After staying overnight in the city of Makassar, Indonesia, I headed back to the airport to pick up a group from the freediving retreat that was arriving in the morning. As mentioned in previous posts, I had been carrying around my freediving fins all year without using them very often. I didn’t know much about safe freediving techniques, so when I heard about Fluid Focus, a week-long retreat at the same place where I was scheduled to spend my last two months of the trip, it felt kismet and I changed plans to arrive a week early.
The retreat is held in Bira, about 5-hours away by car. The transfer van picked me up at the hotel first, then we went back to the airport to pick up the rest of the group coming from Bali. The flight was delayed and we ended up waiting over an hour but, soon enough, a group of white people arrived and I knew it must be them. The group was comprised of people in their 20s and 30s from the US, Canada, UK, Australia, Switzerland, and one girl from Indonesia.
We hopped in the van and began the long drive, which ended up taking more than 7 hours. We chatted on and off and snoozed a bit. We took a few bathroom breaks and then got a variety of snacks at the gas station market, trading amongst ourselves to try out the different flavors. The ride felt endless, as we passed by village after village. It seemed like there were no highways here, just two-lane roads. Once we reached the coast I was bummed to see the murky water offshore, hoping conditions would improve at our final destination.
We finally arrived at the resort, called Tevana House Reef, in the afternoon and they ushered us through the long narrow property, down to the restaurant. As we walked past the accommodations and yoga shala, I couldn’t believe how beautiful the property was, it seemed like it belonged in Bali and felt out of place in the surrounding small, rural village. We all sat at a giant, communal table overlooking the beautiful, clear water below and I felt truly lucky to have been called to this place. The lunch spread was healthy and delicious, and then we were shown our rooms and left to settle in before the pre-dinner restorative yoga session.
The next week went by in such a flash that I completely forgot to journal and almost struggled to recall everything that happened. The retreat began with yoga sessions in the morning, followed by breakfast and a lesson on breath-holding. Then, we would practice some static breath holding in the water, not moving and just holding onto a buoy. We also practiced some dynamic breath-holding by swimming a distance, submerged.
Eventually, we took a boat offshore and began diving on a line, suspended beneath the buoy. First, with just our hands to pull us down without kicking, then tried it again using the fins. (The sport of freediving is kind of like swimming, there’s a handful of flavors to try: with hands, without hands, no fins, mono-fin, and bi-fins.) Considering my previous experience was limited to snorkeling, I enjoyed diving on the line and found it incredibly peaceful having nothing to look at except infinite blue water.
There were two people in the group who had some freediving certification already, but the five other students were primarily newbies except for me who had some experience and no training. We were split up into small groups and each took turns diving down the line while the main instructor watched us for form and technique. It seems I had carried some bad habits from snorkeling that I needed to break. First, I was used to swimming with the snorkel in my mouth but this can be dangerous. If you pass out underwater, you’re body knows to keep your mouth closed to prevent you from inhaling water. If you pass out with a snorkel in your mouth, it may disrupt this natural response.
Second, I was used to looking down as I descended but this arches your back and makes you less streamlined. Plus, I needed to stay close to the line as a safe practice, in case visibility got limited. And, third, I needed to have bigger kicks. I wasn’t used to my long freediving fins and wasn’t using them to their maximum capacity. After practicing on the line, we would wrap up the day with some fun freediving and just exploring the reef. Depending on the dive site, we would often see turtles and white-tip reef sharks. It was fun to take our new freediving skills and just explore the underwater world.
If there was extra time before dinner, sometimes there would be a meditation or breathwork activity scheduled, or we would go explore the local town. Bira is famous for its construction of wooden liveaboard ships and one afternoon, we shuttled over to check out where they are constructed. We walked around the shipyard on the shore, kicking up the thick sawdust that covered the ground. We climbed up some sketchy scaffolding to peer inside a massive, empty hull, then went next door to check out an almost completed boat. It was amazing to see the level of craftsmanship, watching the carpenters chisel away at wood with hand tools, striving for the perfect fit.
The week flew by and eventually, it was time to say goodbye to the new friends that I had just met. I would be staying at Tevana for another two months, wrapping up my time in Indonesia before heading home.
