I wanted to post this here, in case someone looking into Raja Ampat could find it helpful.
First - I'm going to have a lot of opinions below, so it's nice to have some frame of reference to my point of view:
My wife and I have been diving since 2006. We have 400-500 dives logged. Most of our diving is in the Caribbean. Living in the south central US, Central America is a quick trip. Prob more than half our dives are in Cozumel, but we also like diving independently in Bonaire. We enjoyed the same at Curacao. Roatan, Belize. We did a Liveaboard in Raja Ampat, and have done one before in Egypt - the BDE 7 day route out of Hurghada. The only pacific diving we have done together was off the Mexican coast - down near Puerto Vallarta a long time ago, which is "meh" diving, but hey - when you live in Oklahoma you are just happy to see your fins. I've also logged a few tanks in some other places on some work trips - like Okinawa. We are experienced, but 90% of our experience is in waters we are pretty familiar with. Places where you either drift with the current or the current is low enough that you you swim against it on the first half of your dive, and you come back with it on the 2nd half. We are in our late 40s, nearly 50 in good physical shape for a couple of that age, however suffer from what many folks coming up on 50 suffer from: arthritis in joints - not a problem swimming, but my wife's knee will light up after enough use, especially on stairs...and for me a shoulder that had rotator cuff repair in my late 30s has never been the same. Our bodies will perform tasks, but as you age, it comes at a cost.
OK - that felt like a lot of info, but there will be some details where you might compare notes with my experiences and if you are under 35, you may take a different view of those experiences.
Below I cover our route, our layover cities, and non diving stuff...if you don't care about that scroll down to "DIVING"
Our route: I bought our tickets on airline miles which always leads to a hell of a poor route.
We left Friday morning, and spent a couple hours in Chicago, then took the long flight to Japan, spent 6 hours there - used the lounge, got a shower and food - and then took the relatively short 9 hour flight to Jakarta.
We wanted to get a sense of Indonesia, outside of typical tourism so we spent a couple of nights in Jakarta. This gave time for any missing bags to catch up to us, if that happened, gave us some time to adjust jet lag, and time to explore.
Jakarta: Taxi's are cheap relative to North America. In fact, everything is cheap relative to North America. Look into roaming your cell phone plan - for us it was $10 a day for unlimited date/voice/txt. We could have done a local sim, but for $30 didn't want to bother - just roamed our ATT plan. Signal in Jakarta was plentiful enough.
In our time there we visited the national monument, walked the government area around it (really the borders of the monument is a nice walk, in one of the cleanest part of Jakarta you will find).
We wandered into a big, very big, local gathering in a park/square called Taman Fatahillah. I know what 10,000 people gathered in an area looks like, so I would guess there was 20-30,000 people in the area. Shopping, eating, street food, street music performances - people just gathering and hanging out on a Sunday. It was great. It's worth reinforcing for english speaking travellers. As an english speaker you are accustom to being fortunate that english is one of the most common 2nd languages in the world. Jakarta is not often travelled by english speakers - you aren't going to meet many english speakers. Google translate is your friend...you don't even need data for it...you type something in your language, show it to them - try to stick to yes/no questions or questions they can answer with gestures. People were very kind with dealing with a foreigner. That said, in most of Indonesia we were exotic. In Jakarta we experienced our first folks who wanted to take pictures with us, just because of our exotic appearance, height, clothes. It was fairly gentle there - you would run into folks. It lead to some great conversations - met a school group at the national monument and had a wonderful exchange with the teacher and a student working on his english.
It's like anyplace, every once in a while I got the vibe that someone didn't appreciate us being some place, but we are talking about literally 1 in every 100,000 people.
Jakarta reminds me of India.
We visited a few other places, their is a theme park area called Ancol. They have an aquarium, zoo like area, other areas. We visited the zoo area, and 'bird land'. It' was very inexpensive. Birdland was great. Everything I'm mentioning is on google maps.
