One Day Trip to Makailu Island

This is the first time for me composing blog in English. Even honestly, I feel unconfident with my English. Perhaps this way can make visitors from overseas countries read my blog (It must be an unintentionally visit..haha..). 

I’ve just put flag counter in this blog in order to observe how many visitors from others countries get lost in the cyber world to my blog J. Hahaha…welcome to my spider web, a nice place that will make you don’t wanna quit :)

Anyway, thank you for visiting my blog. Hopefully you can get a little bit information here.

For the time being I will tell you about our last trip to Makailu Island. Do you know where the island is? Have you ever heard about the island?  I myself don’t ever imagine that someday I will set my foot on this very small island.  So, please keep your attention to read below story.

Makailu on the map (see the red arrow)

Makailu Island is located nearby Peleng Island in Banggai District, Central of Sulawesi. Local people here call this island as Pulau Tikus. I don’t wanna tell you what is the background or the story behind why it’s called as Pulau Tikus by the reason of possibly create bad impression. Obviously, Tikus (mouse) itself has a negative connotation. Thus, I prefer call it as its original name, “Makailu”.

Before we left for the island, I tried to measure how far the distance from our camp through google earth. It said about 23 km from our camp. That’s not too far, then. Moreover we didn’t need to drive car first, but only walk about 150m to the beach where our rent-boat was parked.

Somebody wears wrong costume :)

We boarded on the boat at 6.00 am. Wishing that lord of the sea will be in our side since rainy season was still not went by yet. Well, the journey began. During the sailing, some of us luckily saw a dolphin jumped beside our boat.  

After 1.5 hrs sailing across the sea, we landed at Makailu Island. No people stay at the island. It is surrounded by white sands with turquoise blue crystal water-sea. 

white sands and glassy shallow water

 

We’ve just landed when a fisherman showed up and asked us to buy his fishes. We bought two big fishes from him and everybody took pictures before they were grilled. 

really fresh fishes

 

Right after unloading our backpacks and logistics, we wore our snorkel sets and started to swim. It made us a bit disappoint that we found so many plants (a kind of seaweeds) nearby the coast and only few of coral reefs could be seen. 

One thing made us happy at that time that we found colorful of starfishes there. We didn’t see this kind of starfish at Togean Islands nor Pulau Dua Island. 

me & starfish

The main purpose of this trip was to explore underwater view surrounding this island and some of us were equipped by snorkeling set. What I read in internet about the beautiful underwater view here seemed overrated. But on the way back from the island we’d just noticed that the best spot for snorkeling is quite far from the coast (about 100 m). 

snorkeling spot (+/- 100 m from the beach)

another shape of starfish

But overall this is a beauty island. White sands, coconut and pine trees, clear water for swimming made us feel comfort. Besides we’re the only one group and felt like in a private island.

 

"maknyuss''

nature picnic