That day I was watching Lonely Planet Bluelist: The Best In Asia, it’s in Singapore, well, only main English speaking channel.
Anyway, the advertisement of that program intrigued me when I saw it, because they are using underwater footage as part of the ad. The best diving sites in the world are in Asia, all located within these three triangle: Indonesia, Phillippine and Malaysia. Their positions in the world globe, equator, current, tide etc make them the best with the most diversity and pleasant water temperature.
I didn’t purposely catch the program, when switching between channels, they were visiting Bali for diving, of course, I stopped to watch, especially when they visited Menjangan, the previous dive site we went in 2005. Menjangan is a beautiful place with beautiful underwater life, blue, colorful, pretty, they have great reef and various macro lives, and also slave boat wreck. The surface interval was also special in the land full of deer, or Menjangan in Indonesian.
However, I was very disappointed with the show. Just for your information, I didn’t start my impression objectively, because I always envy people who are being paid for travel. Argh..See, we work hard to have money to chill out and travel once in a while. They travel all the time, everything paid, and on top of that, they are being paid to do so. Why on earth..? But people always say that too much of good things are also not good. My view is, people who say so are simply jealous and try to cheer themselves up. Hm…personally I don’t mind too much of good thing, who in the right mind does?? ;p
So, I’m disspaointed with the show. It’s supposed to give viewer the impression of the dive sites. So this host went to dive in Menjangan with one of the people we actually know personally in Bali, we just met him again during our trip last month. He is the pioneer of coral reef conservation in Bali. Artificial reef, cracking down cyanide fishing and helping out fisherman who endanger their lives by diving with tyre compressor which cause poisoning and paralysis. He is quite a dominant name in Bali scuba diving industry.
The thing is, the host sounds so ‘blur’ in diving. She practically ‘swimming’ under water, saw the hands swing everywhere for buoyancy, and her commentary was like ‘this is wonderful, nice, beautiful' I guess it’s just right if audience expect more in depth comments than that, maybe something more specific about the dive site or diving instead of general comment we can use for any hot guy or hot girl or hot dog in the street.
If that can actually pass, there was another thing that is really really disappointing, she actually said ‘oxygen tank’ for the very tank that she and other divers breathed. It’s very usual that non-diver thought or make remarks that we are using oxygen tank, but it’s unacceptable for divers to say so. When we breathe oxygen, that means we are in trouble, fighting for our life or survival when we had some incident or decompression illness. There are many mixes of gases for different type of diving and depth, but in the tank for recreational diver, we breathe air, just like what we have on the land, 21% Oxygen and 79% Nitrogen. It’s just being compressed. We hope we don’t get to feel the oxygen because it literally means trouble.
So it’s bad. Come on, it’s Lonely Planet, world-class brand, millions of people actually refer to their brand for travelling etc. And you are being paid for it……!
Huhhhhh……
My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be invented so he could hate that too.
- Peter De Vries
Television is to news what bumper stickers are to philosophy.
- Richard Nixon
On cable TV they have a weather channel - 24 hours of weather. We had something like that where I grew up. We called it a window.
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- Groucho Marx
