Manta Rays don‘t cry

Twilight makes room for silence. In it you can feel loneliness and the breathof harmony. The fishermen in outrigger canoes, life-long friends with thetranquility, complement the feeling. Every night they go out. Later their lamps will illuminate the night to attract prey, like Will-o’-the wisps in thesky. The setting sun lowers itself down for a few moments of magnificent display and islands like the backs of wooded dragons, thrust out of the wateras a backdrop. Batbitim lies ahead, an island somewhere in the nowhere west of Papua New Guinea.

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The last anchorage of the Rubis

If you follow the coastal road to the southwest of Monaco, the vista inland stretches just to the Maritime Alps – the view is phenomenal. The blue of the water, the red rocks at l’Esterel and the lavender fields combine to a panorama which lasts for hours – the Côte d’Azur. There are villages carved in stone from another time and the glamorous health resorts with the rich and famous along the seafront. The sea off the coast retains yet another spectacle: it is a mystical experience to dive down to last anchorage of the Rubis.

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Stone Age

It is like traveling through a picture book. Being part of the story helps you pay more attention to what is happening. You look longer. The coast is lined with sandy beaches in picturesque bays, then the landscape rises and presents an outstanding panorama. Natural forces formed huge cliffs mainly on the Costa Smeralda in the northeast and in the northwest of Cape Caccia, rock formations reaching up to the horizon which then drop abruptly almost 200 meters down to the surf. The water is indigo blue. Below the surface are dozens of hidden caves, a highlight for divers with strong enough lights. In them everybody is an explorer and discoverer.

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Hope for the help of the gods

“Surga ada Disney,” shouts Herdan – “Paradise is here”, and he points ahead. The sea off the coast is home to a third of the world’s coral reefs. This paradise is huge, but the threat of expulsion is real. The country suffers. Borneo’s rain forest is the refuge of rare species; especially the orangutans are faced with extinction. “Forty years ago the loggers came into the country,” says Singa Sinam, chief of a village in Central Kalimantan. “The rivers were clean and swarming with fish. Then the stranger began to chop down our forests and pollute the waters. We still hope for the help of the gods.”

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Lying off Madagascar

If Dirk Fahrenbach cranks the outboard motor up, maybe the boat will cover the distance to Dimakya in time. It is worthwhile to take time for this country, he said. The fact is, we are too slow: The clouds catch up and drench the boat with rain. This flushes away the heat of the body. For 20 years now this German lives in the Philippines. A shower before the rainy season is hardly worth mentioning, he says and afterwards neither. Taking time for this country is Fahrenbach’s life’s work. For decades the fishing grounds were ruined by fishermen with dynamite. The dugongs were almost wiped out.

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– WESER KURIER

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The Last Witnesses

How bad is it? Jaenicke: “It’s brutal. The film about the Arctic and the polar bear has been cut; it shows how cold-blooded big game hunters still shoot the animals down. The documentary about sharks is in the can. At the end we were in Spain. In Vigo they process fins en masse for the Chinese. This is not easy viewing. There is no animal that gets so misjudged and barbarically massacred as the shark! And why? Because some religions believe they have to cook shark fin soup and lots of people here consider shark-steaks and smoked strips of dogfish a delicacy.”

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A dive into Thor‘s World

Once again twilight has dipped Iceland in soft light until the morning. You could see the ships out of the window at night, anchored in the bay. During the summer solstice, the sun never sets completely, nor rises again before the night is over. Starting this early in the day still takes getting used to – eager anticipation does not change this: we are on the way from Reykjavik to Thingvellir, inland. To experience the underwater world at the edge of the valley should outshine everything previously experienced: everyone is an intrepid explorer in the cave system of the Silfra crack.

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The free diver

Others are paralyzed by the breathless silence. Christian Redl lives more intensely in it for six to seven minutes. The Austrian is reckoned an eccentric in the diving scene. Recently he dived into one of the limestone caves on Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula. Outside scrub and mosquitoes, inside clean fresh water for a while – then nothing but a mystical fog of sulfur sulfate. Redl managed the 60 meters down to the bottom. Free divers find the meaning of life in depth and distance records. Average breathers can only imagine it, having seen Luc Besson’s “The Big Blue”. Redl is not attached to a pulling sledge, when going down.

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The Cockpit of the A380

Ingo Meyerdierks is now 46. When the teachers asked him back then what he wanted to be when he grew up, he answered, like all boys: “Pilot”. He was 14 and had his head in the clouds. The sky was always the gateway to the world to him. Meyerdierks is now head of Lufthansa’s A380 fleet. It is a year since the largest passenger aircraft ever built took off for the first time with passengers from Frankfurt Airport. Public interest was huge because of the sheer size of the wide-body jet. It continues down to today. With its height of more than 24 meters, the megaliner is superior to most goings on at international airports.

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– WELT am SONNTAG

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Egypt – Quo Vadis?

The popular uprising in 2010 banished the tourists from Egypt. Now the country are of high priority again. The Red Sea: Hans Hass and Jacques Cousteau dived ahead – thousends upon thousends followed. The small town Dahab on the Sinai Pininsula is still a place of pilgrimage. „The hype surrounding the blue hole – uncredible“, says the marine biologist Dr. Robert Hofrichter. On some days a caravan of Hundrets of snorkelers and divers is moving to the 110 meters deep hole. The natural phenomenon, just a stone’s throw away from the beach, is considered as one of the most dangerous diving plaves in the world. The memorial tables at the rocks are telling the dramas.

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