Hi everyone,
My mate and I are aspiring documentary filmmakers and are planning (tentatively) an expedition to make a doco in Sulawesi. The plan is to kayak around the islands in (probably) South East Sulawesi and make a program about the culture, the environment, the marine life (we're both marine bio students) and the experience itself. Hopefully we'll be living off the land with a few days of emergency food just in case. Spearfishing was the plan, but I don't know much about the regulations in Indonesia or if there are any restrictions..
Anyway, I basically know very little about Indonesia (Sulawesi in particular) and was hoping I could get some information from the ever-knowledgeable Wetpixel family. We'd be living on our own for a few weeks so diving isn't really going to be a part of it.. heaps of snorkelling though and we'll be doing a lot of underwater filming, so great marine life would definitely be a bonus (Sorry, my one key is broken so I can't sound enthusiastic about anything... haha).
What's Southeast Sulawesi like? I've read what I could find on the internet about it but mostly it's been tourist information and dive trips and the like, so obviously it sounds like the most fantastic place in the world, hah. But what's it like outside of the commercial diving and tourist industry? This might be a silly question.. but are there pirates? haha. Seems like kayaking around unprotected may be a bad way to be if there's piracy in the area. I read a bit about some religious feuding... think that would affect two lonely kayakers? What are the people like? Generally pretty friendly?
I know basically nothing about the area, so I'd love to hear anything you've got to offer regarding Sulawesi. And if you know a lot about other parts of Indonesia I'd love to hear that too, maybe Sulawesi isn't the right place for what we're trying to do, you probably know better than me! (<-- had to copy&paste that one!)
Thanks a lot guys
Cheers,
Josh
