (all of the above) than in the larger colonial picture, and lead a heroic if doomed resistance to the Dutch forces.

When dad retired from the army, still only in his 30s, he decided that what Indonesia really needed was water-skiing. And I defy you to imagine any more splendid sight in a nation which loves a good parade, is absolutely addicted to uniforms, and is a sucker for a schmaltzy tune, whether on the guitar or, even better, karaoke, than this absolutely splendid 1950s Indonesian water-skiing video.

Here, have a gander. It’s great!

And so Ilham, following in his father’s footsteps, decided to introduce diving to Makassar. He is, I will realise, an orang besar (big man) in Sulawesi.

Unencumbered by fripperies such as a website, a Facebook page or even, for that matter, a sign, Ilham runs the Makassar Diving Centre, cunningly concealed behind the parking lot of Kampoeng POPSA, the vaguely Singapore-style hawker court he’s set up where dad used to do his waterskiing.

An Indonesia novice would assume that any business without a website or street signage would be barely functioning and, when it comes to diving, more likely to kill you than not. Far from it!

Pak Ilham is a NAUI-certified deep dive instructor, has been diving for 40-odd years, operates a resort on the island of Kapoposang, and has an absolutely bona fide dive boat with two well-maintained 200HP engines, plus gear, plus staff, plus a professional compressor set-up. Further, he has sunk sundry items, including a broken down minibus, a jetski and some substantial classical statues off the island of Kodingareng Keke, to create an impromptu coral garden.

I explain I’m doing a diving and islands story for an inflight mag. Pak Ilham says the boat’s going to Barranglompo and Samalona tomorrow, and why don’t I join? In fact, I could dive with his family this afternoon if I fancied it? Sadly, I’m too busy trying to work out which islands are which to go diving that day.

I ask, tentatively, about the midgets. “Hmmm….” he says doubtfully. “I think there USED to be many midgets on Langkai, but with better nutrition and less – what’s the word? — incest, there aren’t so many.”

Nonetheless – and I recognise that curiosity about people of small stature is neither the most noble nor most cerebral of instincts – I am beginning to fixate on this island. Not least because I know that I will kick myself later if I am 20 miles from an island possibly populated by midgets and don’t get there. Here, have another beach picture.

You meet a nice class of people diving, I always find – especially in the more out-of-the-way spots. Our group comprises Yuda, the captain and dive guide, plus the chap who looks after the boat, plus Bert, a marine biologist looking to revisit an island he worked on 30 years before, Angel, a Chinese-Indonesian dentist whose parents used to let their house to scientists including Bert, and Anwi, who I don’t talk to that much because she’s rather vomitous and I’m being lazy about speaking Indonesian, but is clearly an extremely good photographer.

Our first stop is Barranglompo, the type of densely-packed, villagey Indonesian island of which I’m very fond – rather like Pulau Derawan, in fact. In one of those glaring contradictions that would drive all but the hardest-core fan of Indonesia screaming up the wall, it’s simultaneously a scientific research base and a centre for harvesting and culturing products for aquaria. Further, most fishing is done using dynamite, an activity on which the only possible positive spin is that it’s safer for the end consumer than cyanide. (I am far from hippie-dippie about toxins in food, but I won’t touch small Indonesian fish unless they’re in a restaurant I know and trust.)

The diving is about as rubbish as you’d expect, with equipment problems adding an extra layer of magic to the sheer joy of diving on devastated sand in murk. However, it’s interesting to watch Bert at work, bagging his specimens neatly, and fab to watch Angel, who’s won prizes for underwater photography, doing her stuff too.

On land, it’s fascinating. They’re farming seahorses – poor little seahorses! They’re cultivating gloriously coloured giant clams. And they’re snatching soft coral after soft coral for some fancy aquarium somewhere, and storing them in concrete channels full of seawater.

We stop at the home of an old friend of Bert’s. He and his daughter – who’s just learned to dive with the current batch of scientists – welcome us in. He lost his son recently, in Kalimantan, diving, Angel tells me.

Out comes the mobile, and on goes the video, with footage of her big brother’s body being dragged from the water. Questions that my English mind consider intrusive, such as how bloated he was, go back and forth, and the ritual wailing stops as we pause the video to inspect the head wound they think killed him.

“He was spearfishing a big fish,” Angel explains.

