Floods hit Manado in Sulawesi Indonesia

The wet season means getting dumped on for 3-4 months and dealing with leaky roofs, fungus growing everywhere and the occasional flooded street. That is nothing to what has been going on in other parts of the country.

Central and Eastern Java got hammered last month with many people killed in landslides. The Philippines had a similar event a few days ago and now Manado, home to some of the best diving in SE Asia, has been hit. Torrential rain, combined with deforestation leads to mudslides / landslides. It very scary, in the Philippines they were saying some of the mud is 30 meters deep!

One time I was in the Philippines during an earthquake. My hut was situated on the beach and all the locals came running down over the cliff to the beach. They said they were scared of a landslide. I was thinking ‘doesn’t an earthquake make a tidal wave?’ So there we were, sitting on a 20 meter deep beach in between a possible landslide and a possible tsunami. We later found out the tsunami went across the Strait and killed 20 people on an island called Isla Verde.

Anyway lets hope Manado gets back to shape and the great scuba diving is still possible to access.