Oh - that reminds me - taxis. If you are going to be there a while, download the bluebird app - bluebird is a local brand of taxis. The app works like uber or lyft. You can order bluebird or bluebird "silver" (nicer car) - prices aren't bad. The time it takes to get from point A to point B is very relative to time of day...early morning before 7am things go fast, all day long everything takes a long time.
We also walked a lot.
Places to eat: the most frustrating thing we found was that places would not always be open according to hours we found on the internet. They might close earlier, be closed that day, or be closed for a private event (Weddings on two different occasions). In general, in Jakarta, be willing to go with the flow. If something doesn't work out the way you thought it would, change gears. Improvisation should be a skill carried by any potential visitor.
Oh it's worth saying...dog is available on the menu in Indonesia. Depending on where you are going they might offer it. I can't remember seeing it in Jakarta but in Sorong if you see rica-rica, RW, or B1 - that's dog. I eat things that other cultures don't - so I don't have a lot of personal malice against people that eat dog, but I was halfway through my trip before someone told me what to look out for.
We visited places I'm not mentioning - it was all good fun, though it's a densely populated city in a developing country. At the end of days you will be ready for some peace in your hotel room.
We didn't eat much street food - but certainly ate at local shacks/hole in the wall on our visit. "Mineral water" (bottled water) is what we stuck to for liquids. We had no stomach issues.
Ok, after 3 nights we few the midnight flight from Jakarta to Sorong - direct on Garuda. Garuda offers you 1 carry on, 1 personal item (purse, laptop bag), and 20KG of checked bag. If you have a dive bag, they will allow 1 extra bag up to 23KG. They didn't make us prove our heaviest bag was scuba...they just took our word for it. The Jakarta airport has plenty of options for catching a bite before the flight. Most of the options are before you go through security to the gates. Their are a few things after the gates - but not many open after midnight. The airport is loud and chaotic before gate security, and quiet after.
The flight was uneventful. Garuda service was fine. They flew 737 - the 2 exit rows have more legroom than most of economy, but may not lean back.
We had 2 nights in Sorong before our liveaboard. We arrived at 6am, was at the hotel by 7am. Our room was not ready so we opened a big, grabbed bathing suits, headed to the pool. They had a shower available at the pool - so we rinsed off - then had a soak in the hot tub, and then fell asleep in pool chairs. Around 10am our room was ready and someone came for us. We stayed at the Rylich. It was fine. Not bad. I didn't care for the breakfast much but it was fine.
While in Sorong we walked the first day and tried some places to eat. Sorong, in it's way was far more stimulating to walk around in than Jakarta. In Jakarta - we were an odd site but didn't attract MUCH attention. In Sorong you would have thought we were famous. Children will call at you smile and wave "Hey Mister! Mister!" adults as well. People would stop a car, pull over and take a picture with us. About 20% of people were indifferent to us, and 80% would: wave, smile, call out, want a picture, give us a little honk. If you like to walk alot...it's coming.
Getting around in Sorong. Walking is fine. There is no side walk. It can get hot after 9am. That said, if you don't mind heat and like adventure - walk on. If you see yellow vans - they will give you a little beep. They are a sort of unofficial bus. They will drive up a road. You get in, for a flat rate you take them until you see a place you need to turn, then tell them you want off. They stop some place, you get out, walk to the next road/turn and find a new yellow van. I can't remember the fee - 5000 IDR, 7000 IDR? 15k = 1 USD, its' cheap.
If you have a day of things planned, get a taxi by the hour. Your hotel can set it up for ease, it's going to be 100,000-120,000 IDR per hour with some number of hours minimum like 2. 100k IDR is like $6.50. So it's 6.50 per hour. That's a bargain at twice the price. We lucked out, our driver had pretty good english and liked to talk. This is where I learned about the dog meat. We visited the Buddhist temple, a few other places, some stores. It was a nice day and I learned more about Indonesia talking with the driver for our 4-5 hour outing than I had yet.