“Oh,” I say. “So the fish took him and dragged him down?”

“Dragged him into something,” she says.

I find it difficult to look at his corpse. In my culture, death is private, secretive, almost every element of it, from care of the dying to preparing the body, from flower arrangements to diagnosis, is professionalised and hidden. I’ve been to cremations in Bali and watched bodies go up in flames, which I suspect is an easier way to process death than watching a sealed coffin slide behind a curtain, but my death taboo still stands.

His father brings out photos of his handsome son posing with enormous fish – 80- or 100-kilo monsters that could easily drag a spearfisherman to unsurvivable depths. Here I can say something. “He was a good-looking man,” I say. And he was. A stunner.

Death comes frequently in Barranglompo, I learn: as on the Philippine islands not so far from here, commercial diving is done hookah-style, using a pipe attached to modified truck brakes, with close-to-zero measures to prevent death from the bends or, for that matter, good old diesel fumes.

Samalona is our next stop, an island that’s on the backpacker radar already (the Millers spent some time here in 2013). Which is to say it’s bloody impossible to walk past Fort Rotterdam, the old Dutch trading fort in downtown Makassar, without both becak drivers and boatmen touting trips out to it.

The diving is better at Samalona. We’re all fundamentally tagging along as Bert, who’s been diving off interesting islands for a living for over thirty years – and can we all say three cheers for the absolutely bloody fantastic career choice of being a marine biologist?! – whizzes along the current looking for stuff, but there’s clearly interesting weird stuff to be seen when you’re not chasing after a coral-crazed scientist.

I request a stop on shore: it’s the dinkiest island and I want to take a look. You can walk across Samalona in approximately 90 seconds, and there really isn’t much to it, but I figure it might be a splendid place to pass a night or two – there aren’t just rooms but an entire house for rent — and I note that the warung sells beer. Yay!

I ask again about the little people, whose putative island is now whizzing around my head in big tabloid capitals – INDONESIA’S ISLAND OF THE INCEST DWARVES. Part of me, however, is beginning to wonder whether both this and the possibly-legendary leopard people up north may just be a genetically challenged group of individuals, rather than an amazing off-the-path story.

The name Langkai keeps coming up. Therefore I need to get to Langkai. Here, have another island picture. You’re welcome.

There is, of course, the actual commissioned element to arrange. I want to get to Kapoposang, where Ilham has his beach bungalows, again unencumbered by any form of digital marketing, which makes sense to a degree given there’s no phone signal on the island.

Obviously, the mag doesn’t pay expenses – who does, nowadays? But, when it gets around to it – that’s 60 days after publication or many months after work has been done — it does pay enough to cover a reasonable amount of research and travel, even if most of the profit comes in on other commissions around this base story.

We work out a deal where I’ll cover staff wages on the island, tip the crew, buy food for myself and purchase the not-inconsiderable quantity of petrol required to get to all these islands; boat, dives and gear come free.

So, I’ll go with Yuda and his helper – whose name I cannot remember, and by the time you’ve got horribly drunk with someone on an island it’s far too late to ask – to Kapoposang. We’ll stop at another island someone has told me about, which is apparently the prettiest of the group. We’ll dive Kapoposang and overnight in the resort.

Then in the morning we’ll pop in to check on the incest dwarves, stop at Kodaringeng Keke to check out the sunken bus, and head back to Makassar. This seems like a decent plan for the weekend.

It’s also, I realise, the kind of proper worky travel writing – as opposed to doing fun stuff and writing about it – that would drive my spawn absolutely bloody bonkers, or, rather, leave him sellotaped to his computer. He’s staying with friends on Bali, then off to school camp, while I explore.

I spend an absolutely splendid afternoon buying maps, sampling yet more of Makassar’s fantastic food, and meeting a chap who explains in patiently simple Indonesian how the hundreds of islands off these shores join up. I have neglected to bring my dictionary, but all this enforced Indonesian language conversation is helping my language along no end.

And setting out on the boat, I realise how very much I like my life. It’s a paradoxically pretty journey. Makassar is a major port so bigass tankers and container ships come right into the harbour, close to shore and right in the heart of town, although there’s a second at Paoetere for sailing ships, big fishing boats and public boats to sundry archipelagos.

Multi-storey blocks, container cranes and tankers fade behind us. An ocean studded with white-sand islands stretches ahead of us, clumps of forest just popping out of the sea. There HAS, I feel, to be something absolutely great out here.

