Scuba Diving in Papua New Guinea

Diving with a WW2 Japanese Mitsubishi Zero fighter plane in Kimbe Bay

My right ear is rotten. Broken.  Unusable.   A dozen operations and surgical reconstructions have left it scarred and barely functional.  Various prosthetics failed, and hearing aids makes everything sound tinny and robotic.  I can only dream of stereo.    My affliction means I cannot dive, much less put my head underwater, for fear of infections, and water leaking into my brain (OK, that’s not exactly true, but my dirty thoughts could use the rinse).  After my last reconstruction in 2006, doctors told me I should be able to swim underwater, although a chronic ear infection, the result of a water fight in an elephant-shit infused river in Thailand, left me with doubts.   Diving seemed a bridge too far, and then I discovered a fantastic little product called Doc’s Pro Plugs.    

These are silicon ear plugs with a tiny pin-prick hole enabling the wearer to equalize, while keeping water out.   They cost about $20, and I bought them from a kayak instructor who handled them like they were small pieces of gold.   Well, they’re worth more than gold.  They are the keys to the Magical Kingdom!    If you have ear issues and want to scuba dive, click here to find out more.    I endorse them, I bow before them, I sing Hallelujah to their glory.  Doc, whoever you are, you’re a freaking genius and every creature in the ocean loves you, including me, sinking into the warm, deep tropical waters of Papua New Guinea. 

I'm here with the Scuba Diving Girls.   Technically just Margo and Stephanie are the Scuba Diving Girls – a dive shop/online dive cult they run out of San Diego, but we're accompanied by some other girls as well, and SDG is a state of mind.  We've come to PNG, as the cool kids call it, to explore Tufi and Walindi, two renowned diving spots.    Tufi, with its views of the fjord and its world-class crescent-shaped house reef, was a perfect place to take my PADI Open Water Course.   It's located in a small region on the eastern coast of PNG, almost comically remote, where locals and kids gather at the airstrip for the weekly highlight, a plane load of ghosts emerging from the loud sky bird.   OK, it’s not the 1930’s, when the Leahy brothers discovered one million people living in the country’s highlands, previously unknown to man.   We’re not white spirits returning with ancestors from the dead.   We’re dive tourists.   We’re coming from high, and we’re heading on low. 

Local transportation around the island of Tufi

The resort itself is homely and small, all wood and leafy plants.  Nothing at all like Club Med, more like a modest house.  Some hotels have dogs to make their guests feel at home.   We had a wallaby named Stu with his large drooping scrotum, and a hopping hornbill named Coco, prone to nipping toes under the dinner table, screeching, and pooping fruit on the hardwood floors.     I hit the books, crash coursing PADI’s five beginner classes, learning about decompression sickness and buoyancy, regulators and nitrogen levels. My classroom was the house reef, rife with lionfish and coral, and two sunken boats at the bottom.  My instructor’s name was Glen, who, like most of the villagers in Tufi, walked barefoot with large, callused feet,  and chewed betelnut until his teeth and lips were stained blood-red.    I’ve been so keen to dive all these years that I jumped in the deep end, acing my course exams and underwater trials.   

Underwater, I felt I could fly in an alien planet crammed with alien life forms.  Sluggish, but free to float in any direction.   The deep sound of my breath added an aural otherworldliness, bubbles floating to the surface, larger and larger, like jellyfish.    The girls were the ultimate cheerleaders, offering tips, helping me calculate my pressure groups (although computers do all the work these days).  Everyone got in the spirit, like watching a younger brother walking for the first time.  Margo and Stephanie, with their blonde braids and branded tank tops, recorded my education for their website and Facebook followers, which you can see below. They filmed the process from my first discovery dive to my first qualified dive, swimming through the air hoops Glen would blow upside down.  Another dream realized.  Scuba diving (tick) in Papua New Guinea (tick).   They tell me I’m one lucky son-of-a-bitch.  I won't tell them they're wrong. 

Our diving pal Bronwen Dickey isn’t dealing too well with the erratic altitude of the Bombadier.  It’s shaking like a lunch-carton of flavoured milk in the backpack of a hyperactive squirrel.  We overnighted back at the Airways in Port Moresby, where it rained bullets, and jetted off to the Walindi Dive Resort in Kimbe Bay, on the island of West New Britain.   Amidst sprawling palm oil plantations, neatly staggered where once there was jungle, Walindi rests against a black sandy beach, and a divers paradise.   The reef here is a wealth of life and colour, containing 413 species of hard coral (over half the world’s total species, in one bay) and over 900 species of fish.    After hearty breakfasts, we’d hit the boat for a 3-dive day, submerging ourselves in just a handful of the incredible coral garden dive sites on offer in the sheltered bay.  This was my first encounter with giant barrel sponges, red whip gorgonians, moray eels, nudibranches, dozens of reef fish, and several large grey reef sharks.   We even encountered a frenzy abovewater, watching shark fins slicing above water, like a pirate movie.   I did my first night dive, beneath the Hanging Gardens, an eerie but wild experience. I did my first deep dive, to 34m, floating back and forth through a spectacular swim through, just minutes left of compressed air in my aluminium tank.   I did my first wreck dive – a Japanese Mitsubishi Zero fighter jet, which mysteriously ditched off the coast during the war.  Discovered in 2000,  it’s in outstanding condition for a wreck, with guns in place and the propeller crusty with coral life.   I finally nailed my buoyancy, doing underwater somersaults to the amusement of schools of barracuda.   In just a week, I was closing in on my Advanced Certification.  Papua New Guinea was my first diving destination, and has been just about impossible to live up to since.  

Bronwen took this great shot of barracuda in Kimbe Bay