Derawan Island lies closer to the main land of Kalimantan – about one and a half hours of sailing from Nabucco. The dive resort is a good deal older than the Nabucco Resort and contains dive centre, equipment and souvenir shops, a large restaurant and a good deal of bungalow-like cabins that did seem rather worn down.

New luxury cabins were being built when we visited but ours had holes in the ceiling, useless air conditioner, torn mosquito nets and shapeless mattresses. But, as we found out, the diving did more than make up for this.

The restaurant was situated almost at the end of a long, long jetty (where the guest accommodations used to be), and the chef Harod, originally from Surabaya on Java, was a really friendly guy. He did become more and more desperate during our stay as we ate so little of his otherwise excellent food. Very varied and plentiful and inclusive all the water and fruit juice you could possible drink. Only beer and soft drinks were charged as extras.

In our room we had two large bottles of complimentary water that we could refill in the restaurant as often as we wished, and we could take of advantage of the tea and coffee machine 24 hours a day.

Normally Harod offered a large and varied buffet but we had a say in everything as we were the only guests on Derawan – apart from numerous rats incessantly darting back and forth across the rafters.

Apparently Derawan Dive Resort catered a lot for the Japanese dive market, and we had landed in between two dive groups so all was peaceful and quiet.

Derawan Dive Resort – or DDR – had at least four dive boats which could hold from six to 12-14 divers. A trip to Derawan included two guided boat dives per day as well as unlimited diving from the jetty – three of them guided if we wanted to. That brought the guided dives up to five per day included in the price – quite generous.

Trips to the giant mantas off Sangalaki, the jellyfish lake on Kakaban and to Big Fish Country at Nabucco Island would be charged as extras depending on how many divers wanted to go.

Nobody checked our logbooks on arrival. This task usually fell to the dive guide on duty. In our case this was a guy named Samarand. We arrived on Derawan in the middle of the afternoon, and Samarand wanted to do our check dive straight away so we could get a fresh start the following morning.

Our check dive went well. We drifted slowly along the reef, and Samarand found numerous small and interesting stuff like stonefish, nudibranchs, ghost pipe fish, crabs and so on.

Back on the boat we realized that the reason he hadn't checked our logbooks was most likely that he was more or less blind, i.e. he was incredibly long-sighted and didn't own a pair of glasses. But he knew where to find all the things we wanted to see.

There were three dive guides, and they each took duty turns every three weeks. Our first day of diving turned out to be Samarand's last, and the next day we were handed over to Eddi, one of the best guides we had ever come across.

Eddi was born and raised in Balikpapan, and like the other dive guides he had signed a five-year contract with Derawan Dive Resort. During the course of the contract period (usually at the end) DDR was obligated to train the dive guide to become a PADI Divemaster.

Unfortunately for future guests Eddi's contract expired a few weeks later but I'm sure he wouldn't have any problems finding a good job elsewhere in the Indonesian archipelago.

Eddi's briefings were very thorough. He included neat drawings on a whiteboard very accurately specifying where to find all the cryptic critters that indeed turned out to be the hallmark of Derawan Island. Naturally, he included maximum depth, 50 minutes or 50 bar.

Although standard dive length was 50 minutes (and with five dives a day that seemed fair) we often stayed down for up till 70 minutes because we quite simply couldn't tear ourselves away from this paradise below the surface.

When we went night diving, full tanks had been placed at the end of the almost 200 metres long jetty, so we didn't have to drag them all the way from the dive centre on the island.

The whole attitude towards service and safety was radically different here than on Nabucco Island. We had barely taken our equipment off in the boats before some one pushed a small bottle of mineral water into our hands.

Everybody asked us what we wanted to do and see, and we didn't feel at all that we were any trouble as quite often was the case on Nabucco. The crew was nice and friendly and attentive and quick to help out.

Most dives took place 10-15 minutes from the dive centre. They had two oxy boxes but since we stayed so close to the island, they were only placed onboard on longer trips for instance to the other side of the island or to the islands of Sangalaki and Kakaban. And we were assured that everybody knew how they worked and indeed were trained in medical first aid.

Diving around Derawan Island was quite undramatic – a world of difference to Nabucco Island. The currents were easily manageable and quite often a fin kick now and then was enough to stay put and have a closer look.

The island was surrounded by a coral slope that in most places at some 20 metres turned into sandy bottom and only slowly disappeared out of sight. Only on the eastern side at sites like Shark Cave was it possible to go as deep as 40+ metres.

The macro stuff and not least the sheer variation were simply astounding. And we had the time to sneak up on very shy gobies and jawfish that usually would have fled into their boroughs before you even noticed them.

Pygmy seahorses were literally available on demand, and several of the fan corals had more than one of these dear little critters onboard.

We had orang-utan crabs in large tube sponges, stonefish almost fully buried in coral rubble, twospot turkeyfish parading in our torch lights, oriental flying gurnards flying and crocodile fish mating, juvenile dusky batfish, cockatoo waspfish, ribbon morays of all sex and ages, green turtles, Indonesian jawfish and crab-eye goby, lots of different ghost pipefish, and lots and lots of nudibranchs and flatworms in all their colourful splendour. This was indeed Critter Paradise.