And Kapoposang, two hours from Makassar by speedboat, is wonderful. We dive with sharks – two big ones that come a little close for my comfort, though Yuda’s relaxed and reeftips have hardly ever taken so much as a nip out of a human – not to mention turtles, tuna, trevally and barracuda, moray eels and pretty things.

I try and fail and try and fail to get the money shot of turtles taking off from the wall with its pretty sea fans. But I can’t get both turtle and wall into a composed shot.

And then Yuda and his mate, good Indonesian Muslims that they are, break out a crate of beer for sunset and I improve my Indonesian language skills yet more.

A fisherman swings by, through the shady forest that lines the white sand beach. There are whale sharks off the island, he says: eleven of them, following a school of tiny fish and krill that comes through regularly around this time of year.

He gives Yuda, who knows the islands backwards, directions to the spot.

“Do you want to see the whale sharks?” Yuda asks.

DAMN RIGHT I want to see the whale sharks. I cannot imagine a single diver who would not want to see the whale sharks. The gentle giants of the shark world, they cruise the globe following patterns that no one fully understands.

People fly thousands of miles just for the chance to swim, snorkel or dive with whale sharks. And I don’t have to choose between whale sharks and midgets – the whale sharks are actually en route! It’s a 100% Indonesian piece of serendipity. I’m super-chuffed I fronted up for the extra 50 litres of petrol.

More beer is drunk and I improve my command of Indonesian obscenities no end.

All of us are a little under the weather at 6am the next day – in fact, having missed the sunset due to washing, I almost miss the sunrise too. Following three hours of reasonably deep diving with five bottles of Bintang is not exactly what the dive books recommend, but I eat, hydrate and caffeinate, and we leave at 7 as planned.

The whale sharks’ presence is hard to miss. Every single fishing boat from every single tiny island is out here, stretched like strings of bunting along the pancake-flat sea. There’s joy in the air. The catch is boundless! Polystyrene crate after crate of tiny fish are loaded. Men grin below the makeshift turbans that shield them from the sun as they haul in nets and pick out their silver catch. Some boats are tag-teaming – running loads back to shore to store on ice so that others can continue to harvest this marine bounty.

Yuda pulls out a carrier bag and swaps some of the dreaded Aqua glasses to fill the bag with fish.

And, OMFG, a whale shark! The first one, maybe three meters long, leopard-spotted and graceful, glides beside our boat, a fleeting vision: we squeal and snatch at pictures.

But where are the rest? We to and fro among the fishing fleet, taking directions every which way. They’re always somewhere else, but there’s a big one, seven metres long, somewhere out there.

“Snorkel?” Yuda asks.

I’ve been stripped down to my culturally-more-appropriate vest-that-should-really-be-a-T-shirt and shorts-that-should-be-a-bit-longer-this-far-out snorkelling outfit for a while. Flippers on, and we’re in the current, me following Yuda. He shouts through his snorkel: another! There are mantas, too!

“Want to dive?” Yuda asks.

“Yes,” I say.

I must admit that I’ve retained some baseline diving trauma – rescue course notwithstanding – from Zac’s death drop in the Blue Hole. I love diving. But bottomless walls and strong currents make me nervous – despite the fact I love what you see down there.

Diving a brand new site, surrounded by fishing nets and fishing boats, in the open ocean with unknown currents, is a big step for me, and involves a lot of trust. I trust Yuda, not least because he went diving in Bali and decided against diving Tepekong, an amazing but famously difficult and dangerous dive site, because “he’d rather live”. (I might consider this when I bank my thousandth dive.)

“No more than fifteen metres, and not on the wall,” I say in rubbish Indonesian. The site is a sandy bottom that looks to me like the top of a sea mount, which means there could be all sorts of nasty currents – down, up, out to sea, down and out to sea… – around the edges. On this, it appears, Yuda and I are aligned. “Have you got reefhooks?”

Yuda has two serious-ass reefhooks: not tent pegs on a rope, but bona fide claw anchors. I take one, he takes the other, which means if something hideous happens with the current, or if we find a spot we want to stop at and the current’s too fast to stop, we can anchor ourselves to the reef.

I do my usual checks – I’m mildly OCD about pre-dive checks by many people’s standards, and make myself do them even when we might miss something like a whale shark – and roll backward off the boat, Yuda gives the signal, and down we go.