First - I'm going to have a lot of opinions below, so it's nice to have some frame of reference to my point of view:
My wife and I have been diving since 2006. We have 400-500 dives logged. Most of our diving is in the Caribbean. Living in the south central US, Central America is a quick trip. Prob more than half our dives are in Cozumel, but we also like diving independently in Bonaire. We enjoyed the same at Curacao. Roatan, Belize. We did a Liveaboard in Raja Ampat, and have done one before in Egypt - the BDE 7 day route out of Hurghada. The only pacific diving we have done together was off the Mexican coast - down near Puerto Vallarta a long time ago, which is "meh" diving, but hey - when you live in Oklahoma you are just happy to see your fins. I've also logged a few tanks in some other places on some work trips - like Okinawa. We are experienced, but 90% of our experience is in waters we are pretty familiar with. Places where you either drift with the current or the current is low enough that you you swim against it on the first half of your dive, and you come back with it on the 2nd half. We are in our late 40s, nearly 50 in good physical shape for a couple of that age, however suffer from what many folks coming up on 50 suffer from: arthritis in joints - not a problem swimming, but my wife's knee will light up after enough use, especially on stairs...and for me a shoulder that had rotator cuff repair in my late 30s has never been the same. Our bodies will perform tasks, but as you age, it comes at a cost.
OK - that felt like a lot of info, but there will be some details where you might compare notes with my experiences and if you are under 35, you may take a different view of those experiences.
Below I cover our route, our layover cities, and non diving stuff...if you don't care about that scroll down to "DIVING"
Our route: I bought our tickets on airline miles which always leads to a hell of a poor route.
We left Friday morning, and spent a couple hours in Chicago, then took the long flight to Japan, spent 6 hours there - used the lounge, got a shower and food - and then took the relatively short 9 hour flight to Jakarta.
We wanted to get a sense of Indonesia, outside of typical tourism so we spent a couple of nights in Jakarta. This gave time for any missing bags to catch up to us, if that happened, gave us some time to adjust jet lag, and time to explore.
Jakarta: Taxi's are cheap relative to North America. In fact, everything is cheap relative to North America. Look into roaming your cell phone plan - for us it was $10 a day for unlimited date/voice/txt. We could have done a local sim, but for $30 didn't want to bother - just roamed our ATT plan. Signal in Jakarta was plentiful enough.
In our time there we visited the national monument, walked the government area around it (really the borders of the monument is a nice walk, in one of the cleanest part of Jakarta you will find).
We wandered into a big, very big, local gathering in a park/square called Taman Fatahillah. I know what 10,000 people gathered in an area looks like, so I would guess there was 20-30,000 people in the area. Shopping, eating, street food, street music performances - people just gathering and hanging out on a Sunday. It was great. It's worth reinforcing for english speaking travellers. As an english speaker you are accustom to being fortunate that english is one of the most common 2nd languages in the world. Jakarta is not often travelled by english speakers - you aren't going to meet many english speakers. Google translate is your friend...you don't even need data for it...you type something in your language, show it to them - try to stick to yes/no questions or questions they can answer with gestures. People were very kind with dealing with a foreigner. That said, in most of Indonesia we were exotic. In Jakarta we experienced our first folks who wanted to take pictures with us, just because of our exotic appearance, height, clothes. It was fairly gentle there - you would run into folks. It lead to some great conversations - met a school group at the national monument and had a wonderful exchange with the teacher and a student working on his english.
It's like anyplace, every once in a while I got the vibe that someone didn't appreciate us being some place, but we are talking about literally 1 in every 100,000 people.
Jakarta reminds me of India.
We visited a few other places, their is a theme park area called Ancol. They have an aquarium, zoo like area, other areas. We visited the zoo area, and 'bird land'. It' was very inexpensive. Birdland was great. Everything I'm mentioning is on google maps.
