First Expedition

It has been a year. We couldn’t wait to return to Pasir Hitam spending our summer 2017 holiday there, a kind of adventure holiday in the nature. We do not have a house yet and the village where one can find some “warung” (little shops) is about 20 minutes by boat.

Having our two kids with us was pretty much challenging but we were so excited to go for our first expedition: camping, glamping, diving, snorkeling, beach fun, exploring the nature, eating fresh food from the garden and freshly caught fish, and enjoying the view without any tourist.

Our preparation covered a long list of things we would need primarily and secondarily for our comfort. There were things we brought from Switzerland like our family tent, water filter, our dive gear and medications. The rest of the things we bought in Indonesia: We bought our dive compressor and dive tanks in Bali then shipped to Manado. The generator, kitchen appliances, tools, food and other things we bought in Bitung and Manado. Belgis came earlier to Bitung to organize all the preparation with the help of her sister Ninang and other family.

We gathered all our stuff in Bitung then we transported them with a mini truck to Manado harbour on a Tuesday morning, to be shipped to Daruba (Morotai) by the passenger boat KM Geovani in the afternoon. It was a day of adventure to organize all this. We’re glad that everything were well loaded in the boat and that Ninang and her son Ricky were also travelling to accompany all our stuff.

The boat has a stopover in Ternate, which makes it two nights until Morotai so we decided to get there instead by plane the next day, which only takes 2 hours.

In Daruba we have Dela (Belgis’s cousin) who organized the hotel, the boat transfer to Pasir Hitam and also showing us around including tasting an incredibly hot spicy “Aer Guraka” (ginger tea with palm sugar). Thursday morning at sunrise we went down the port on a Bentor ride (motor tricycle), the boat from Manado has arrived. The small taxi boat we rented could approach the big boat side by side and we could fetch and load our stuff directly. With the help of Leny ‘the boss of the port’, all went ok.

We left Daruba at around midday, the weather was excellent and we enjoyed the boat ride. It was so exciting! We ate our lunch “Nasi campur” on the boat and we had enough space for Liam to take a nap.

After about an hour, as we perceive Rao island, we noticed there was a heavy greyish cloud on top. We could only hope that it would pass but eventually it didn’t. It was pouring, raining really hard. We couldn’t see the island and we couldn’t find Pasir Hitam.

The boatmen asked us the direction, we told them to slow down the engine and approach slowly. Still it was difficult to point the location of Pasir Hitam. Infact we couldn’t recognize it maybe because we visited it only two times last year. At the end we realized that we have passed Pasir Hitam so we made a turn and finally arrived safely but completely wet, us, the kids and a few of our stuff.

When we arrived at the beach, there was nobody, even though Belgis has asked for four persons from the village to come to help unloading our things and helping us to settle down the first days. We were a little bit disappointed. Nevertheless we were happy to have finally arrived safely. The three boatmen were so helpful, not only that they unloaded all our stuff; they also helped us making our first temporary tent to sleep the first night by the beach.

We covered our stuff with a tarpaulin sheet and we could sleep all four adults, two kids in the tent. For dinner we still had some food from lunch. In the end, we had a wonderful first evening under the stars by the beach.