Seamounts are interesting places – I’ve dived with thresher sharks at one on Malapascua, and with hammerhead sharks off another on Malapascua. They seem to function a bit like service stations on the ocean road: sometimes they’ll have entire coral gardens and cleaning stations, with fish waiting for their larger clients to come along, sometimes they’re just flat and dull.

This one’s pretty bland, apart from the sharks, and decorated with long fishing nets rapidly filling with catch, which also can’t do the coral any favours. We’ve just got down when Yuda squawks through his regulator. There’s a whale shark cruising right above me, a juvenile, just three metres long.

I bang out a couple of photos, realise I won’t get a decent shot without a wide-angle lens and a strobe and exposure control, and resolve to just watch the sharks instead. This irritates Yuda, who can’t see why on earth someone would be in the water with the world’s largest fish and a camera and NOT take pictures, so he takes my camera, which I’m cool with. The fishing net shot above is his, and I think it’s really rather good.

Then we’re in the cloud of krill. It’s like diving in fog – I even think my mask has fogged, but when I look up to the surface or close up at my computer, there’s no fog there. I follow Yuda. For ten more minutes, we fin along the seamount, down and up over the unbeauteous corals and sea grass.

No more whale sharks. Yuda calls the dive. We only have a tank each, and another dive to do. Slowly, we ascend to safety stop depth.

And it’s my turn to squawk through the regulator. “Wark!” I yell, articulately, as we hang in the water.

There’s such a majesty to sharks, all kinds of shark. They just materialise out of the blue water, almost ghostlike, like Polaroids onto paper. One minute there’s nothing. The next, there’s a shark. And then they fade away again. Even scientists don’t know where sharks go, or even how they navigate – the best bet is a form of geomagnetic sensing in which sea mounts may play a part.

This one is perfect, the textbook picture if one had the timing and equipment.

It’s right behind Yuda, heading towards us, wide mouth gaping, sieving krill. Cleaner fish hang from its belly like streamers, feasting on parasites (fun fact! Sharks get STDs too).

It’s perfect, just textbook perfect, and as we emerge, we’re buzzing. White sand island, whalesharks, what could be better? Well, midgets, obviously.

And, I realise, I think this dive into the unknown has finally cleared my diving trauma.

While we’ve been diving, Yuda’s mate has been chatting midgets with the fishermen. They’re not on Langkai, the island we thought they were on, but Lanjukang, the one along from it, a pretty little place with a gorgeous golden sandbar.

There are only 15 families on Lanjukang – Langkai is a metropolis with 300 households! – but they and the fishermen who frequent the seamounts around here support a little warung. The lady has – yay! – coffee and – major yay! – believes Yuda when he explains in considerable detail to a group of curious islanders how the crazy bule doesn’t like sugar or even sweet milk, or anything sweet, not even sedikit, ta muchly.

We sit in the makeshift bale and chat as I drink my coffee. Apparently, two Spanish and American tourists came through only a month ago, making Lanjukang quite the destination and causing quite the stir. It boasts a rather optimistic sign with a map of the island likely created long after dynamite fishing nuked the reef.

There’s a man who knows the midgets, and can bring us to them, but we’ll have to pay if we want a photo. Yuda thinks I want a photo. For some reason, he also thinks I’m writing a book, or, possibly, he’s just decided that people here will understand the idea of writing a book better than they will the idea of an inflight magazine based in a country that’s neither Indonesia nor England. I resolve to bring mag copies with me next time I do this sort of thing.

I don’t really want a picture of me with some people of short stature (hell, I’ve been to Hobbit House in Manila). I wanted to find the island of the midgets. However, this appears to be the island of the midgets, and, further, the midgets’ significantly-larger but still-not-actually-terribly-tall brother is coming to meet us, so I’ll pay for the photo and bung a few tourist rupiah into the economy.

Amazingly, the midgets’ brother speaks some English! He has an Indonesian book of conversational English, and assuming that the English conversation you want to make is an outtake from Brief Encounter – “Good afternoon! This is my friend, Smith!” – I’m sure it could work rather well.

And, lo!, behind him, his brother appears. He’s about up to my waist but in proportion, with bandy legs and a facial structure that suggests Pak Ilham may have been on the nail about inbreeding. In the days before the outboard motor, when the siblings were born, the genetic pool must have been tiny. We make introductions, and off we trot to Casa Midget – or, rather Casa Brother Midget.

