Menjangan Island, Bali

Gliding through water, enjoying, not touching, not destroying - just snorkeling

When visiting Menjangan Island Marine National Park either for snorkeling or scuba diving, what we should do to protect environment?

a) protect our feet before stepping on and killing the corals
b) allow our guide to catch and bring marine species to the surface for a closer look
c) take wonderful photos when our guide is torturing fish with a stainless steel sate stick
d) praise our guide when he destroys old, healthy gorgon fan to find pigmy sea horse

You don't find these answers appropriate? Me neither.
Sadly these answers are not the seeds of my pervert imagination, they are just my observations.

 

But!
Menjangan Island National Park is protected by Indonesian government.
Every dive operator is trying to protect life in marine national park.
PADI dive centers put even more of their resources (education, work, financial...) into protection.
Tourists are saints regarding preservation and protection of the nature.

These very nice statements look slightly less nice in reality:

Government protection: they diligently collect protection fees from foreign owned dive operators, their guests and guides.
Small part of this money they use for occasional raids to check if we paid everything. Rest they use for undisclosed purposes.
They stay in harbor whenever poachers are fishing on the protected reefs of Menjangan Island. When complaining about occasional fishing expeditions on protected reefs, they like to say “Maybe you and your guests see wrong...”.
In a nutshell – a total crap of a job.

Too many dive and snorkeling guides taking guests to Menjangan reefs are deeply in love only with money.
For a slim chance of a little more tip they will do anything.
If guest want to see why puffer fish is called puffer they will demonstrate it for you. If puffer fish finds itself in mortal danger it puffs itself to try to scare enemy away with bigger size. When inflated it floats to the surface. And in many cases it can not deflate soon enough to submerge and it dies. This is why you have to really torture it before she uses this final defensive mechanism. Stainless steel sticks are fantastic tool for showing holidaymakers what marine life can do...
And same stick is very useful also for raking gorgon fan coral to dislodge a few millimeters big pigmy sea horse and proudly showing tiny creature to you...

Or for poking a beautiful lion fish...

We have close to 20 PADI dive centers in Pemuteran. As for the exception of a couple foreign owned dive centers and two locally owned, rest are behaving really miserably.
Not only I do not support, I strongly oppose PADI position on what kind of businesses are allowed to use PADI name.

However, greed, total absence of ecological awareness, really bad behavior in national park conducted by some local, uneducated boys I can at least understand, if not approve.
But esteemed visitors from the West, enjoying and paying for this? This point is too much for me.
I'll simply try to take you to places not infested by snorkelers and divers with moronic attitude, where we do not have to observe idiots trying to devastate nature...
To places where we can enjoy in pure diving, without disturbing anything, to enjoy visiting all the creatures that rightfully call this habitat their home, where we leave only bubbles in the clear waters and take with us only memories...