Oh - that reminds me - taxis. If you are going to be there a while, download the bluebird app - bluebird is a local brand of taxis. The app works like uber or lyft. You can order bluebird or bluebird "silver" (nicer car) - prices aren't bad. The time it takes to get from point A to point B is very relative to time of day...early morning before 7am things go fast, all day long everything takes a long time.
We also walked a lot.
Places to eat: the most frustrating thing we found was that places would not always be open according to hours we found on the internet. They might close earlier, be closed that day, or be closed for a private event (Weddings on two different occasions). In general, in Jakarta, be willing to go with the flow. If something doesn't work out the way you thought it would, change gears. Improvisation should be a skill carried by any potential visitor.
Oh it's worth saying...dog is available on the menu in Indonesia. Depending on where you are going they might offer it. I can't remember seeing it in Jakarta but in Sorong if you see rica-rica, RW, or B1 - that's dog. I eat things that other cultures don't - so I don't have a lot of personal malice against people that eat dog, but I was halfway through my trip before someone told me what to look out for.
We visited places I'm not mentioning - it was all good fun, though it's a densely populated city in a developing country. At the end of days you will be ready for some peace in your hotel room.
We didn't eat much street food - but certainly ate at local shacks/hole in the wall on our visit. "Mineral water" (bottled water) is what we stuck to for liquids. We had no stomach issues.
Ok, after 3 nights we few the midnight flight from Jakarta to Sorong - direct on Garuda. Garuda offers you 1 carry on, 1 personal item (purse, laptop bag), and 20KG of checked bag. If you have a dive bag, they will allow 1 extra bag up to 23KG. They didn't make us prove our heaviest bag was scuba...they just took our word for it. The Jakarta airport has plenty of options for catching a bite before the flight. Most of the options are before you go through security to the gates. Their are a few things after the gates - but not many open after midnight. The airport is loud and chaotic before gate security, and quiet after.
The flight was uneventful. Garuda service was fine. They flew 737 - the 2 exit rows have more legroom than most of economy, but may not lean back.
We had 2 nights in Sorong before our liveaboard. We arrived at 6am, was at the hotel by 7am. Our room was not ready so we opened a big, grabbed bathing suits, headed to the pool. They had a shower available at the pool - so we rinsed off - then had a soak in the hot tub, and then fell asleep in pool chairs. Around 10am our room was ready and someone came for us. We stayed at the Rylich. It was fine. Not bad. I didn't care for the breakfast much but it was fine.
While in Sorong we walked the first day and tried some places to eat. Sorong, in it's way was far more stimulating to walk around in than Jakarta. In Jakarta - we were an odd site but didn't attract MUCH attention. In Sorong you would have thought we were famous. Children will call at you smile and wave "Hey Mister! Mister!" adults as well. People would stop a car, pull over and take a picture with us. About 20% of people were indifferent to us, and 80% would: wave, smile, call out, want a picture, give us a little honk. If you like to walk alot...it's coming.
Getting around in Sorong. Walking is fine. There is no side walk. It can get hot after 9am. That said, if you don't mind heat and like adventure - walk on. If you see yellow vans - they will give you a little beep. They are a sort of unofficial bus. They will drive up a road. You get in, for a flat rate you take them until you see a place you need to turn, then tell them you want off. They stop some place, you get out, walk to the next road/turn and find a new yellow van. I can't remember the fee - 5000 IDR, 7000 IDR? 15k = 1 USD, its' cheap.
If you have a day of things planned, get a taxi by the hour. Your hotel can set it up for ease, it's going to be 100,000-120,000 IDR per hour with some number of hours minimum like 2. 100k IDR is like $6.50. So it's 6.50 per hour. That's a bargain at twice the price. We lucked out, our driver had pretty good english and liked to talk. This is where I learned about the dog meat. We visited the Buddhist temple, a few other places, some stores. It was a nice day and I learned more about Indonesia talking with the driver for our 4-5 hour outing than I had yet.