On our check dive Samarand had shown us a stonefish more or less completely buried in the coral rubble. Only its beaky eyes and sour mouth were visible.

Passing the same spot a couple of days later we asked Eddi by pointing and gesticulating if he would dig it out with his stick, please, so we could have a closer look. If at all possible this made the stonefish look even more miserable than before. It hopped a bit from side to side but seemed to believe that it had indeed found the perfect spot. By using its enlarged pectoral fins as shovels it then began to dig itself into a new hole.

We did feel a little guilty afterwards – especially when we found out that Eddi hadn’t any idea of how poisonous the stonefish really was.

You could probably walk the outline of Derawan Island in 30-40 minutes or so. But still it was big enough for a small fishing village, a shipyard, a couple of kiosks, a primary school, a cemetery, a mosque, hens and ducks and quite a few tailless Japanese bobtail cats.

We had gotten wind of a villager who nursed green sea turtles on a government grant and wanted to pay him a visit. He collected newborn baby turtles on the beach, kept them in bowls and tubs and after a while released them into the vast blue sea.

The green turtle is the second largest of the marine turtle species outgrown only by the leatherback turtle. It can grow up to more than 1 meter in carapace size and weigh as much as 180 kg. Although it’s found in all tropical and sub-tropical oceans, Indonesia is one of only a few countries where sea turtles hatch all year round.

The survival rate of hatchlings is as low as 0.1% since an average of only 50% of all eggs hatch and then a large number of baby turtles are eaten by fish and other underwater predators. The number of eggs per clutch as laid by a female turtle in the still of the night averages slightly in excess of 100.

A survival rate of 0.1% means that none of these may survive at all – indeed, only one out of 1,000 baby turtles survive the first year. Is this enough to sustain the species? Some scientists believe that a minimum of 2.5 hatchlings per 1,000 is needed. It seems the green turtle needs all the help it can get.

When we called on this villager he had three large plastic bowls containing four, seven and 14 day-old baby turtles. They were irresistible, and we carefully held some of them in our hands – just for size – and were really amazed at how soft their tiny flippers were.

A batch of 14 day olds were about to be released during the next couple of days – after our leaving, of course – and the villager explained that this simple method resulted in significantly increased survival rates for Baby Green.

One day we took a stroll with Eddi through the village. He pointed out the house of the local rich man – the only house with real tiles on the porch and a satellite dish twice the size of everybody else’s. The local football team was out practicing in the midday sun – all wearing Ronaldo t-shirts. The local alderman hung out with some other men, and it seemed quite clear that he was a man everybody wanted to be on good terms with.

I told Eddi I had read somewhere that the primary reason for personal injuries in Indonesia was coconuts falling from the top of the palm trees. Eddi laughed his head off and replied that this was certainly news to him. In that very instant a sizeable coconut whizzed right passed his head and thumbed to the ground. Eddi screamed like an old woman jumping as high as his tiny, skinny legs could lift him. Never say never…

DDR had a much bigger transfer boat than Nabucco and although a heavy early morning fog had descended upon the Berau River forcing us to slow down considerably to avoid big floating tree trunks, the trip back to Tanjung Redeb on the mainland was about an hour shorter than when we came out to Nabucco Island.

After our wonderful but thoroughly exhausting experiences on the islands of Nabucco and Derawan we spent five or six days at the five-star Hotel Dusit in Balikpapan – the first 24 hours asleep.

A quick summary of the dive log revealed that we had totalled 31 dives at an average length of almost 60 minutes. This amounted to 1,830 minutes or 30.5 hours, and although our 12 dives at Derawan were fairly shallow with an average maximum depth of 18 metres our 19 dives at Nabucco averaged a maximum depth of 27 metres. No wonder we were exhausted.

There were no tourist attractions of any significance in Balikpapan. Basically, Kalimantan is all about coal and gold mines as well as oil and timber. But it is the region’s largest city and fine as a starting point.

Our local contact confirmed that very few tourists did take time out in the area but we did ferret out that no more than 1½ hours’ drive away on the road from Balikpapan to Samarinda (the regional capital) was an orang-utan reservation of some sorts.

Our contact wouldn’t recommend it though as he had tried it and in return received complaints from guests because they did see any of these humans of the forest.

In the lobby of the Dusit we found a poster spelling out quite a few outings but nobody could enlighten us. I suppose that if you dig a little deeper something will come up.

Our best option for guaranteed action was through a company called Land & River Tours that arranged light trekking in the Sungai Wain National Park or a five-day jungle river cruise on the Mahakam River. Especially the latter sounded really interesting and also entailed meetings with the Dayak people.

The drawback, if I may call it that, is that you’ll have to arrange this either before or after your dive trip, and you can’t use it as a diversion in between dives.

Unfortunately, before we managed to book anything, I had a severe case of stomach cramps. By way of elimination we concluded that it had to have been the draft beer from the night before. Ah well, but better to die in a five-star hotel than on a wooden canoe on a muddy river far out in the jungle…