I don’t want to take these people’s photo. Or, rather, if I had the time to do a proper study and place them in their home and their environment and talk to them properly which would require a translator since my Indonesian isn’t good enough for nuance, I would like to. As it is, I’m objectifying these poor people horribly.

I realise, in fact, that I hadn’t got any further in thinking about this story than: “Find out if the island of the midgets exists.”

There are two midget brothers and a sister. The men work in fishing. The sister keeps home. We are all equally unenthusiastic about the picture, but Yuda takes one, me a giant in a wetsuit with mask hair, the three of them together. And, at least when I look at the picture, it really is me who looks out of place and wrong-sized, not them.

Then we talk money. Yuda thinks 100,000 is fair. I hand over 100,000. The brother wants another 50,000, at which I initially baulk – that’s crazy money out in the badlands of the Spermonde islands – but he explains it’s 50,000 for each of the siblings, which, both Yuda and I agree, is fair. Dimly suspecting the life of people of short stature on a remote Indonesian island is far from the bliss of that gold sand beach, I don’t nego.

Job done, we head back to the boat. “They live in the forest, the midgets,” Yuda remarks darkly as we leave. I am still processing this.

The post THIS Is Why I Love Indonesia appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

The one who didn’t rape and kill and pillage. Didn’t enslave workers to dig pits for war gold, then bayonet them when the work was done. (When treasure hunters on Halmahera find an Indonesian corpse or two, they know they’re getting close.)

In fact, Teruo met his wartime girlfriend when other soldiers were trying to mutilate her, and he recognised the magic which prevented them…

But this story’s not really about Maria. Though she’s alive, still. 105 years old, her magic as strong as ever, living the quiet life in Western Halmahera.

It’s about Teruo. Teruo Nakamura, the man who fought the Second World War until 1974.

He was famous once, Teruo. The last soldier, the absolute last soldier, of World War II. A man who never surrendered.

He outlasted the holdouts who fought on into the 50s, outlasted the stragglers into the 60s and carried on fighting his private war, deep in the crumpled forests of Morotai island, right up until 1974.

And, no, he didn’t surrender then, either.

How did they catch him? Well, there’s a story. And it’s not the one you’ll read in the books.

He was a simple guy, Nakamura. An aboriginal from the island we call Taiwan today. A farmer, basically. Raised in places like these. He was posted first to Halmahera, when things looked bright for the Imperial Army, then to Morotai as MacArthur’s troops steamed inexorably north, young men took to the sky in kamikaze planes, entire units blew themselves up with grenades rather than surrender…

And then he fought on. For decades.

Could he not believe that Japan would ever surrender? That the war would ever be over?

Could he really, really not have known the war was over?

It’s hard to imagine the carnage of his war. The Allies overran Morotai within a fortnight. Dropped thousands of tonnes of TNT on Halmahera within a single day. Nakamura was with a commando unit. They got separated. His last orders?

Fight on.

Which, in his way, he did.

The Allies weren’t bothered with mopping up holdouts, wasting manpower on suicidal crazies out there in the forest. They set up a command base for a while, then pushed onwards, northwards, to the Philippines.

The Japanese soldiers on Morotai, as on other islands in the Pacific, lost contact with Tokyo in January 1945. Fought on, with no radio contact, until — well, until someone came to tell them otherwise.

And Nakamura? He did the same, only for longer. Much, much longer.

Once he realised he’d be a long time waiting, he built a little shack, by a river, in a valley between two mountains. Scratched a crude map on a stone. Tamed a wild boar and a moleyu bird for company (and eggs). And farmed simple things: cassava, bananas, coconuts…

And waited. And waited. For almost thirty years, for the victorious Japanese Army to come and find him, and bring him home, a hero…

How did they catch him?

Well… An Indonesian airforce patrol flying over the jungle noticed his hut and his little farm, the story goes, and posted a reward for his capture.

But he was cunning, Nakamura. And whatever else happened, he wouldn’t be taken alive.

What did they do?

He told him! Many, many times he told him. But he never believed it. Never believed…

So they let him be, the folk from the village. This half-crazed, half-naked Japanese soldier out in the jungle, farming.

