Last week in Sumatra

Fantastic soft white sand on a islet south of Telos

Today’s catch beach combing catches. We did buy the big Nautilus shells from two boys padeling by.

Beautiful cowrie shells but unfortunately occupied!

Nice anchorage south of Telos Town. Good holding as we enjoyed 32 knots squalls during night!

I suspect this is the creature making a lot of noise…

We are now in to our last week of Indonesian Visa allowance before we need to clear out. We arrived yesterday morning after a 16 h motor sail from the Mentawai Islands to Cubadek Island, a very beautiful anchorage a couple of hours south of Padang.  The outer Islands west of Sumatra are very isolated with almost zero international tourism except for a handful (mostly Australian) of surfers.  Unfortunately the “Sea of Plastic” is evident here as well as in many other places in SE Asia. Unless you keep your rubbish (or burn it) it gets thrown in to the water. Very sad and hopefully the government and tourism agencies will do something against these habits.

Happy, smiling faces every where.

Swimming young visitors at Siberut, Mentawai Islands

At the last anchorage, we felt as were back to San Blas, Panama.  Remote tribes known for being “hunters and gatherers” trade their goods by dugout canoes. The few existing “roads” are mostly usable for motorbikes.  Unfortunately “Farr Flyer” lost some money and apples (!) while we were snorkeling / diving a few miles out on the coral reefs.  So much for security and honesty… Thankfully a number of other valuables were not taken (or missed).

Spade fish,abut 25 cm height. VERY curious

View on the Cubadek Anchorage. Farr Flyer to the left, Tina P to the right.

Burning trash. Two out of 5 big monitor lizards and a monkey in view

Cubadek Paradiso, a small diving/snorkeling resort, run by Marco and Dominique allows some civilized habits we haven’t had for some time. Happy hour bar! Wifi that we can use from our anchorage!  Dinner booked at the restaurant tonight!  Also the wildlife is amazing both below and above the water. Today we counted 6-7 huge Monitor lizards (up to 2 meter long), a number of Macaque monkeys, a Giant Squirrel, Eagles etc. Wow.