Until the reward, of course. Though nobody, to be honest, wanted to admit they’d known he was out there the whole time. Could be trouble, you see. Big trouble. Harbouring an enemy combatant for almost thirty years…

Nakamura was hard to catch. When anyone comes, he had a cave, a hiding place in the mountains. He would take the bird, call the pig, and run in there to hide.

They asked the guide. And he said, “The only thing you can do for Nakamura is this. Find yourself some Japanese uniforms and a Japanese flag. Learn to count in Japanese, like soldiers. And learn the Japanese anthem.”

So the Indonesian soldiers dressed up in Japanese uniforms, marched military style to a Japanese count, sang the anthem, raised the flag and Nakamura …

Of all this extraordinary story, this is the bit which really got to both of us.

I imagine him, when he heard the victorious army, marching to find him, after thirty years of solitary struggle. That utter, utter leap of delirious, disbelieving joy, when he heard the Japanese anthem. Running from his hiding place towards them, towards his army, his struggle justified…

And then?

Gotcha!

No Japanese. No victory. His home island a new country, now, an electronics mecca. His wife long remarried. His children adults…

And, no, no hero’s welcome for Nakamura, either. Quite the reverse, in fact. In the end, back in Japan, they damned him as a coward…

For a long while after this, they say, the patch of forest where he had his cave was off-limits. A restricted zone.

Why?

Yes! That’s what they were hiding there. The gold.

In the village, they believe this. They hunt for it, the few who know the secret. And a second secret, too.

There was another one.

Still now?!

I run a calculation. Even a young commando from 1945 would be well into his 80s by now. And why, why on earth would he stay?

Not since April. The last time he came was April. They are worried about him. They think he might be dead.

And the location of the gold, if there were such a thing, will have died with him, claiming its last life.

Though it doesn’t stop them looking for it. Combing the tunnels and caverns which wind through the mountains, like the guys we met on the mainland, nothing more to their name than a bamboo ladder, a rope and some bamboo winding gear, a plastic bucket, a torch, a pickaxe and a shovel, digging their way down to unimaginable riches and, if they can conceal it from the government, a one way ticket out of here…

The post The Last Soldier appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

And, when you can snorkel with giant manta rays, turtles and jellyfish defanged by evolution off Pulau Derawan in Borneo and see pretty much all the Togian islands have to offer (bar the plane) without fronting up for cylinders and BCD, it makes sense for any traveler with more time than money to be a little picky about where they actually dive.

An active undersea volcano, fringed with bright corals, falls well into the “yep, I’ll dive that!” category. One of almost 50 newly catalogued dive sites off Halmahera in East Indonesia, it nestles just offshore from Galela, only a couple of hours by dive boat from Tobelo.

The pure black sand beach, glittering with shards of mother of pearl, fringed by coconut palms and encircled by rocky coves full of lobsters, submarine hot springs and coral means there’s plenty for snorkellers too.

But descending into the crater itself? Wow!

The coral around Halmahera has suffered from dynamite fishing (now banned) – with the exception of the west coast, where a longstanding military base has meant explosions of any kind are a VERY bad idea.

As early as five metres, we see gorgeous fan corals, gigantic feathery, heathery creations which waft like slender pink and purple ferns in the current. Sparkling reef fish flitter through bright, branching tabular corals in gold, orange and yellow, like a myriad butterflies in a fantasy garden.

Descend further? And, oh my lord. A narrow swim-through between bright, towering overhangs populated by seaslugs, nudibranch, flirting reef fish and even the odd seahorse, opens dramatically to reveal schooling fish, swarming like bees, enormous groupers, the odd barracuda, squadrons of pennant fish trailing dorsal fins like banners striped in yellow, black and white…

Steam from the lava below emerges generally as hot springs, making the water shimmer with marine heat haze, though clouds of sandy smoke form an underwater echo of the clouds of gritty ash which burp from the low volcanoes on the mainland.

And then, there it is, the crater edge. Tiny, star-shaped violet corals flower like underwater daisies on coral skeletons and volcanic pebbles dyed a ferric orange and sand whose bony pallor calls to mind volcanic dust. It’s almost unbelievably beautiful.

And, wow!

I’ve said before that diving’s like flying. Here you’re finning, soaring over the edge, down into an active volcano, into a classic cone with vents hissing oily mineral steam around you.

The fish get bigger, the hot springs more dramatic, with slabs of coral still bright even at this depth, furry soft corals flourishing on the death of the old, the sort of nudibranches (bright, underwater critters) that get experts who’ve seen the big stuff a zillion times all excited.

We descend to 32 metres, by my gauge (memo to self: must buy a dive computer), 25 by the divemaster’s account. Deep enough for me, anyway, to get a hit of “hello trees, hello flowers, hello volcano!” nitrogen narcosis equivalent to a large martini or a medium reefer.

You know. Or maybe you don’t. You get a fin in the face. Figure you should stay still a while until the finning folk are safely out of face range.

So you just hover there, 100+ feet under the sea, gurning at the lovely daisies and the furry corals, while your left brain says, “Woot! Crater! We must go deeper! Woo! Down to the bottom, babe!”, your right brain says, “You’re narced. Don’t be f*cking stupid”.

Then your left brains says, “Woot! We’re hovering! We’re flying, man! Let’s reach down and stroke those purdy corals!” And your right brain, regardless, does all the sensible stuff like checking your remaining air, your pressure, the whereabouts of your dive buddy plus divemaster, and taking you back up…

To those dazzling rocky walls. And a truncation after the chick who’s diving with us hits her head, barrel rolls, can’t see us and surfaces far too fast.

I look around. She’s nowhere. Not above me. Not below me. Not behind me. Not in front of me. Not to either side of me…

The dive master signals me to stay and powers off upwards, and I misinterpret his: “Stay there, I’ll come back and complete the dive if everything’s OK” signals as “Follow me.”

At 5 metres, my legs tiring with his speed and my brain (totally unnarced by now) beginning to worry, he does the same shit again. I read it as “Stay there, count off your 5-metre safety stop and then surface.” Which, to his bewilderment, I do.

Though, in all honesty, I don’t think hanging out solo at 20+ metres is a smart idea for anyone sans dive computer or time piece. Let alone a muppet like me…

Actually, for a pretty new diver like me, this was a fairly challenging dive. My weighting was uneven – for some reason, there was only one weightbelt between three – which, combined with quite a bit of mild but unpredictable current means you list and roll like a pissed-up sailor until your leg muscles make friends with your brain and allow your instincts to take over.

The oily, thermocline heat haze from the vents dramatically reduces visibility once you’re in one, while sending you upwards if you don’t adjust your buoyancy fast. It’s not as dramatic as in the freshwater volcano lake I dived back in Coron, but the lower visibility here meant much less advance warning.

Anywise… A second dive is technically easier (Lynn and I chat, and buddy up more firmly: we go from a 3-0 formation to a 2-1). More dazzling corals, more gorgeous reef fishes, more big fellas, more sparkling colour.

The highlight? A deep, dark maw in a coral cliff, black, vertiginous and terrifying as an entrance to the mouth of Hades, whence an ominous warmth and murky fragments issue forth, and lobsters, inter alia, hang out enjoying the warmth.

Now, I’m no expert. But I’m guessing this place would be paradise for diving geeks, and quite possibly marine biologists too. There are at least four known bird species unique to Halmahera, plus several butterflies – and these are only the ones that folk have bothered to classify.

God knows how many uncatalogued species are hanging out down here, just waiting for those with the technical skills and knowledge to handle the conditions and identify them.

At the surface, we catch up with my spawn, who’s been enjoying snorkeling in the company of the friends we’re hanging out with (and splashing about with me between dives).

We agree that Yus, our divemaster, will take him down to 5 or 6 metres on his secondary air-source using some of his remaining air, while I follow behind on some of mine as a reserve in case any shit goes wrong.

Junior, who’d been a little miffed that the dive centre’s smallest dive kit was a medium (on the big side even for me), and the site was too deep for him to dive, plugs in like a right little trouper. And he finally gets his chance to add an undersea volcano to his fairly impressive tally of live volcanoes explored.

We find an enormous lobster nestled below an orange coral, surrounded by lurid purple anemones trailing tendrils like feathers. Soar over those spiky coral bushes, one a brilliant scarlet. Progress through the oily texture of thermoclines. He’s still talking about the scarlet corals today.

Like I say, I’m no expert. But if you’re in the area, go do this thing. It’s beautiful. And if you’ve never dived before, go learn. With or without the narc effect, it’s the closest most of us will get to space travel.

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